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In September 2022, a hacktivist group known as Guacamaya, which targets “extractive industries, military, and law enforcement” throughout Latin America, breached the email servers of Mexico’s Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (SEDENA). The hacktivists released approximately six terabytes of internal Mexican military email communications and attachments, to Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), a nonprofit that publishes leaked documents in the public interest. The dataset offered an unprecedented window into the military’s use of spyware and surveillance technology.

I was part of a small team at the University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center that analyzed this data for an investigation into the targeting of journalists and human rights defenders in Mexico. The military targeting dissidents with spyware was one element—alongside digital harassment, abuse of legal process, physical violence, and impunity—that created an environment of persecution for the country’s civil watchdogs.

At the Human Rights Center, our team investigates serious human rights violations, focusing on international crimes committed through digital technologies. The use of spyware and surveillance technology to target Mexican civil society has become increasingly widespread and systematic, and its abuse is often linked to physical violence. In 2025, Mexico ranked as the second deadliest place in the world for journalists, after Gaza.

Civilians globally are being surveilled at an astonishing scale. From mass surveillance using traffic cameras in the United States to the targeted deployment of highly sophisticated zero-click spyware such as Pegasus, governments and law enforcement can access people’s lives with increasingly less friction. This technology is overwhelmingly used to target dissent. It’s ubiquitous, silent, dangerous, and notoriously difficult to detect, let alone investigate.

This article was aggregated automatically by CyberWire Daily's newsfeed engine. Original reporting: www.lawfaremedia.org.