translated from Spanish: FGR has been contracting cell phone spying programs in the last 2 years

The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) has contracted, in the last two years, programs for the mass espionage of mobile phones to an intermediary company of the main provider in the field of cyberespionage during the government of Enrique Peña Nieto.
According to documents that El País had access to, in 2019 and 2020, the Prosecutor’s Office signed at least four contracts for $5.6 million with Neolinx of Mexico.
Read: Detect spyware in Mexico linked to The Navy and the Durango government
The purchases were made under the secret heading on national security expenditure, so the contracts were not transparent by the Prosecutor’s Office, according to the medium.  In the previous six-year period, the purchase of the Pegasus program that spied on activists and journalists was also made from this budget exchange.
Neolinx is a company created in 2009 and linked to the sale of espionage equipment and has served in the country as an intermediary for the Italian Hacking Team. In 2015, thousands of the company’s internal emails and documents were leaked to the public, showing that Mexico was the world’s leading buyer of its spyware with an investment of nearly six million euros.
Leaked information revealed that 12 entities in the country had business relationships with the hacker company through other intermediary companies, including Baja California, Chihuahua, Durango, Tamaulipas, Jalisco, Nayarit, Tlaxcala, State of Mexico, Mexico City, Puebla, Guerrero and Campeche.
According to the analysis by the Network in Defense of Digital Rights (R3D), at the time Neolinx would have sold its products to the government of Guerrero and the State of Mexico, as well as to the Federal Police, the then PGR and Defensa Nacional, among other units.
By April 2018, the company would have signed the last contract with the Public Prosecutor’s Office prior to the change of administration.
Now, according to information obtained by El País, Neolinx is known to have continued to sell its inputs and services to the current government, this time as an intermediary for the Israeli company Rayzone Group.
The newspaper found in various reports of the FGR’s internal supervisory body that the Prosecutor’s Office under Alejandro Gertz Manero has concluded at least four contracts for mass data analysis and consultation services, as well as for geographical location.
The first contract concluded during Gertz Manero’s management at the helm of the FGR was in charge of the Specialized Sub-Procedure on Organized Crime Research (SEIDO) and was signed on May 30, 2019 in the amount of $2.4 million.
The service described in the contract is known in the cyberespionage market as Geomatrix and is the same service that had acquired the FGR in the previous six-year period and was used without controls, according to a 2019 publication made by the R3D in collaboration with Indigo Report.
With information from El País.
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Original source in Spanish