Surveillance and cyber-weapons on the ground in Mexico

Michael Safi hears from Nina Lakhani on how 15,000 Mexicans, including journalists and politicians, appeared on a list of possible targets for surveillance

This episode first aired on our global news podcast, Today in Focus.

In March 2017, a 38-year-old freelance reporter named Cecilio Pineda Birto was shot dead in Altamirano, a town in the southern Mexican region of Tierra Caliente - a battleground for organised crime factions. His phone vanished from the crime scene. A few weeks earlier, a number connected to that phone had been selected as a possible surveillance target by a client of the spyware company NSO Group.