John Scott-Railton stared at the screen in disbelief. The IT expert was investigating a security breach at one of the most heavily protected systems in the world - 10 Downing Street. Several phones connected to it, including Boris Johnson's, had been tested, leading him to an extraordinary conclusion: "The UK was underestimating the threat from PegasusIn classical mythology, Pegasus was a winged horse., and had just been spectacularly burned."

Pegasus is a phone-hacking system developed by an Israeli company, NSO. It can steal data including contacts, passwords and social media posts. It can tell where a phone is - and where it has been.

It can even use the camera to take photographs and the microphone to record conversations. And it does it all without the owner having any idea that there is a problem. Its inventors boast that it works like a ghost.

By tracing servers, Scott-Railton concluded that the hack on Downing Street had been carried out by the United Arab Emirates. And the security breach did not stop there. Phones used by Foreign Office officials had been hacked at least five times, with the UAE, India, Cyprus and Jordan identified as the culprits.

The hacks, which took place between July 2020 and June 2021, have just been revealed in an article by the investigative reporter Ronan FarrowThe son of the actress Mia Farrow, he is best known for writing about the film producer Harvey Weinstein and his abuse of women. in The New Yorker. NSO claims that Pegasus is only sold to police forces and intelligence agencies for use against criminals and terrorists. But there is plenty of evidence that politicians, activists and journalists have also been targeted.

These include members of the opposition party in Rwanda and journalists exposing corruption in El SalvadorA country in Central America. It suffered a terrible civil war from 1979 until 1992.. Experts believe Pegasus is linked to 300 acts of physical violence, including the murder of the Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal KhashoggiKhashoggi was murdered at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018. It is widely agreed that he was assassinated by Saudi agents because of his opposition to the country's regime..

Now NSO has developed an even more controversial tool: an AI system that predicts crimes before they have been committed.

Named MaestroAn Italian word meaning master or teacher. It is most commonly used to describe orchestra conductors., it analyses data from a phone, working out the routines that the owner follows and the people he or she interacts with. If those routines suddenly change, Maestro notifies the police. 

The system is already being used in several countries, and according to the head of NSO, Shalev Hulio, has led to the arrest of at least one suspected terrorist.

Maestro has chilling echoes of The Minority Report, a short story by Philip K DickAn American science-fiction writer best known for his story Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was the basis of the film Blade Runner. He wrote The Minority Report in 1956. that was made into a film starring Tom Cruise. It imagines a future world in which crimes are foreseen before they occur, and the police arrest suspects before they can carry them out.

The story poses some challenging philosophical questions. Is it fair to arrest people for crimes you believe they are going to commit, but are not guilty of? And if you can be sure that someone is going to do something, does that mean that they never had any choice in the matter?

Yes: Knowing the future is not the same as deciding it. It is like reading a preview of a TV series: what happens in it is determined by scriptwriters who could have chosen many different outcomes.

No: The future can only be known in advance if our destinies have been mapped out for us and there is nothing we can do to change them. That is by definition incompatible with free will.

Or... No one can ever really know what will happen in the future. Maestro is based on not knowing - it only alerts the police when an event takes place that it did not predict.