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On a recent spring night in Naples, Ciro Pellegrino hurried home to tell his wife about a strange notification he’d received on his phone. Before speaking with her, he opened the microwave oven and placed his smartphone inside—an impromptu Faraday cage. It was the start of a bizarre new ritual occasioned by Pellegrino’s discovery, via a notification from Apple, that his phone was infected with military-grade spyware.
“Since April 29, I’ve felt like I’m living in a spy story, one I would have gladly done without,” Pellegrino said recently. Pellegrino is the head of the Naples bureau at Fanpage.it, an Italian digital news outlet renowned for its investigative journalism targeting the highest levels of government. Several months earlier, Pellegrino’s boss, Fanpage editor in chief Francesco Cancellato, had received a similar alert, making him the first known Italian journalist ensnared by an emerging digital surveillance threat that has since become the flash point in a full-blown national scandal.
Researchers at Citizen Lab, a digital surveillance monitoring group at the University of Toronto, quickly concluded that Italian authorities likely deployed an advanced spyware tool known as Graphite, developed by the Israeli company Paragon Solutions, against Cancellato and other domestic critics. Graphite, which is similar to the notorious Pegasus malware, can infect a device silently and without any visible traces, granting operators complete access to calls, messages, photos, and encrypted chats, as well as the ability to activate the microphone and camera. Cancellato suspects the breach on his phone happened through a pdf sent to a WhatsApp group that he was added to without his knowledge. “I didn’t notice anything because it probably happened at night,” he said.
Fanpage is a Naples-based digital outlet, with bureaus in Milan and Rome, that has made a name for itself in recent years with investigations into major Italian government officials and organized-crime networks. (I worked at Fanpage for nearly a decade, and led its investigative team from 2018 to 2024.) Last year, Fanpage investigative reporters exposed explicitly neofascist sympathies within the youth wing of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s political party, Fratelli d’Italia. The series, titled “Melonian Youth,” captured footage of young extremists openly giving Nazi salutes and deploying racist rhetoric at political gatherings. Meloni responded by publicly condemning the behavior, asserting that there was “no space in Fratelli d’Italia for racist or anti-Semitic positions,” while distancing her party from any form of fascist nostalgia. “Over these years we’ve obviously pissed off a lot of people, so anyone could have had some interest in targeting us, in trying to figure out what we’re up to,” Cancellato said.
Media unions, watchdog NGOs, and fellow journalists denounced the surveillance as a grave attack on press freedom. The Committee to Protect Journalists called the spyware hack “a serious breach of journalistic rights and freedoms,” urging authorities to demonstrate that they “will not tolerate illegal surveillance of the media.” A coalition including the International Press Institute and ARTICLE 19 said they were “alarmed by the latest case of a journalist…having their secure communications and sources compromised using advanced spyware,” describing it as “yet another serious attack on press freedom.” Italian press organizations have also quickly expressed solidarity. “Press freedom is one of the pillars of our Constitution,” stated Alessandra Costante, secretary-general of the Italian National Journalists’ Federation, or FNSI. “We hope no other cases emerge, but we are ready to take every initiative to protect colleagues who were spied on.” She later told The Guardian, “Was Francesco Cancellato the only journalist in Italy targeted? We don’t think so.”
Who exactly is behind the spying remains something of a mystery—or, perhaps, a state secret. Meloni’s office has insisted that neither the intelligence services nor any state entity had ordered surveillance of reporters. But there’s reason to think that is not the whole truth: recent reporting by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica revealed that the Italian intelligence chief, Alfredo Montavano had acknowledged using Paragon’s Graphite spyware, but “only” to monitor migrant-rights activists from Mediterranea Saving Humans, an NGO involved in rescuing migrants at sea. Montavano insisted that surveillance of these activists, who stood accused of facilitating unlawful migration, was permitted by law, and he explicitly denied that any journalist was deliberately targeted.
Nevertheless, suspicions of official involvement have run high, given that Graphite is sold exclusively to state agencies. The Meloni government has refused to answer parliamentary questions, citing national security. Vittorio di Trapani, the president of the FNSI, criticized this response, saying, “Applying state secrecy to an act of this gravity is a mistake, a serious mistake.” The FNSI and Italy’s Order of Journalists filed a criminal complaint in February to push prosecutors to uncover who ordered the spying. So far, Italian prosecutors have initiated investigations in five cities into the alleged use of Graphite against journalists and activists. “The Paragon scandal cannot simply be brushed aside.… Those who are responsible must be held accountable,” former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi told Reuters.
For Pellegrino, finding himself at the center of a geopolitical spyware scandal has been a surreal experience, with profound personal consequences. “I don’t have any state secrets to hide, nor anti-state secrets. I’m not a drug trafficker or a human trafficker,” Pellegrino said.
Unlike his boss, Pellegrino wasn’t directly involved in the high-profile investigations that put Fanpage in the spotlight. Instead, he led the Naples local news bureau, quietly building his online presence in recent years. “My life has changed,” he said. “My phone is the black box of my life, containing everything you could possibly imagine: medical records, messages exchanged with my wife, photographs from our trips, conversations with people who are no longer alive. And then there’s all my professional information, data related to my work and communications with confidential sources.”
Cancellato, for his part, said, “I have no desire to point my finger at the government and say, ‘You spied on me,’ but I can say this for sure: the government isn’t doing anything to help me find out who spied on me. They’re only trying to clear themselves of the accusation of having spied on me.”
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