"Riana Pfefferkorn, a cryptography fellow at the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, said FlexiSPY is “kind of an app version of a wire.” Wiretaps are the traditional monitoring tool used by law enforcement after obtaining a warrant signed by a judge.
“It can be done quickly, but it’s not something that can be done remotely,” Pfefferkorn said. “That raises the question for me of whether this was a U.S. law enforcement agency that installed this on Chapo’s phone, if it was his phone.”"