News Desk :
A major Israeli cyber-surveillance company, NSO Group, came under heightened scrutiny Sunday after an international alliance of news outlets reported that governments used its software to target journalists, dissidents and opposition politicians.
The Israeli government also faced renewed international pressure for allowing the company to do business with authoritarian regimes that use the spyware for purposes that go far afield of the company’s stated aim: targeting terrorists and criminals.
NSO strongly denied the claims.
NSO has attracted scrutiny since 2016, when the company’s software was said to be used against a rights activist in the United Arab Emirates and a journalist in Mexico. Since then, The New York Times has reported that the software was deployed against journalists, rights campaigners and policymakers in Mexico and Saudi Arabia. The new reports that appeared Sunday suggest that the firm’s software has been used against more people in more countries than had previously been reported.
Among other actions, the company is said to have sold a sophisticated surveillance application known as Pegasus that the journalism consortium said appears to have been used to attempt to hack at least 37 smartphones owned by journalists from countries that include Azerbaijan, France, Hungary, India and Morocco. Separately, a person familiar with NSO contracts told
The Times that NSO systems were sold to the governments of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, India, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E.
The allegations may escalate concerns that the Israeli government has abetted government abuses by granting NSO an export license to sell software to countries that use it to suppress dissent.
The accounts, published by The Washington Post and an alliance of 16 other international news outlets, follow recent reporting by The Times that Israel permitted NSO to do business with Saudi Arabia, and encouraged it to keep doing so even after the Saudi government was implicated in the 2018 assassination of a Saudi journalist and dissident, Jamal Khashoggi.
In a statement, NSO said: “We firmly deny the false allegations made in their report. Their sources have supplied them with information which has no factual basis, as evident by the lack of supporting documentation for many of their claims. In fact, these allegations are so outrageous and far from reality, that NSO is considering a defamation lawsuit.”
The Israeli prime minister’s office declined to comment, and the Israeli Defense Ministry said it had not been given enough time to respond to a request for comment. The ministry has previously said it would revoke export licenses granted to any Israeli company that sold software that contravened the terms of the license, “especially after any violation of human rights.”
The new accusations heightened concerns among privacy activists that no smartphone user – even those using software like WhatsApp or Signal – is safe from governments and anyone else with the right cyber-surveillance tech.
Activists say that without access to surveillance-free communications, journalists will no longer be able to contact sources without fear of exposing them to government retaliation. And rights campaigners will be unable to freely communicate with victims of state-led abuses.
“Stop what you’re doing and read this,” tweeted Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower who leaked large amounts of classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013. “This leak is going to be the story of the year.”
The journalist consortium linked NSO to a leaked list of more than 50,000 mobile numbers from more than 50 countries that it said appeared to be proposed surveillance targets for the company’s clients. The alliance said the list contained the numbers of hundreds of journalists, media proprietors, government leaders, opposition politicians, political dissidents, academics and rights campaigners.
The list was first obtained by Amnesty International, the human rights watchdog, and Forbidden Stories, a group that focuses on free speech. They then shared the list with the journalists.
The consortium said the numbers on the list include those of the editor of The Financial Times, Roula Khalaf; people close to Mr. Khashoggi; a Mexican reporter who was gunned down on the street, Cecilio Pineda Birto; and journalists from CNN, The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and The New York Times.
In a statement posted on its website, NSO said the list of numbers had not come from its database. “Such data never existed on any of our servers,” the statement said.
“As NSO has previously stated, our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi,” the statement continued. “We can confirm that our technology was not used to listen, monitor, track, or collect information regarding him or his family members mentioned in the inquiry.” (Courtesy: The New York Times)
