Israel to examine whether spyware export rules
should be tightened
Commission to review claims NSO’s Pegasus was misused
by customers to target journalists and activists
Peter
Beaumont and Philip Oltermann
Thu 22 Jul
2021 16.45 BST
An Israeli
commission reviewing allegations that NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware was misused
by its customers to target journalists and human rights activists will examine
whether rules on Israel’s export of cyberweapons such as Pegasus should be
tightened, a senior MP has said.
The move
came as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, convened an emergency
cybersecurity meeting after reports his mobile phone and those of government
ministers appeared in the leaked list. An official in Macron’s Elysee Palace
said that the president’s phone and phone numbers had been changed.
NSO has
said Macron was not a “target” of any of its customers, meaning the company
denies he was selected for surveillance using its spyware, saying in multiple
statements that it requires its government clients to use its powerful spying
tools only for legitimate investigations into terrorism or crime.
The German
chancellor, Angela Merkel, added her voice to the escalating controversy on
Thursday, telling reporters in Berlin that spyware such as NSO’s should be
denied to countries where there was no judicial oversight, after it emerged 14
heads of state were on the list.
Asked
whether she regretted that technology sold by NSO Group had helped to undermine
freedom of expression in countries governed by autocratic regimes, Merkel said:
“I believe it is important that software developed for certain situations does
not fall into the wrong hands. There have to be restrictive conditions and such
software should not be sold to countries where judicial oversight over such
attacks cannot be guaranteed.”
The growing
fallout from the revelations of the Pegasus project, a collaboration of 17
media organisations including the Guardian, which launched on Sunday with a
series of claims about misuse of the software, has continued to resonate.
In Israel
the prospect of tighter controls on the export of spyware such as Pegasus was
raised by Ram Ben-Barak, the head of parliament’s foreign affairs and defence
committee – and a former deputy head of the Mossad spy agency – on Army Radio
as he disclosed that Israel’s “defence establishment [has] appointed a review
commission made up of a number of groups”.
“We
certainly have to look anew at this whole subject of licenses granted by DECA
[Israel’s Defence Exports Control Agency],” he said. “When they finish their
review, we’ll demand to see the results and assess whether we need to make
corrections.”
DECA is
within Israel’s defence ministry and oversees NSO exports. The ministry and the
company have said Pegasus is meant to be used to track terrorists and criminals
only, and that all foreign clients are vetted governments.
At the
heart of the project is a leaked database of about 50,000 mobile phone numbers.
The Guardian and other media partners that had access to the data believe the
list indicates persons of interest selected by government clients of NSO. It
includes some people whose phones showed traces of NSO’s Pegasus spyware,
according to forensic analysis of their devices.
The
appearance of a number on the leaked list, however, does not mean it was
subject to an attempted or successful hack.
NSO says the
database has “no relevance” to the company, and has rejected the reporting by
the Pegasus project as “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories”.
It denied that the leaked database represented those targeted for surveillance
by the Pegasus software.
The alleged
misuse has stirred questions within Naftali Bennett’s cross-partisan coalition,
one of whose members, the liberal party Meretz, questioned the defence
minister, Benny Gantz, about NSO exports in a meeting on Thursday.
Gantz
“emphasised the importance of upholding human rights within the framework of
weapons sales”, a joint statement said.
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