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It is considered the most powerful spyware in the world, which can reliably crack the encrypted communication of iPhone and Android smartphones.
Pegasus software, made by an Israeli company, NSO Group, was able to track terrorists and drug cartels. It has also been used against human rights activists, journalists and dissidents.
Now, An investigation published Friday by The New York Times Magazine He discovered that Israel, which controls the export of spyware just as it does the export of conventional weapons, has used Pegasus to advance its interests around the world, making it an important component of its national security strategy.
A year-long investigation by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti reports that the FBI had purchased and tested NSO software for years and planned to use it for local surveillance until the agency finally decided not to distribute the tools last year.
The Times found that sales of Pegasus played a critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and negotiating the 2020 diplomatic agreements, the Abraham Accords. Signed at the Trump White House ceremony, It normalized relations between Israel and some of its longtime Arab foes.
The US called the cyberweapon for domestic use.
The Times found that the US also took action to buy Pegasus. The FBI acquired the spyware in a never-reported deal in 2019, despite multiple reports of it being used against activists and political dissidents in other countries. He also spent two years debating whether to deploy a newer product called Phantom in the United States.
Discussions within the Department of Justice and the FBI continued until last summer, when the FBI ultimately decided not to use NSO weapons.
But Pegasus equipment is still in a building in New Jersey used by the FBI, and the company has also given the agency a demonstration of a Phantom that can hack American phone numbers.
A prospectus brochure obtained by The Times says the Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to “turn your target’s smartphone into an intelligence goldmine.”
The Times investigation, which ran for a year, was based on interviews with government officials, intelligence and law enforcement leaders, cyber experts, corporate executives and privacy activists in a dozen countries.
It tells the story of NSO’s rise from a startup operating out of a converted chicken coop in an agricultural cooperative to its own foundation. Blacklisted by the Biden administration For being used by foreign governments in November to “maliciously target” dissidents, journalists and others.
NSO started with two schoolmates Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, who founded new companies in Bnai Zion, an agricultural cooperative outside of Tel Aviv, in the mid-2000s.
Mr. Hulio said CommuniTake, one of his new initiatives that offers mobile phone technical support workers the ability to take control of customers’ devices with permission, has caught the attention of a European intelligence agency.
NSO was born and the company finally developed a way to access phones without the user’s consent – no need to click on a malicious attachment or link. (It was just a coincidence that the company’s name sounded like the NSA).
‘You start to believe that your every move is being watched.’
After NSO began selling Pegasus globally in 2011, Mexican authorities used it to capture drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo. And European investigators have used it to break up a child abuse gang with dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries.
But there were also abuses. bring out in reports by researchers and news organizationsincluding Times.
Mexico used spyware to target journalists and dissidents. Saudi Arabia used it against women’s rights activists and their business partners. Jamal KhashoggiWashington Post columnist who was killed and dismembered by Saudi agents in 2018.
That year, the CIA bought Pegasus, an American ally, to assist Djibouti in its fight against terrorism, despite longstanding concerns about human rights abuses there, including the persecution of journalists and the torture of dissidents.
In the UAE, Pegasus was used to hack the phone of Ahmed Mansour, who has been harshly critical of the government.
Mr. Mansoor’s email account was breached, his geolocation was tracked, $140,000 was stolen from his bank account, he was fired from his job and strangers beat him on the street.
“You start to believe your every move is being watched,” he said. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his posts on Facebook and Twitter in 2018.
Pegasus has been provided to far-right leaders in Poland, Hungary, India and other countries through a series of new deals licensed by the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
The Polish government did not order the Pegasus system to be discontinued when it passed laws that many Jews inside and outside Israel saw as Holocaust denial, or even at a conference attended by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki himself, Netanyahu himself. incorrectly listed “Jewish perpetrators” among those responsible for the Holocaust.
The NSO’s blacklisting infuriated Israeli officials.
American companies are trying to create their own tools that can hack phones with the ease of NSO’s “zero click” technology.
Boldend, one of those companies, told defense giant Raytheon in January 2021 that he could hack the popular Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp, but later lost the ability after a WhatsApp update. Times.
The claim was particularly notable because, according to one of the slides, a major Boldend investor is the Founders Fund, a company led by billionaire Peter Thiel, who was one of Facebook’s first investors and remains on its board.
NSO’s recent blacklisting in the US could suffocate the company by denying it access to American technology it needs to run its operations, including Dell computers and Amazon cloud servers.
The rebuke infuriated Israeli officials, who denounced the move as an attack not just on the country’s most important jewel of the defense industry, but on the country itself.
“Those who point their arrows at the NSO” are “actually aiming at the blue and white flag that hangs behind it,” said Yigal Unna, chief executive of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate until January 5.
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