NSO Group confirms that Israeli government officials opened an investigation and visited NSO's Tel Aviv office on Wednesday to assess Pegasus abuse allegations
‘We want them to check everything,’ says CEO of cybersecurity company implicated in campaigns against politicians, activists and other notable figures.
MIT Technology ReviewPatrick Howell O'Neill
Context & Ripple Effects
The Israeli review follows reporting that Pegasus had infected 23 of 67 examined phones belonging to officials, reporters, executives and activists. By taking the inquiry inside NSO’s offices, authorities move the dispute from outside reporting to direct scrutiny of the vendor’s operations.
The episode sits at the center of a widening commercial-spyware accountability problem: later reporting found Pegasus on French journalists’ phones, while a broader investigation traced the industry’s global reach around NSO.
First-order effects
NSO must provide Israeli officials access and information for an inquiry into Pegasus abuse allegations, putting its controls and customer-use claims under immediate official examination.
The Israeli inquiry gives governments confronting alleged Pegasus targeting a domestic-government review to compare with their own findings, rather than relying solely on technical investigations and press reports.
NSO’s customers and prospective customers face greater scrutiny of how Pegasus is deployed, especially as later coverage tied documented abuses to the company’s financial strain and client-risk decisions.
Third-order effects
If official investigations continue to follow abuse disclosures, commercial-spyware vendors will face a market shaped as much by government oversight and customer accountability as by their technical capabilities.
The pattern points toward a more constrained surveillance-software business, in which evidence of misuse can limit a vendor’s financing and acceptable customer base.
The trend: Commercial spyware is moving from a largely opaque government-sales market toward one in which technical exposure of abuse triggers direct scrutiny of vendors and their customers.
New: NSO Group confirms Israeli officials from Defense Ministry opened an investigation and visited NSO's Tel Aviv offices today to look into abuse allegations from the Pegasus Project. CEO Shalev Hulio: “I believe it's very good that they are checking.” https://www.technologyrev…
And the statement from NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio: “That true, I believe it's very good that they are checking, since we know the truth and we know that the list was never exist and not related to NSO.”
The Israeli government is no doubt shocked, *shocked*, to discover a well-known spyware firm with close government ties, and whose exports are all approved by the MoD, appears to be complicit in gross human rights abuses: https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
This might be a welcome development were or not for the fact that the Israeli MoD already undertakes “inspections” of NSO as part of export licensing requirements (around which there is zero transparency). You don't need to be Shakespeare to recognize theatre when you see it. htt…
‘We want them to check everything,’ says CEO of cybersecurity company implicated in campaigns against politicians, activists and other notable figures. https://www.technologyreview.com/ ...
The initial Hebrew-language report characterized today as a “raid” — that's not how MOD characterized it, as Frank rightly points out, but it is nevertheless significant https://twitter.com/...
Interesting @FT piece about NSO and ongoing Pegasus phone spyware imbroglio. Funny the founder thought Apple, Google, WhatsApp would've been faster at patching the zero-day, zero-clicks — sounds like a humble-brag.😉 Excellent reporting. @MehulAtLarge https://www.ft.com/...
NSO is calling it a visit not a raid. The first to report it was the Israeli publication Calcalist, which called it a raid. But MoD didn't seize computers, which would occur if it was a raid. And the visit was coordinated with NSO who knew they were coming https://www.calcalist.c…
The full statement from an Israeli Ministry of Defense spokesperson: “Today (28.07.21) representatives of several bodies visited the office of NSO in order to assess the allegations raised in regards to the company.”