Gov’t eyes spyware export curbs; Merkel, Macron troubled by NSO abuse reports

An Israeli parliamentary panel may seek changes to defense export policy over reports that software sold by Israel’s NSO Group was used to spy on journalists, officials and rights activists in several countries, a senior lawmaker said on Thursday.

Among suspected targets of NSO’s Pegasus software is French President Emmanuel Macron, who convened his cabinet on Thursday over calls for investigations. Amid mounting EU concern, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin that spyware should be denied to countries where there is no judicial oversight.

“We certainly have to look anew at this whole subject of licenses granted by DECA,” Ram Ben Barak, head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, told Army Radio, referring to the government-run Defense Export Controls Agency.

Israel has appointed an inter-ministerial team to assess reports based on an investigation by 17 media organizations that said Pegasus had been used in attempted or successful hacks of smartphones using malware that enables the extraction of messages, records calls and secretly activates microphones.

NSO has rejected the reporting by the media partners as “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories.” Reuters has not independently verified the reporting.

NSO says it does not know the specific identities of people against whom clients use Pegasus. If it receives a complaint of Pegasus having been misused by a client, NSO can retroactively acquire the target lists and, should the complaint prove true, unilaterally shut down that client’s software, the company says.

Other world leaders among those whose phone numbers the news organizations said were on a list of possible targets include Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Morocco’s King Mohammed VI.

The Israeli government team “will conduct its checks, and we will be sure to look into the findings and see if we need to fix things here,” said Ben Barak. A former deputy chief of Mossad, he said proper use of Pegasus had “helped a great many people.”

TARGETING TERRORISTS, CRIMINALS

DECA is within Israel’s Defense Ministry and oversees NSO exports. Both the ministry and the firm have said that Pegasus is meant to be used to track terrorists or criminals only, and that all foreign clients are vetted governments.

But the alleged misuse has stirred questions within Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s cross-partisan coalition, one of whose members, the far-Left party Meretz, queried Defense Minister Benny Gantz about NSO exports in a meeting on Thursday.

Gantz “emphasized the importance of upholding human rights within the framework of weapons sales,” a joint statement said.

After Army Radio also aired an interview on Thursday with Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian journalist who said Pegasus had been found on his cellphone, NSO chief Shalev Hulio vowed to investigate.

“If he was indeed a target, I can assure you already that we will cut off the systems of whoever took action against him, because it’s intolerable for someone to do something like this,” Hulio told the station.

In keeping with NSO and Defense Ministry refusal to identify client countries, Hulio stopped short of confirming that Hungary had Pegasus. Budapest has not commented on the matter other than to say Hungary’s intelligence-gathering is conducted lawfully.

Hungarian prosecutors on Thursday said they had launched an investigation into suspected unlawful surveillance following multiple complaints in the wake of allegations of misuse of NSO’s spyware.

Hungarian police this week said they had received two complaints about the alleged abuses, one from a private individual and one from a politician.

The investigative website Direkt36, part of a media consortium that published the expose, said a list of more than 300 Hungarian phone numbers suspected to have been targeted using the software included those of journalists, business people, lawyers and people critical of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government.

Orban’s chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, told a weekly press briefing that details about Hungarian government surveillance activity were “not public information.”

“In such issues there is only one question to be examined, namely whether intelligence gathering took place lawfully or not,” he said. “We state that all secret intelligence gathering took place lawfully.”

On Monday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said the government was not aware of the surveillance activity reported in international media, adding that the Information Office, an intelligence agency under his supervision, had not used Pegasus.

Hulio said NSO has worked with 45 countries and rejected around 90 others as potential clients. The company has shut down five Pegasus systems for abuse, Hulio said, adding that the software cannot be used against Israeli or US mobile phones. (Reuters)