Herzliya:
An official at Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO Group mentioned Wednesday that the firm’s controversial Pegasus spyware tool was not used to target French President Emmanuel Macron.
The comments came as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) urged Israel to suspend exports of the spying technologies just after heads of state — like Macron — and scores of journalists and rights activists featured on a list of alleged targets chosen for possible surveillance.
We can “specifically come out and say for sure that the president of France, Macron, was not a target,” Chaim Gelfand, chief compliance officer at NSO Group, told the i24 News tv network.
But he also alluded to “some cases brought up that we are not so comfortable with”, noting that in such situations the firm “usually approaches the customer and has a whole long discussion… to try to understand what were his legitimate reasons, if any, to use the system.”
Gelfand’s comments had been broadcast on the identical day that RSF head Christophe Deloire referred to as on Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett “to impose an immediate moratorium on surveillance technology exports, until a protective regulatory framework has been established”.
Deloire’s get in touch with came just after a list was leaked of some 50,000 phone numbers believed to have been selected by customers of NSO Group. The numbers purportedly incorporated these of Macron, and 13 other heads of state.
Pegasus can hack into mobile phones with out a user understanding, enabling customers to study just about every message, track a user’s place and tap into the phone’s camera and microphone.
Contracts with 45 nations
NSO has contracts with 45 nations, and says Israel’s defence ministry will have to approve its offers. The firm does not determine its prospects.
However, rights group Amnesty International and the Paris-based organisation Forbidden Stories that obtained the list, mentioned NSO’s government customers consist of Bahrain, India, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda and Saudi Arabia.
Reporting by media outlets like The Guardian, Le Monde and The Washington Post discovered that almost 200 journalists from organisations like AFP had been on the list.
“Enabling governments to install spyware that is used in practice to monitor hundreds of journalists and their sources throughout the world poses a major democratic problem,” Deloire mentioned.
Spokespeople for Bennett and Defence Minister Benny Gantz did not respond to inquiries from AFP on Wednesday.
NSO, a giant of Israeli tech, is based in Herzliya north of Tel Aviv, and has 850 workers.
Its CEO Shalev Hulio, 39, denied in an interview with Israel’s 103FM radio on Tuesday that his firm was engaged in mass surveillance.
He mentioned NSO had “no connection” to the list of thousands of phone numbers.
On Wednesday, Bennett touted Israeli technological prowess at a cyber conference in Tel Aviv.
“Of every $100 invested in cyber defence across the world, $41 of those were invested in Israeli cyber defence firms,” he mentioned.
“We as a government, we as a nation, have to defend ourselves,” Bennett added.
He recommended international interest in Israeli technologies remained robust, saying “dozens of countries” signed memorandums to acquire Israeli tools that defend against cyber attacks.
A additional statement on Wednesday by NSO claimed that the firm was a victim of a “vicious and slanderous campaign”, and that it would no longer respond to media inquiries.
“Any claim that a name in the list is necessarily related to a Pegasus target or Pegasus potential target is erroneous and false,” it mentioned.
“NSO is a technology company. We do not operate the system, nor do we have access to the data of our customers, yet they are obligated to provide us with such information under investigations,” the firm added.
On Tuesday, Gantz mentioned Israel approves export of technologies only to governments “exclusively for the purposes of preventing and investigating crime and terrorism”.
He mentioned Israel is “studying” current publications on the topic.
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