PARIS (AFP) – Israeli’s NSO Group is in the eye of a storm over its Pegasus spyware – but it is far from the only company helping governments with their covert surveillance operations.
Explosive claims that Pegasus was used to spy on activists and even heads of state have shone a spotlight on the software, which allows highly intrusive access to a person’s mobile phone.
But NSO are merely one player in an industry that has quietly boomed in recent years, arming even cash-strapped governments with powerful surveillance technology.
“These tools have gotten cheaper and cheaper,” said Ms Allie Funk, senior research analyst in technology and democracy at the United States think tank Freedom House.
“So it’s not just the world’s foremost intelligence agencies that can purchase them – it’s smaller governments, or local police agencies.”
Emerging economies such as India, Mexico and Azerbaijan dominate the list of countries where large numbers of phone numbers were allegedly identified as possible targets by NSO’s clients.
Professor Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab research centre, said such companies allowed governments to effectively “purchase their own NSA” – a nod to the US National Security Agency, whose own extensive surveillance was exposed by Mr Edward Snowden.
The Citizen Lab scours the Internet for traces of digital espionage by governments.
Just last week it published an investigation into another secretive Israeli company that sells spyware to foreign governments, Candiru.
It appears to have been similarly used to target dissidents and journalists, from Turkey to Singapore.
And in 2017, Citizen Lab found that Ethiopia had used spyware developed by Cyberbit – yet another Israeli firm – to infect the computers of exiled dissidents.
‘Entrepreneurial’ ex-spies
“There are multiple factors why we see a lot of Israeli companies,” Prof Deibert said.
One is the “openly entrepreneurial” attitude of Israel’s cyber-espionage agency Unit 8200, who “encourage their graduates to go out and develop start-ups after their military service”, he told AFP.
He added there was “a strong suspicion” that Israel gains “strategic intelligence” from this technology being provided to other governments, siphoning off some of the information gathered.
But while Israel is now facing calls for an export ban on such technology, it is not the only country hosting companies that sell off-the-shelf spyware.