Israel has been trying to limit the damage the Pegasus spyware scandal is threatening to do to France-Israel relations. The Moroccan intelligence service used the software, made by an Israeli company with close ties to Israel’s defense and intelligence establishments, to spy on dozens of French officials, including fourteen current and former cabinet ministers, among them President Emmanuel Macron and former prime minister Edouard Phillipe. It would not be unreasonable for the French intelligence services to assume that there was a measure of Israeli spying on France involved here, with or without the knowledge of the Moroccans. Macron, in a phone conversation with Israel’s prime minister Naftali Bennett, pointedly asked for an explanation.
Benny Gantz, Israel’s Defense Minister and a former Chief of Staff, on Wednesday visited Paris on a damage-control mission. His goal: To try to pacify the angry French authorities following the revelations that a sophisticated piece of spyware, produced by an Israeli spyware firm, was sold to Morocco with the approval of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The Moroccan intelligence service used the software to spy on opposition figures, journalists, and civil society activists in Morocco – but also on dozens of French officials, including fourteen current and former cabinet ministers.
Among those under Moroccan surveillance: President Emmanuel Macron and former prime minister Edouard Phillipe.
The Israeli firm, the NSO Group, sold its Pegasus software to forty-five other governments – some democratic, such as India and Mexico; some authoritarian, such as Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, and UAE; and some in between, such as Hungary and Rwanda.
The governments of all these countries officially bought the spyware to track and monitor criminals and terrorists, but most of these governments used the spyware for domestic spying on democracy activists, civil society organizers, journalists, and political opposition figures. In Hungary, the government also used the Pegasus spyware to track and monitor two Hungarian moguls who challenged Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s system of awarding lucrative government contracts to his cronies.
Macron, in a phone conversation with Israel’s prime minister Naftali Bennett, pointedly asked for an explanation.
There were reasons for Macron’s irritation: The NSO Group was established in 2009 by three Israelis — Niv Carmi, Shalev Hulio, and Omri Lavie. Contrary to popular belief, the three were not veterans of the vaunted Unit 8200, the IDF’s signal intelligence branch (although many of the company’s employees are). It is generally accepted by intelligence services around the world that many Israeli high-tech companies share information they glean from their contracts abroad with the Israeli security services, if they think such information is vital to Israel’s security (this is why the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, has been reluctant to allow Israeli cyber companies access to the U.S. market).
Such information may be voluntary given to the Israeli companies by their foreign clients, or the information may be collected by the Israeli companies without the foreign clients being aware of such collection.
In other words, it would not be unreasonable for the French intelligence services to assume that there was a measure of Israeli spying on France involved here, weather or not the Moroccan intelligence services, which operated the Pegasus spyware and did the actual tracking and monitoring of high-level French officials, were fully aware of that or not.
Israeli sources said that Macron had told Bennett, in a polite but pointed language, that the close security, intelligence, and diplomatic cooperation between France and Israel may come under questioning if this case were not treated seriously by the Israeli government.
Macron implied that one manifestation of such seriousness would be the tightening by the Israeli Ministry of Defense of its controls of export licenses granted to the NSO Group and other companies operating in the same domain.
Before leaving for Paris, Gantz announced the creation of an interdepartmental commission to “get to know what happened and learn from what has happened.”
Le Figaro notes that Israeli commentators expressed doubts that the NSO Group would be the subject of any meaningful sanctions. The issue, rather, is how the Defense Ministry may impose some restrictions on technology exports – either limiting the technologies available for export, or the type of clients eligible to buy Israeli spyware – but do so without damaging the financial (and, some would suggest, intelligence) benefits the highly regarded Israeli cybersecurity companies bring.
Last week, speaking at an industry forum, Bennett, who himself made millions as a cybersecurity start-up entrepreneur before entering politics, noted that 41 percent of global investments in the cybersecurity sector are invested in Israeli cybersecurity companies.
The NSO Group, for its part, insists it is being wrongly blamed for the irresponsible conduct of some of its clients. The company says it is selling its intrusive spyware to governments so that these governments could better track and monitor terrorists and criminals. The company also says that it has no way to monitor what its clients do with the company’s product – but, the company adds, if “credible evidence” is presented to it about a client misusing its software, then the company shuts it off.
The NSO Group said that in recent years it has either lost or foregone about $300 million for refusing to conclude contracts because of possible human rights violations by potential customers.
The company did not provide any details about these potential customers.
The practices of the NSO Group have come under question before, and the company has experienced internal turmoil, involving board members and management, over how much prudence the company should exercise when considering a sale to iffy clients, and how transparent it should be in letting the public know who its clients are.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that those on the board who preferred less scrutiny of clients and less transparency have won the day. Haaretz, though, has kept reporting on the company, publishing unflattering stories about clients who were willing to pay the company more than half a million euros so they could use the Pegasus software to spy on a dozen telephones and laptops belonging to opposition figures.
The NSO Group’s secretive ways and its willingness to sell its products to unsavory regimes have not been without consequences for the 200 or so of its employees who are veterans of Unite 8200 (the company has about 800 employees).
In 2019, the IDF informed the NSO Group employees that they would no longer be allowed to do their military reserve service in Unit 8200 in order to avoid a situation in which they would be “confronted with conflicts of interest.”
The Record reports that, on Wednesday, the Israeli Ministry of Defense announced that officials from several Israeli government agencies have visited the offices of NSO Group. “We can confirm that representatives from the Israeli Ministry of Defense visited our offices,” an NSO spokesperson confirmed to The Record.
“We welcome their inspection,” the NSO Group said.
Israeli news outlet Calcalist cited an anonymous source who said the visits were more of a formal meeting than an in-depth audit of NSO’s documents and computer systems.
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