Israel tries to limit fallout from the Pegasus spyware scandal

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 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. There were reasons for Macron's irritation: The NSO Group was established in 2009 by three Israelis - Niv Carmi, Shalev Hulio, and Omri Lavie. 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. 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.