On Pegasus – NSO, Israel, and the World

A former elite commando officer turned tech startup millionaire before he went into politics, he felt the solution lay in Israel's lucrative tech frontrunners - in particular, a boutique cyber-hacking company from Herzliya called NSO. The company had made its reputation with its Pegasus software, designed to infiltrate mobile phones. Reports in the New York Times and Haaretz have suggested that Israeli officials not only 'permitted' the sale of NSO and other cyber weapons to authoritarian states that would put them to questionable uses but 'encouraged' it, using these backroom deals to buy the public support of countries which had been hostile to Israel. Macron called Bennett demanding to know why Israel had approved the sale of NSO cyber tools to countries like Morocco. The defence minister, Benny Gantz, claimed that 'Israel gives cyber export licences only to governments and only for combating terror and crime', pretty much the line of NSO's own PR. The truth is that none of the revelations came as a surprise to Israeli officials. A handful of tech journalists and others had been trying to write about NSO for the last five years - it had been suggested that the Saudi government used Pegasus to hunt down Jamal Khashoggi - but no one had shown much interest. Even now, Israel's courts have rejected the claim that the defence ministry was negligent in issuing export licences to NSO. Stories appeared in the press pointing out that 'many Israeli families make a living selling these technologies,' and that if Israeli companies didn't supply them then foreign companies would. NSO is one of a long list of companies to profit from Israel's booming cyber-spying industry.