As Israeli-made offensive cyber-tech from the NSO Group is revealed to have targeted world leaders, will Israel’s own edge be blunted by foreign-sales restrictions?
“Many allies spy on each other,” it’s been said. “the trick is not to get caught.”
Having indirectly broken that cardinal rule after Israeli-made technology targeted Western leaders such as French president Emmanuel Macron, Israel’s new leadership finds itself under pressure to rein in the country’s private surveillance-tech outfits.
A long-running joint investigation by the Guardian and Washington Post broke the story last week that NSO Group Technologies, a Herzliya-based company whose spyware tool called Pegasus allows the remote penetration of smartphones, had provided the know-how that was used to listen in on a slew of world leaders, journalists, and opposition figures.
That list includes Macron, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Lebanese prime minister Saad Al-Hariri, European Council president Charles Michel, Kind Muhammad VI of Morocco, and a host of others.
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