Pegasus affairIsrael Tries to Limit Fallout from the Pegasus Spyware Scandal
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.
