Growing Unease in Israel over Pegasus Case

Every sale of a weapon system developed in Israel, or a piece of software which may have military or intelligence uses, must be approved by a commission staffed with experts from the country’s Ministry of Defense.

This commission does not only give its approval in principal for sales of weapon systems or software – it must authorize such sales to specific clients.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, comes from the entrepreneurial cybersecurity universe. He did his military service in Sayeret Matkal, the IDF’s elite commando unit which is part of the IDF intelligence branch (two other prime ministers, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu, also served in Sayere Matkal. Barak was its commander in the early 1970s). After Bennett left the service, he made a fortune in high-tech, focusing on cybersecurity, before entering the political arena.

Bennett and Minister of Defense Benny Gantz, himself a former Chief of Staff of the IDF, have formed a small intradepartmental unit to manage and limit the fallout from the Pegasus revelations.

Israel is worried that what is now a PR black eye for the country may morph into a full-scale diplomatic crisis. There are calls for reviewing the process of approval of military and intelligence technology for sale.

“We only approve the export of cybernetic products to governments, and only for legal use to prevent crime and terrorism. The countries which purchase these systems must adhere to the terms of use,”Gantz said in a terse statement.

The NSO Group, for its part, has released a lengthy statement by the company’s legal team, insisting that the company has taken all possible measures to ensure that its software was not used for other purposes than the tracking of criminals and terrorists.

Analysts note that there is an inherent contradiction in the company’s position. The company says that it has no way of knowing how the client uses the company’s software, yet, these analysts say, the company says that that software has not been used for anything other than tracking criminals and terrorists. At the same time, the company said that, in the past, when “credible evidence” was presented to it that the software has been misused, it went ahead and remotely cut off the ability of the client to use the software.

The NSO Group’s activities reached the headlines in late 2018, when it was revealed that the Saudis used Pegasus to track to whereabouts of Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi regime, who was lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. Saudi intelligence operatives were waiting for him, and they killed him and dismembered his body.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that it talked to several people who were present at a demonstration in June 2017 given to Saudi officials by NSO Group. The demonstration took place in Cyprus.

The purpose of the demonstration was to show the Saudis how Pegasus could infiltrate a phone without the victim having to open an email message, an attachment, or anything else.

The NSO Group people sent one of the Saudis to a nearby phone shop to buy an iPhone. The Saudi official then called the NSO People and gave them the number of the just-purchased phone. Within minutes, Pegasus managed to infect the new iPhone, and the NSO People showed the Saudis how they could take control of the device, including remotely using the phone’s camera and microphone to spy on the phone’s owner, and accessing all the content on the phone.

Within days, Saudi Arabia signed a $50 million contract with NSO Group.

Analysts note that there appears to be a correlation between Israeli diplomacy and the deals of NSO Group. Among the forty-five countries which acquired the software, are Saudi Arabia, Morocco, India, Hungary, Rwanda, and others – countries with which Israel, under Netanyahu, either established or markedly improved relations.

On a visit to Hungary in 2017, Netanyahu said: “The markets dictate what works, I do not dictate … The only place where I really intervened [in my capacity as prime minister]… is cybersecurity.”