Opinion | Spyware is thriving, dangerous and unrestrained. It's time to change that. - The Washington Post

“A tool that destroys the essential codes of civilization.” That’s how Mexican investigative journalist Carmen Aristegui described the Pegasus spyware licensed by Israel’s NSO Group to governments around the world — and then turned by some of those governments against the press, the opposition and manifold others who might pose a threat to a snooping state. The problem, as a recent report by a partnership including The Post reveals, isn’t only the abuse itself but also how little we know about it.

The Pegasus Project investigates a leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers concentrated in NSO client countries notorious for citizen surveillance. From those numbers, the investigators identified 1,000 people across 50 countries, including business executives, activists, journalists, and more than 600 politicians and officials. Thirty-seven of these people’s smartphones suffered successful or attempted hacks via Pegasus, despite the military-grade tool’s intended purpose for tracking only criminals. NSO called these findings exaggerated and baseless.

NSO asserts that the 60 intelligence, military and law enforcement agencies to which it licenses its software are subject to rigorous reviews. Similarly, the Israeli Defense Ministry insists that “appropriate measures are taken” when cyber products are exploited for a purpose besides combating illegal activity. So why was Saudi Arabia allowed to keep Pegasus after the murder of Post Opinions contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi? Amnesty International’s forensics discovered that Pegasus successfully infected the phone of his fiancee in the days after his death; in the months before it, the spyware was targeted at his wife as well. NSO has always denied that its technology was associated with the crime, but it also claims to have no visibility into client activity. NSO also says confidentiality agreements keep it from revealing even who its clients are.

Pegasus can access a victim’s texts, location, photos and, more alarmingly, sometimes with merely a message that produces no notification and requires no action. A victim doesn’t even need to make a mistake. This technology of course can be used for legitimate and even positive purposes — disrupting drug cartels, for instance, or fighting terrorism. Yet it can also be abused, and when it is, the rest of the world usually finds out only through the very activists, academics and journalists whose phones are under threat of infiltration by those who hope to stop them from doing their jobs.

NSO isn’t alone, and neither is Israel. The private spyware industry is thriving, largely unrestrained. That must end. Transparency requirements and accountability requirements should ensure companies’ “rigorous reviews” are actually rigorous, but governments should also take the onus on themselves to assess the human rights impact of issuing a license before it’s approved — and, if it is approved, after. Countries with a history of turning these technologies against citizens should be prohibited from purchasing them at all. And countries that respect the bounds of the law should refuse to buy from companies that do business with those that don’t. Global leaders must work together to fix a problem that doesn’t care about geography. Luckily, they have an incentive to act: They are targets, too.

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"Opinion" - Google News
July 20, 2021 at 09:12PM
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Opinion | Spyware is thriving, dangerous and unrestrained. It's time to change that. - The Washington Post
"Opinion" - Google News
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