Israhell's spy tech being exposed by the mainstream media

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From If Americans Knew:
Guardian, NYT, WaPo report: Israeli spyware is getting Israel in hot water
https://israelpalestinenews.org/guardian-nyt-wapo-report-israeli-spyware-is-getting-israel-in-hot-water/

On Monday, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post each published a different news story about Israeli technology  – all with a common thread: unscrupulous practices targeting innocent people that Israel considers a threat.
NOTE: NSO Group is an Israeli tech firm with ties to the Israeli military. Its signature spyware, Pegasus, has been implicated in cases of worldwide hacking, selling "dangerous" surveillance tools to foreign governments (allegedly including Saudi Arabia, which it used against journalist Jamal Khashoggi), and  and spying on Palestinians and their allies.

Last week, the Biden administration placed NSO Group on a US blacklist, after determining that the Israeli spyware firm has acted "contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US."



THE GUARDIAN: PALESTINIAN ACTIVISTS' MOBILE PHONES HACKED USING NSO SPYWARE, SAYS REPORT

The mobile phones of six Palestinian human rights defenders, some of whom work for organisations that were recently – and controversially – accused by Israel of being terrorist groups, were previously hacked by sophisticated spyware made by NSO Group, according to a report.

[Read about Israel's malicious targeting of Palestinian human rights orgs here https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/08/palestinian-activists-mobile-phones-hacked-by-nso-says-report  .]

An investigation by Front Line Defenders (FLD), a Dublin-based human rights group, found that the mobile phones of Salah Hammouri...and five others were hacked using Pegasus, NSO's signature spyware. In one case, the hacking was found to have occurred as far back as July 2020.

FLD's findings were independently confirmed with "high confidence" by technical experts at Citizen Lab and Amnesty International's security lab, the world's leading authorities on such hacks.

The revelation is likely to provoke further criticism of Israel's recent decision to target Palestinian human rights activists. UN human rights experts have called the designation of the groups as terror organisations a "frontal attack" on the Palestinian human rights movement and on human rights everywhere, and said it appeared to represent an abuse of the use of anti-terrorism legislation by Israeli authorities...

The case of the six Palestinians also raises new questions about how Israel itself may use spyware to target critics of the government or others who are seen as threatening the country.

[Read full article here
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/08/palestinian-activists-mobile-phones-hacked-by-nso-says-report   .]



WASHINGTON POST: ISRAEL ESCALATES SURVEILLANCE OF PALESTINIANS WITH FACIAL RECOGNITION PROGRAM IN WEST BANK

The Israeli military has been conducting a broad surveillance effort in the occupied West Bank to monitor Palestinians by integrating facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and smartphones, according to descriptions of the program by recent Israeli soldiers.

The surveillance initiative, rolled out over the past two years, involves in part a smartphone technology called Blue Wolf that captures photos of Palestinians' faces and matches them to a database of images so extensive that one former soldier described it as the army's secret "Facebook for Palestinians." The phone app flashes in different colors to alert soldiers if a person is to be detained, arrested or left alone.

To build the database used by Blue Wolf, soldiers competed last year in photographing Palestinians, including children and the elderly, with prizes for the most pictures collected by each unit. The total number of people photographed is unclear but, at a minimum, ran well into the thousands.

The surveillance program was described in interviews conducted by The Post with two former Israeli soldiers and in separate accounts that they and four other recently discharged soldiers gave to the Israeli advocacy group Breaking the Silence and were later shared with The Post. Much of the program has not been previously reported...

In addition to Blue Wolf, the Israeli military has installed face-scanning cameras in the divided city of Hebron to help soldiers at checkpoints identify Palestinians even before they present their ID cards. A wider network of closed-circuit television cameras, dubbed "Hebron Smart City," provides real-time monitoring of the city's population and, one former soldier said, can sometimes see into private homes...

The Blue Wolf initiative combines a smartphone app with a database of personal information accessible via mobile devices, according to six former soldiers who were interviewed by The Post and Breaking the Silence.

Official use of facial recognition technology has been banned by at least a dozen U.S. cities, including Boston and San Francisco, according to the advocacy group the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. And this month the European Parliament called for a ban on police use of facial recognition in public places.

[Read full article here. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israel-palestinians-surveillance-facial-recognition/2021/11/05/3787bf42-26b2-11ec-8739-5cb6aba30a30_story.html  ]



NEW YORK TIMES: DESPITE ABUSES OF NSO SPYWARE, ISRAEL WILL LOBBY U.S. TO DEFEND IT

As a new accusation surfaces that NSO's software may have been used to spy on Palestinians, Israeli officials say it is crucial to national security.

Hacking software sold by the NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm, has been used to spy on journalists, opposition groups and rights activists. There have been so many accusations of abuse that the Biden administration slapped sanctions on the company last week.

But the company's biggest backer, the government of Israel, considers the software a crucial element of its foreign policy and is lobbying Washington to remove the company from the blacklist, two senior Israeli officials said Monday.

NSO insists that the software — which allows governments to remotely and secretly penetrate a phone, monitor its location and extract it contents — is intended to help countries combat organized crime and terrorism.

But there has been a drumbeat of periodic revelations of abuse, with the company's Pegasus software used to hack the phones of political opponents in dozens of countries.

The latest accusation came Monday, when international computer privacy experts said that Pegasus had been deployed against Palestinian rights activists, raising questions about whether the Israeli government itself was behind the hacking.

If the new claims are true, the case would be yet another instance of the software being used against rights advocates and the first known instance of it being used inside Israel and the occupied territories.

The Israeli prime minister's office and the Defense Ministry denied that Pegasus had been used to hack the Palestinians' phones...

[Read the full article here https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/world/middleeast/nso-israel-palestinians-spyware.html .]

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Israeli spyware firm behind Pegasus phone-hacking scandal going broke
https://www.rt.com/business/541035-israeli-spyware-firm-phone-hacking/

Israeli tech firm NSO Group is facing a $500 million default after being blacklisted in the US over its Pegasus phone-hacking technology that was allegedly used to spy on political dissidents, journalists, and rights activists.

Moody's slashed NSO's credit rating on Monday, putting it eight levels below investment grade.

The US rating agency explained that the company is at increased risk of violating the terms of its debt agreements, Bloomberg reported.

This comes after the spyware firm was added to a US trade blacklist following accusations that its military-grade Pegasus technology, aimed at preventing crime and terrorism, has instead been used by some of its clients to spy on human rights activists, journalists, and political dissidents.

NSO has repeatedly denied these claims, stressing that it has terminated a number of contracts "with government agencies that misused our products."

The new export restrictions from Washington, added around three weeks ago, ban all dealings with the Israeli firm.

NSO reported negative cash flow last year, after being valued at about $1 billion following a management buyout in 2019. Moody's analysts say the current decline in revenue and the distribution to shareholders may continue to drain the company for the rest of the year.

Moody's estimates that NSO's debt will exceed its earnings by nearly 6.5 times this year, while S&P Global Ratings puts the firm at B-, which means it still likely has the capacity to meet its financial obligations, but is highly vulnerable to adverse economic conditions.

NSO had around $29 million of unrestricted cash as of June, and drained its $30 million bank credit line.

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Apple sues Israeli company behind Pegasus spyware
https://www.rt.com/news/541115-apple-sues-pegasus-israel-spyware/

Apple is suing the NSO Group over its Pegasus spyware that specifically targeted iPhones, and seeking to permanently block the Israeli-based company from using any Apple device, software or service.

"State-sponsored actors like the NSO Group spend millions of dollars on sophisticated surveillance technologies without effective accountability. That needs to change," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, said on Tuesday, announcing the lawsuit.

The complaint was filed in the federal court in San Jose, California and provides "new information" on how NSO infected thousands of iPhones with its Pegasus spyware, using an exploit called FORCEDENTRY that has since been patched.

In addition to the court-imposed ban on accessing Apple products and services, the company seeks "redress for NSO Group's flagrant violations of US federal and state law, arising out of its efforts to target and attack Apple and its users."

CitizenLab, a digital rights outfit at the University of Toronto in Canada revealed in September that NSO had exploited a vulnerability in Apple's iOS operating system to install Pegasus on thousands of iPhones around the world – targeting dissidents, human rights activists, journalists and politicians, among others.

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1463215336757604356?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1463215336757604356%7Ctwgr%5Ehb_0_7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.rt.com%2Fnews%2F541115-apple-sues-pegasus-israel-spyware%2F

The existence of Pegasus was revealed earlier this year. In addition to Israel, governments of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, India, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have been accused of its use.

Due to the revelations, NSO was added to the US government blacklist in October, cutting off its access to American investors. It is currently facing a $500 million default after its credit rating was downgraded on Monday.