“It violates the trust that we give customers. “Every allegation about misuse of the system is concerning me,” he said. He said that in the past 12 months NSO had terminated two contracts over allegations of human rights abuses, but he declined to name the countries involved. “We understand that in some circumstances our customers might misuse the system and, in some cases like we reported in Transparency and Responsibility Report, we have shut down systems for customers who have misused the system.” “The company cares about journalists and activists and civil society in general,” Hulio said. It also said it does not operate the spyware licensed to its clients and “has no insight” into their specific intelligence activities.Īfter publication, NSO chief executive Shalev Hulio expressed concern in a phone interview with The Post about some of the details he had read in Pegasus Project stories Sunday, while continuing to dispute that the list of more than 50,000 phone numbers had anything to do with NSO or Pegasus. In lengthy responses before publication, NSO called the investigation’s findings exaggerated and baseless. Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that specializes in studying Pegasus, also conducted a peer review of Amnesty’s forensic methods and found them to be sound. Three Android phones showed signs of targeting, such as Pegasus-linked SMS messages.Īmnesty shared backup copies of data on four iPhones with Citizen Lab, which confirmed that they showed signs of Pegasus infection. However, unlike iPhones, Androids do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty’s detective work. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed evidence of successful infection. Of those, 23 were successfully infected and 14 showed signs of attempted penetration.įor the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the phones had been replaced. Amnesty’s Security Lab examined 67 smartphones where attacks were suspected. The media consortium, titled the Pegasus Project, analyzed the list through interviews and forensic analysis of the phones, and by comparing details with previously reported information about NSO. The evidence extracted from these smartphones, revealed here for the first time, calls into question pledges by the Israeli company to police its clients for human rights abuses. The targeting of the 37 smartphones would appear to conflict with the stated purpose of NSO’s licensing of the Pegasus spyware, which the company says is intended only for use in surveilling terrorists and major criminals. The numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list.Īmong the journalists whose numbers appear on the list, which dates to 2016, are reporters working overseas for several leading news organizations, including a small number from CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde in France, the Financial Times in London and Al Jazeera in Qatar. The numbers on the list are unattributed, but reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials - including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. Amnesty’s Security Lab did the forensic analyses on the smartphones. But forensic analysis of the 37 smartphones shows that many display a tight correlation between time stamps associated with a number on the list and the initiation of surveillance, in some cases as brief as a few seconds.įorbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and Amnesty International, a human rights group, had access to the list and shared it with the news organizations, which did further research and analysis. The list does not identify who put the numbers on it, or why, and it is unknown how many of the phones were targeted or surveilled. The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found. Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 media partners.
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