In an open letter to the Israeli government, three top civil servants have spoken of the anguish of having their “personal and professional worlds” exposed by one of the country’s most powerful cyberweapons, Pegasus.
“We are in an emotional tempest and our sense is very grim,” they wrote. “Our sense of insult, humiliation and powerlessness in light of the trampling of our basic rights is unbearably severe.”
Their words echo those of many others whose governments have bought the Israeli smartphone hacking software. These include a jailed dissident in the United Arab Emirates, government critics in Mexico and even the former wife of murdered Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi.
But this week’s allegations mark the first time the flagship product of Israel’s NSO Group has become embroiled in a domestic scandal, and the first time the weapon’s use — and abuse — is being debated by Israeli society.
So far, the three civil servants and 23 other Israelis — mayors, senior political aides, even a son of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — are reported to have been targeted by the police with the spyware, all purportedly without court warrants.
The Financial Times and other media have not been able to verify the allegations. The Israeli police has prevaricated between accepting that some abuse had been uncovered and denying that these specific people had been targeted. A former police chief, Roni Alsheich, said the reporting “was disconnected from reality”.
But the official reaction to the report was immediate. The government has announced plans for a commission of inquiry. Judges in Netanyahu’s trial for corruption have delayed proceedings, since any unlawful targeting of potential witnesses in his trial without a police warrant would scupper parts of the case against him. Politicians have decried the alleged assault on Israeli democracy, long vaunted as the only one in the Middle East.
In a speech to parliament, Netanyahu, who for more than a decade used the software as a diplomatic calling card as he wooed recalcitrant Arab allies, captured the shock of Israel’s elite.
“ [It’s like] using planes meant to be used against Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas to blow up Israeli civilians,” he said. “They exposed citizens, followed them, listened in on them and got into their most buried secrets.”
The outcry was in sharp contrast to years of official indifference towards the non-Israeli victims of abuse of the country’s most notorious export — a piece of software that surreptitiously defeats smartphone encryption by mirroring its contents remotely.
Even as evidence mounted that hundreds of members of civil society around the world have had their secrets stripped from their phones by people who bought Pegasus software, Israel has both publicly and privately backed the NSO Group, which manufactures Pegasus. When foreign victims sought justice in Israeli courts, judges agreed to NSO’s requests that the hearings happen in secret.
“When we filed the lawsuits in 2018, the sense we got is that neither the courts nor society at large appreciated the seriousness and the risks of such technology — they were seen as exotic stories of things that happen in faraway places but never at home,” said Alaa Mahajna, the lead lawyer for a friend of Khashoggi’s and a group of Mexican activists who allege that NSO shares responsibility for the harm its weapon causes. “Fast forward four years and this is the only thing on the media cycle.”
For privacy advocates such as Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, Israel’s response should be an opportunity to reform both surveillance and policing in a country where citizens have been convinced by their leaders that any intrusions are necessary for their security.
Most worrying, she said, is the alleged intrusion of intelligence gathering techniques — where agencies have wide leeway to collect data surreptitiously — into the practices of the police, who ought to have a more restricted right to violate citizens’ privacy, especially with a wide-ranging weapon such as Pegasus.
“It’s not as if as long as we find someone to blame for this, we will be fine,” she said. “We need to ask the right question and get to a proper answer — what methods of investigation should the Israeli police use? Only when we have the answer can we decide what technology should be used.”
Pegasus has recently been traced to the phones of six Palestinian human rights groups that the defence ministry has called terrorists. And for Mahajna, a Palestinian with Israeli nationality, the spread of such surveillance techniques into Israeli society was inevitable. “It is only a matter of time that such practices will become the norm,” he said. “Once you normalise invasive surveillance of people who live a couple of kilometres away, you are already normalising surveillance at home.”
But so far, the focus in Israel has not been on the scope and invasive nature of weapons such as Pegasus, whose sale a UN body has asked Israel — without success — to regulate more closely, but instead on whether it had been used without warrants.
Given Israeli courts rubber-stamp most wiretap requests, this is a red herring, said Eitay Mack, a human rights lawyer who has spent years trying to rein in Israel weapons sales to authoritarian regimes.
“The goal here seems to be to fix the legislation and legalise the use of systems like Pegasus [in Israel] — there is no principal discussion of the basic dangers inherent here,” he said.
The NSO group has declined to comment. As the debate over democracy rumbles on, Mack said the company could only profit. “In the end if Pegasus is allowed within Israel, then Israel will of course continue its exports abroad — and the only winner is NSO.”
