The Israeli spy software firm NSO Group has rarely been out of the headlines over the past year.
Its spyware tool Pegasus worms its way into phones, accessing data and turning on the microphone and camera to act as round-the-clock surveillance equipment. Authoritarian states have reportedly bought the cyber weapon from NSO and put it to nefarious political uses targeting journalists, human rights workers, civil rights lawyers, and opposition parties.
Perhaps most notoriously, associates of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government, who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018, were later found to have Pegasus on their phones. And last month it was reported that the spyware was used on the phone of Kamel Jendoubi in 2019, when he was investigating potential Saudi war crimes in Yemen on behalf of the United Nations.
US President Joe Biden's administration placed NSO and Candiru, another Israeli surveillance software developer, on a blacklist in November, barring US firms from providing them with technology. Washington said these companies' military-grade software tools were being used for "transnational repression" and were harming US national interests.
Poland's opposition-led Senate joined the backlash last week, announcing plans to draft a law to regulate surveillance software such as Pegasus, after it was used to target the phones of several opposition leaders. The legislation has little chance of being passed; the Polish justice ministry reportedly bought the spyware in 2017, ostensibly as part of an anti-corruption drive.
Selective outrageBut while there has been plenty of selective international outrage at NSO for its profiting from repression and human rights violations, the real problem is being largely obscured.
This is not a matter of better regulation of a few private companies that have gone rogue. This is a battle for control of a rapidly developing cyber weapons industry that is not only highly profitable, but gives those states that can oversee the industry enormous clout over other states.
The reality is that cyber weapons, like conventional arms, are not going away. They are just going to get more sophisticated, invasive and destructive - and more profitable.
Up to this point, Israel has dominated the field. That is largely because its conventional and cyber weapons industries have been lavishly subsidised with US military aid, and because Palestinians under occupation have served as a ready laboratory for testing the new technologies.
But that may be changing as Washington begins to crack down on pioneering Israeli firms, such as NSO and Candiru, making it much harder for them to sell their wares. NSO was reported last month to be close to insolvency.
While the Biden administration has packaged its measure as a way to protect human rights from offensive software, its motives appear to be far less disinterested. An examination of Israel's own role in the development of the cyberweapons industry points to what is really at stake.
Police operationThis month, it emerged that NSO's Pegasus software had not only been used by malign actors abroad, but had also been covertly used by Israeli state agencies against opponents of Israel's far-right government, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel itself.
Israeli police were recently forced to concede that they had been using Pegasus too. They reportedly bought an early version of the software in 2013, long before its use elsewhere was discovered.
The targets in Israel included the leaders of protests that took off in 2019 to oust former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power. Netanyahu is currently on trial on corruption charges, and is widely reported to be readying for a plea deal.
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