Israeli police used NSO's Pegasus spyware to hack citizens, report
India's Supreme Court is also looking into government use of NSO spyware
The Israeli police have been accused of conducing warrantless phone surveillance of Israeli citizens, including activists and politicians, using the NSO Group ' s controversial Pegasus spyware, the Israeli newspaper Calcalist reported on Tuesday.
The Hebrew-language business newspaper stated that police have had access to the Pegasus spyware made by Israel's NSO Group since 2013 and began to use the tool after December 2015 against targets including anti-government protest leaders, sometimes without the necessary court orders.
The report says that in 2020, the police used the spyware to track leaders of political protests against the former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is accused of corruption.
The phones of two sitting mayors accused of corruption and devices of numerous other Israeli citizens, including government officials, were also hacked by the police.
The hacking was not carried out under the court supervision, as per Calcalist investigation, and there is no information on how the data collected was used or analysed.
"In all the cases mentioned in the article, and in other instances, use of Pegasus was made at the sole discretion of senior police officers," the report said.
"The significance is that with Pegasus, the police can effectively hack without asking a court, without a search or entry warrant, without oversight, to all cell phones."
In a separate report, Israeli daily Haaretz claimed to have access to documents suggesting that Israeli police were invoiced by NSO group for 2.7 million shekels (£635,000) in 2013.
Responding to these reports, the Israeli police service said that the force had acquired third-party cyber technology, although it denied conducting warrantless interception and stopped short of confirming or denying whether Pegasus was used in the interceptions.
"The Israel police acts according to the authority granted to it by law and when necessary according to court orders and within the rules and regulations set by the responsible bodies," the police said in a statement, according to Haaretz.
"Naturally, the police don ' t intend to comment on the tools it uses. Nevertheless, we will continue to act in a determined manner with all the means at our disposal, in the physical and online spaces, to fight crime in general, and organised crime in particular, to protect the safety and property of the public."
Privacy advocates have long warned that NSO Group does not have enough controls in place to limit how its customers use the powerful cyber surveillance tools it sells.
Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, which revealed last year how widespread the use of NSO Group's spyware, claim that Pegasus may have been used to snoop on more than 1,000 journalists, rights activists and other prominent individuals from about 50 countries.
In November, the US government placed NSO Group on a trade blacklist on the grounds that the company's software had "enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists".
NSO in India
In October last year, the Supreme Court of India asked an expert team to look into whether the Union Government had used Pegasus to spy on opposition leaders, activists, judges, and journalists.
Earlier this month, the technical committee appointed by the Court published a public notice urging citizens to contact the panel if they believed their phones were infected with Pegasus software.
The notification asked such people to explain why they believed their phones could have been infected with Pegasus malware, and whether they would allow the technical experts to examine the said device.
So far, the Government of India has chosen to remain silent about alleged targeting of its own citizens, to the annoyance of the Supreme Court.