How Israel used Palestine to test spyware

How Israel used Palestine to test spyware

Israel is a leader in the growing spyware industry. Spyware puts in danger human rights, press freedom, and democracy around the world. Antony Loewenstein writes about the role of spyware in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and why governments are failing to stop the increase in spyware.

An Israeli soldier puts her hand under a mini drone in Beersheba, a city in the Naqab desert. In 2022, drones were 25% of Israel’s weapons exports. AMIR COHEN/REUTERS

Javier Valdez Cárdenas was an investigative journalist. Someone shot him on the streets of Culiacán, northwest Mexico, in May 2017. It was in daylight. Only a few moments before, the reporter left the newsroom of Riodoce, the Mexican weekly newspaper. He was starting to investigate drug cartels, illegal groups controlling sales of drugs. Four years later, one of his killers, Juan Francisco Picos Barrueta, got 32 years in prison for the crime.

Violence against journalists is too common in Mexico. But this wasn’t a simple murder of a reporter working to expose organized crime and corruption. Javier’s widow was Griselda Triana, also a journalist. Two years after Javier’s death, the Canadian digital watchdog group, Citizen Lab, told her that there was powerful spyware called Pegasus on her mobile phone. The spyware appeared on her mobile phone 10 days after her husband’s death. Before then, Triana knew nothing about the government targeting her and Javier. ‘We heard that mobile phones could monitor people but we did not think that this could happen to us,’ she said. ‘Javier tried to make sure that his conversations on his mobile phone were safe and secure.’

I asked Triana why she thought there was spyware on their phones. ‘So the authorities could get data from sources of information or listen to calls linked to his murder,’ she said. No-one knows who was spying on the couple or why but some people think it was the Mexican government. Often corrupt government officials and drug cartels work together to stop and kill their enemies.

The Israeli company behind Pegasus is NSO Group It first showed its new spyware to Mexican authorities in 2011 when there was an increase in drug war violence. Spyware is used to fight crime but also to target many journalists, protesters, political enemies of governments, and human rights activists. This means Mexico is the world’s biggest user of spyware made in Israel.

There are similar stories now around the world. At least 75 states have bought spyware in the last ten years. Unregulated and invisible private companies mainly developed these new surveillance technologies. They allow the hacker to enter smartphones without the individual knowing. When Pegasus is inside a phone, it can activate the camera and microphone, and steal data, including communications, images, and videos. The spyware gives governments new powers to do surveillance. This power has led to terrible abuses. One of the worst cases is the Saudi killing in 2018 of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Pegasus targeted him and his wife in the months before his death.

When I did the research for my new book, The Palestine Laboratory, I spoke to Pegasus victims from Togo, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and India. All were afraid of surveillance and of police, gang, or military violence. Hacking a phone sees everything on the phone. A victim never feels safe again.

‘There was panic when Togo activists found that Pegasus got into WhatsApp,’ Togolese activist Farida Nabourema told me. ‘We thought that the government wasn’t so clever, but the dictatorship hires clever people.’

But not only dictatorships use spyware to target their enemies. In Greece, it is used against opposition politicians and investigative journalists. It’s a political crisis in the country. As the Cárdenas case in Mexico shows, this new form of electronic surveillance also puts in danger press freedoms, puts their sources at risk, exposes journalists to blackmail and stops them from investigative reporting.

So what action is there to stop the spyware industry? The answer is very little. There are still no global regulations to control the spyware industry. In fact, more countries are using spyware today than before.

No action and other problems

Sadly, governments do not want regulation as they want to use the technology for themselves. And so the spyware industry continues to grow.

We can see this in the European Union. The EU talks about banning the worst spyware companies, but so far it’s only talk. There is more action in the US. President Joe Biden signed an order in March 2023 restricting the government’s use of spyware. He said that both authoritarian governments and democracies abuse spyware to target their citizens. The US also decided to ban NSO Group and another major Israeli spyware company, Candiru, in November 2021. They also banned two more European-based spyware companies – Intellexa and Cytrox. A past Israeli general, Tal Dilian is head of both companies.

Some human rights groups welcomed the bans but if we look closer, we see a different story. Pegasus is now on the ban list but other phone hacking tools are still used across the US today. In 2022, the US outlet The Intercept said all except one of the 15 US government departments bought products made by Israeli company Cellebrite in recent years. And the US government continued to use the NSO Group product Landmark – a tool that can secretly track mobile phones around the world.

The US ban also has some other problems. It does not include the use of spyware made by US intelligence. The US worries that it’s losing business to Israel’s growing defence sector. Especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, as many European governments want to buy missile defence systems, artillery, and rockets. Banning Israeli spyware companies helps to put the US ahead in cyber weapons.

Palestinian men on their smartphones outside a shop in Gaza City. Palestine is a testing ground for Israel’s spyware and surveillance tools. It exports them to authoritarian governments around the world. IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/REUTERS

Israel cannot lose

The lack of serious regulation helps Israel. It is the leader in the technology and exports of these tools. NSO Group Technologies Ltd started in 2010. It is only one cyber-weapons company in Israel. 75 governments have bought spyware technologies and 56 bought them from companies based in or connected to Israel, such as NSO Group, Cellebrite, Cytrox, and Candiru. The Israeli Ministry of Defence approves all of them.

For Israel, spyware is big business and also a way to gain political friends. The New York Times said NSO business deals played an important role in getting support from Arab countries. As a result, companies like NSO Group are really a part of the Israeli government.

The state’s spyware industry has benefited from a number of intelligence officers. Monitoring every part of Palestinian life helped to develop spyware to export around the world to democracies and dictatorships. Israel uses occupied Palestine to develop and test its spyware. Then Israel can sell its spyware and say they tested it successfully in occupied Palestine.

Exporting the tools of the occupation is not new. Israel has sold facial recognition tools, ‘smart’ walls, drones, camera hacking, biometric products, and spyware to over 130 governments including Bangladesh, Myanmar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines. Most governments in the Global South have bought Israeli arms or received Israeli training.

The most authoritarian governments in the last 50 years have often worked secretly with Israel, for example, Liberia under dictator William Tubman until his death in 1971, and Guatemala in the 1980s when it was committing genocide against its Indigenous population.

Western media has not reported it but Israel has worked with dictatorships since the country existed in 1948. One of the main reasons for this is to help US interests.

Spyware and arms exports are also important for Israel to protect itself from criticism for the longest occupation of modern times in Palestine: 56 years and more in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Not many nations will criticise the terrible treatment of the Palestinian people if they need Israeli weapons.

Many new spyware companies

US bans limit the power of NSO Group and Candiru but there are now many other Israeli companies in their place. Without regulation the industry will continue to grow. Defence Prime is one of the bigger companies started by Israelis living in the US. It offers a lot of money for the best Israeli hackers. But the NSO Group is still there. A number of companies are interested in buying it. Demand for spyware is increasing so it doesn’t matter if it is Pegasus or another company.

Regulation is one solution to the growing spyware problem but progress is slow. A complete ban is a better solution but governments don’t really want it. Not many governments or no governments will refuse the possibility of using powerful cyber-weapons against its enemies. In 2021, UN human rights experts called for a stop to the sale of spyware until there is regulation.

But which country will be the first to decide to act responsibly?

NOW TRY THE ORIGINAL:

https://newint.org/features/2023/10/02/spy-games

(This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)