Between NSO and Israeli power, troubled ties

President Emmanuel Macron, his former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe and a dozen French ministers. This is the very first circle of the President of the Republic who found himself on a list of potential Moroccan cyber-spy targets with the very powerful Israeli surveillance tool Pegasus, according to the revelations of the consortium of investigative journalists Forbidden Stories and Le Monde, Tuesday July 20.

“If the facts are true, they are obviously very serious,” responded the Elysee, contacted by Le Monde. Morocco was quick to argue that it was not using Pegasus, and NSO, the now famous Israeli spyware maker, added that Emmanuel Macron “did not, and never was, a target or has never been selected as a target by NSO clients “.

Netanyahu first, then NSO

All that’s missing is a reaction from the Israeli authorities. The role of the Hebrew state in the export of Pegasus and its possible links with NSO is, in fact, the subject growing media attention while the twists and turns in this scandal multiply.

Rabat thus began to use this monitoring tool in 2019, shortly after Morocco and Israel resumed trade relations which led to the normalization of diplomatic relations in December 2020, underlines Forbidden Stories investigation.

Same coincidence with Hungary and India. These two states are believed to have set in motion the Pegasus spy machine in 2019 in the wake of official visits by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the two countries.

“Where Netanyahu goes, NSO follows him,” says the center-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which recalls that Saudi Arabia signed an agreement with the manufacturer of Pegasus during the negotiations on the agreement to normalize relations with Israel.

Clearly, the Hebrew state is suspected of using NSO as a “negotiating tool” to achieve its diplomatic objectives, even if it means putting a “weapon of mass surveillance” in the hands of governments with known authoritarian leanings, summarizes the Financial Times.

“It is certain that in terms of image, this whole affair is damaging to Israel’s reputation,” admits Daniel Cohen, specialist in cybersecurity issues at the International Institute for Research on Terrorism in Herzliya, contacted by France 24.

Pegasus, a lever in negotiations ?

Even though the Israeli government and NSO have never officially recognized that access to this cyberespionage technology could be part of diplomatic negotiations, the hypothesis “seems plausible” to Lior Tabansky, author of the book “Cybersecurity in Israel” and researcher. at the Cyber ​​Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Research Center at Tel Aviv University, contacted by France 24.

First, because each sale of Pegasus to a foreign state “is supervised by the Israeli Ministry of Defense,” recalls this specialist. In other words, the government exercises control over the exports of this tool.

But also, because “Benjamin Netanyahu pursued a strategy of seeking to take advantage of Israel’s relative advantage in innovative sectors to achieve political and diplomatic objectives”, summarizes Lior Tabansky. For this expert, Israel may have used NSO “as other countries use their know-how in armaments to negotiate certain alliances”.

With one nuance, says Daniel Cohen. “It is not Israel’s custom to bring offensive digital weapons to the negotiating table,” said this specialist from the Institute for Research on Terrorism. If Pegasus could have been used as a diplomatic tool, “the discussions must have taken place behind closed doors, far from official negotiations,” he underlines.

For his part, he thinks rather that access to Pegasus for countries like Saudi Arabia or Morocco came “naturally after the improvement of diplomatic relations with Israel”. It was a sort of tacit clause: countries understood that by resuming a more peaceful dialogue, they could more easily obtain this much-coveted technology without fear of a veto from the Israeli government.

The backdoor thesis for Israeli spies

Several European and American national security officials have further told the Washington Post that Israel will also use NSO as a Trojan horse for its spies. “It would be foolish to think that NSO does not share the information it gleans about its clients with the intelligence services,” said a former US national security official on condition of anonymity, interviewed by the Washington Post.

In this hypothesis, the Pegasus software would have a backdoor, which would allow Israeli spies to connect to it remotely to find out who NSO customers are wiretapping.

A scenario that Israeli society has called “pure conspiracy theory”. No wonder the group rejects these accusations: “if it was proven that their software has a backdoor, NSO would risk losing all of its customers, for whom discretion is fundamental,” notes Daniel Cohen.

He would not be “surprised” if the Israeli intelligence services sought access to Pegasus’ data. But the thesis of a backdoor fits badly with the atypical profile of NSO. “This is not the classic Israeli enterprise in the military or intelligence sector,” he stresses.

The two main founders – Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie – were not members of Unit 8,200, the famous school for cyber-spies, unlike many of the Israeli entrepreneurs who founded electronic intelligence companies. “It is one of the few companies in this sector which has no proven link with military intelligence,” confirms Lior Tabansky.

NSO is also partly owned by American investors, which reinforces the image of a company more independent of Israeli power than most of its domestic competitors. So much so, moreover, that “when NSO offered the government a tool for tracing cases of Covid-19 at the start of the epidemic, the latter refused on the pretext that he did not trust a company completely private, “says Daniel Cohen.

It is therefore a company in which the Israeli authorities themselves do not fully trust that has led to Israel being accused of having validated exports of surveillance tools used to spy on journalists, activists and perhaps. even be heads of state.

In an attempt to limit the damage, the government announced on Tuesday evening the establishment of a “commission” to reflect on the reforms to be implemented in order to prevent history from repeating itself and Pegasus finding itself again. in the wrong hands.