Israel inspects NSO Group offices after Pegasus revelations

Israeli authorities have inspected the offices of surveillance outfit NSO Group in response to the Pegasus project investigation into abuses of the companys spyware by several government clients The Guardian reportedOfficials from the Defence Ministry visited the companys offices near Tel Aviv on Wednesday at the same time when Defence Minister Benny Gantz arrived in Paris for a prearranged visit in which he discussed the Pegasus revelations with his French counterpartFrench President Emmanuel Macron is one of the highest profile figures whose phone numbers appeared on a leaked databse of 50000 numbers that are believed to have been selected as candidates for possible surveillance by the clients of NSO the report saidHe spoke to Israel Prime Minister Naftali Bennett last week to stress the importance of properly investigating the projects findingsEarly media reports described the moves on NSOs offices as a raid but the company said in a statement that the authorities had visited rather than raided its premisesThe NSO said it had been informed in advance that Defence Ministry officials responsible for overseeing commercial exports of sensitive cyberexports would be doing an inspection The company is working in full transparency with the Israeli authorities it added as per the reportThe Defence Ministry said in a tweet that the visit conducted by several state bodies was related to disclosures stemming from the Pegasus project a consortium of 17 media outlets including The Guardian which revealed last week that government clients around the world have used the hacking software sold by NSO to target human rights activists journalists and lawyersAs the scale of the disclosures has become clearer diplomatic pressure has mounted on Israel to explain the nature of the relationship between NSO and the state under the tenure of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the report saidThe wider Pegasus project investigation found that the Israeli government gave the NSO explicit permission in 2017 to try to sell the hacking tools to Saudi Arabia in a deal reportedly worth at least 55 million the report saidGantz told French Defence Minister Florence Parly on Wednesday that Israel is investigating the matter with the utmost seriousness according to a statement from the Israeli Defence MinistryPrior to their Paris meeting French government spokesperson Gabriel Attal had said that Parly was keen to question her counterpart about the knowledge the Israeli government had of the activities of NSOs clients and what measures would be put in place to prevent a misuse of these tools that are highly intrusiveGantz had previously defended export licences for the hacking tools saying in a speech at a cyberware conference in Tel Aviv last week that countries that purchase these systems must meet the terms of use which are solely for criminal and terrorism investigationsThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever