Journalists and members of the opposition become targets of spyware?

BAn international coalition of journalists issued new allegations against Israeli surveillance software provider NSO. IT experts found traces of attacks using the company’s Pegasus software on 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, their families, and businessmen. These phone numbers are part of a data set of more than 50,000 phone numbers collected by reporters and the organization Forbidden Stories. Amnesty International Evaluation. According to reports, these numbers were clearly selected by NSO customers as potential spy targets. On Sunday, the National Bureau of Statistics strongly denied these allegations.

“Süddeutsche Zeitung”, Ed, WDR and “Time” intervened. According to them, research on Project Pegasus showed that hundreds of journalists, human rights activists, opposition activists, and politicians were selected to be monitored by spyware. More than 180 journalists from different countries made the list. The number of German journalists is not among them. How this list came to Taboo Stories and Amnesty International, and then they shared it with the media, and it was still public in the report-Süddeutsche Zeitung mentioned source protection.

The National Bureau of Statistics has been accused in the past software Help the Pegasus totalitarian government track down journalists and dissidents. Facebook sued NSO in the United States in 2019. The allegation in the lawsuit is that NSO tried to access hundreds of smartphones through a security breach in the WhatsApp messaging service that was later shut down. The target group includes journalists, including journalists from Le Monde, Mediapart and Le Canard Enchainé, journalists from the American television channel CNN, Hungarian investigative journalists (Direkt36) and well-known journalists from Azerbaijan. Also: lawyers, dissidents, human rights defenders, diplomats and government officials.

The National Bureau of Statistics is also accused of using its surveillance software to assassinate Saudi dissidents Jamal Khashoggi Played a role. According to the Washington Post, the two smartphones in which Amnesty International IT experts found traces of the Pegasus attack belonged to women close to Khashoggi, including his fiancée Hatice Cengiz at the time.

The Israeli company talked about “false allegations and misleading allegations” on Sunday for the purpose of reporting on Taboo Stories. Their sources provided them with information without factual basis. “These allegations are so outrageous and far from reality that NSO is considering a defamation lawsuit.” NSO reiterated that its technology “has nothing to do with the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi.” Its technology “is only sold to law enforcement agencies and secret service agencies of audited governments, and its sole purpose is to save lives by preventing crime and terrorism.”