The NSO Group, Israel's notorious cyberweapons distributor, secretly offered that spyware system to the U.S. government. The potential business relationship was negotiated even as NSO became the subject of controversy, with critics accusing it of aiding human rights abuses in nations around the world.
The American government was interested in Phantom because NSO's primary spyware, Pegasus, doesn't work on U.S. telephone numbers. The paper is reporting.
During a presentation to officials in Washington, the company demonstrated a new system, called Phantom, that could hack any number in the United States that the F.B.I. decided to target. Israel had granted a special license to NSO, one that permitted its Phantom system to attack U.S. numbers. The license allowed for only one type of client: U.S. government agencies.
The Central Intelligence Agency, Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S. Secret Service, and the U.S. military were all interested in the company's services. The NSO Group was purchased by the FBI.
The bureau had negotiations with the company for at least two years. FBI and Justice Department lawyers constantly sought to clarify whether the product would violate domestic wiretapping laws. Around the time that a series of journalistic expos caused global amounts of trouble for NSO, the agency backed out. Things have only gotten worse for the Israeli company since that time, as the U.S. turned its back on any partnerships, and scandals erupt throughout the world in connection to its products.
We have provided some highlights from the investigation below, but you should read the full investigation here.
NSO and its secretive client base were under scrutiny as the FBI considered buying Phantom. The company's products were being used to hack people. U.S. officials were unperturbed. The newspaper reported that business and legal discussions continued despite the fact that Pegasus had been used against activists and political opponents in other countries.
NSO maintained connections to politicians in the U.S. Some of the most powerful members of the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations have ties to the firm, as reported by the Washington Post last summer.
The idea that the FBI was trying to purchase a commercial software that could potentially compromise any American's phone is frightening. The FBI told the Times that investment in such technologies not only helps to combat crime, but that the agency spent two years trying to get a legal framework in place for procuring such a product.
There is another plausible rationale for law enforcement interest. Its device-hacking capabilities were an effective way to circumvent the police's frustration with the popularization of encryption.
NSO is being sued by Facebook over the hacking of users of its messaging service. According to the lawsuit, the vendor's software was used to hack as many as 1,400 different users. The majority of these users were based outside of the United States, but at least one phone was American.
NSO's longstanding claim that it is incapable of targeting U.S. phone numbers is false, according to Meta's lawyers.
According to the Times, the U.S. phone that was hacked was part of a demonstration for federal officials who were considering buying Phantom. The Times reports.
What Facebook didn’t appear to know was that the attack on a U.S. phone number, far from being an assault by a foreign power, was part of the NSO demonstrations to the F.B.I. of Phantom — the system NSO designed for American law-enforcement agencies to turn the nation’s smartphones into an “intelligence gold mine.”
NSO's attempts to impress the FBI were discovered by Facebook's lawsuit against NSO.
The NSO Group is still involved in many ongoing controversies that span the globe as the Times investigation breaks. There is no idea when the allegations will stop.
The Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the nation of Finns has reported that the phones of multiple diplomats are believed to have been affected by the NSO scandal. Lama Fakih, the U.S.-Lebanese Director of Crisis and Conflict and head of the HRW Lebanon office, was also targeted. In Poland, an ongoing crisis spurred by revelations that Pegasus was used to target a slew of politicians has now boiled over into a full-blown inquiry by the Polish senate to determine whether the spyware was used to help manipulate the nation's 2019 election. Several human rights activists in Hungary have announced their plans to unleash a legal campaign against the Hungarian government and NSO, which is alleged to have hacked them. There are allegations within Israel that the police used the company to spy on Israelis.
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