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NSO Group co-founder Shalev Hulio travelled to Panama in 2013 on an Israeli diplomatic passport and told Panamanian immigration he would be staying at the Israeli embassy.
I can’t read the word Panama without thinking of the Panama Papers. And the journalist who discovered them and was subsequently assassinated with a car bomb.
The details of Hulio’s diplomatic passport have been revealed alongside new testimony from a former intelligence officer in Morocco that confirms the North African country had access to Pegasus — despite its claims that it has not used the spyware. The findings come from a new collaborative investigation into NSO Group coordinated by Forbidden Stories.
Kudos to Forbidden Stories for uncovering this corruption, because I didn’t expect it to be this international.
Why do we even allow these ‘businesses’ to exist?
It’s like someone started up a company where you could hire them to break into people’s houses for you. There are no ethical uses of the software that they create, they are entirely used for illegal activity and in support of oppressive governments.
They’re selling cyberweapons without any kind of regulations or restrictions.
Israel’s entire edge in the tech sector is in lax regulation and a steady supply of experienced, amoral ex-military software engineers. Western entrepeneurs who would otherwise have had trouble finding willing professionals and maintaining legal cover for their adware, data mining, or cyberweapons startup in a home country more concerned with ethics and international relations flocked to Israel over the last couple decades and singlehandedly propped up the local economy.
In return, the US, for instance, gets to wash its hands of the whole affair and say they’re not the ones selling spyware to the Saudis and other western-friendly authoritarian regimes, it’s all out of their control, while American venture capital reaps the rewards of investments in Israeli companies.
They’re allowed to exist because they will exist regardless if they’re legal or not. Their main (and likely only) customers are governments, so they’ll find shelter in whatever country allows them to operate and prosper there.
You could say the same about drug cartels and most governments spend billions of dollars fighting them while outlawing their products and sanctioning countries/governments which allow them.
I don’t expect the US Navy is going to be launching missiles at programmers in speedboats anytime soon, but it would be easy to sanction these companies and cut them off from the banking system.
Except the government is run by people in the pockets of the companies and countries who are doing this.
Wow how surprising, couldn’t have seen that coming /s
Israel is a cancer not a country.
