In July 2021, Amnesty International, in collaboration with tens of journalists and scholars, exposed how the Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware facilitated “human rights violations around the world on a massive scale.” Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes have employed Pegasus, a military-grade cyber weapon, to target 50,000 people, including lawyers, human rights activists, opposition politicians, and diplomats, as well as climate justice and women’s rights advocates. This Israeli spyware has also enabled the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul and countless other cases of arrests, torture, and killings.
Palestinian civil society has issued an urgent call to ban all spyware, including NSO’s Pegasus.
Israeli spyware companies such as NSO Group hire graduates of Israeli military intelligence units who use illegal mass surveillance to blackmail Palestinians, sow divisions and distrust, and sell the tools that have been developed to maintain Israeli apartheid to the worst violators of human rights around the world as “field tested.”
The Global Network Against Spyware (GNAS)
The BDS movement coordinates a worldwide network that campaigns to ban spyware as a dangerous cyberweapon, exposing the harm it causes worldwide. To this end, the network, which includes civil society and human rights organizations, journalists and lawyers, advocates at all levels, including with policymakers, and organizes global days of action. The Global Network Against Spyware (GNAS) understands that Israeli technology and corporations are core to the spyware industry but stands against spyware on principle: data protection is necessary in order to protect human rights and civic rights. Only through collective action can spyware be stopped. GNAS welcomes groups who wish to join the network and agree with its principles.
WHY?
The NSO Group has admitted it receives permission from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for each sale to its customers. This means that successive Israeli governments have authorized and licensed the sale of NSO’s spyware to the Saudi regime, the authoritarian government of Hungary, to the security forces who silence the investigators into the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, as well as to unknown parties that have used Pegasus to spy on South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, French president Emmanuel Macron, the UK government, the Catalan independence movement, US diplomats in Uganda, and many more.
In November 2021, for instance, it was exposed that Pegasus was used to spy on six Palestinian civil society organizations. Despite the surveillance, the Israeli authorities could not come up with any evidence to support their smears against those organizations, but they nevertheless banned them.
Marwa Fatafta of AccessNow said on July 12th, 2022, that “We heard NSO Group repeatedly claim […] that its notorious spyware Pegasus is used to save lives, fight terrorism, and crack down on criminal activity, yet it failed to bring even one example where this was the case.”
The Israeli apartheid regime and the private companies that sell spyware around the world are strongly connected. Exporting the technology of oppression turns Israeli apartheid into a global threat.
Unless we act now to stop this spyware technology and ban it altogether, unless the right to privacy, so necessary for the work of lawyers, journalists, and human rights defenders, is protected, none of us will be safe. We will not be secure until the criminals who profit from spyware are brought to justice, which will prevent additional companies from attempting to profit from these crimes.
Israel uses Pegasus and similar spyware as a diplomatic tool to buy votes at the UN and to secure military alliances and arms deals.
We demand not only that spyware be banned and that companies profiting from cyber weaponry be shut down. We also demand that the source code of the spyware be published so that tech companies can protect their consumers from spyware that has already been distributed to authoritarian regimes and prevent new companies from selling spyware under new names.
The growing international scandal around the Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, used by dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in perpetrating numerous crimes and human rights violations, is only the tip of the iceberg. For years, Israel and its high-tech companies have been exporting spyware and other intrusive surveillance technology across the globe, including to some of the most ruthless regimes.
We call on justice movements, progressive organizations, and people of conscience around the world to:
- Join us in campaigning to ban cybersurveillance and end its role in violating and eroding human and civic rights.
- Stop the NSO Group's dirty - and deadly - business across the globe.
- Call for an end to military and security relations with apartheid Israel.
Beyond spyware, Israeli technology of surveillance and oppression is wide-reaching. It includes facial recognition software and hardware, smart cities, and many other digital tools of oppression, and not only spyware. Tech companies are keen to capitalize on the technology developed by the Israeli military and to integrate it into their research and production chains, as well as to profit from Israeli demand for technological means to maintain its apartheid system.
In May 2021, as the Israeli military occupation forces bombed Palestinian homes, clinics, and schools in besieged Gaza and threatened to push Palestinian families from their homes in occupied Jerusalem, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud executives signed a $1.22 billion contract to provide cloud technology to the Israeli government and military, known as Project Nimbus.
Civil society groups and people of conscience are organizing to demand that the companies end the Project Nimbus contract. The No Tech for Apartheid campaign heeds the call from Palestinian civil society to end business and institutional complicity with apartheid Israel. Technology should be used to bring people together, not enable apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism.
The campaign is growing and being taken on by workers and shareholders of the two companies, community organizers, and students. Activists organize on campuses to challenge Google's profiteering and Amazon and Google's recruitment of students. Student organizing focuses on building intersectional alliances, bringing together Palestine's solidarity struggles with struggles for workers' rights and those against digital colonialism and militarization of our societies through technology.
Read more about the campaign here: https://www.notechforapartheid.com/
As prime minister of apartheid Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu visited some of the world’s most notorious authoritarian regimes and far-right governments, including those of Brazil, Chad, Hungary, Poland, UAE, and more. Each of those visits coincided with - at least an attempt to sign - a contract between the respective country and the NSO Group, which sells Pegasus. Each one of those visits also opened new markets and strategic alliances for Israel’s settler colonial regime.
Spyware began as a tool to maintain Israeli control over Palestinians. Still, later, the Israeli government started selling spyware to oppressive regimes around the world that seek to preserve their own situations of injustice. Through those deals, Israeli companies earn money, but more importantly, the Israeli government approves and encourages those deals to build an international alliance of right-wing authoritarian regimes.
Racist leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, religious-national fanatic leaders such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, corrupt militaristic leaders such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and merciless dictators such as Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko are quick to find common ground with the Israeli government. They are eager customers of Israeli spyware as it is a useful tool of repression for them.
Edward Snowden said, “If they can do the same thing from a distance, with little cost and no risk, they begin to do it all the time, against everyone who’s even marginally of interest. If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.”
The Pegasus project showed that human rights activists, lawyers, journalists, and opposition members are the favored targets of Pegasus spying. Unlike military targets, these people must rely on civilian technology, commercial phones, and computers, which are vulnerable to Israeli spyware.
When Israeli spyware became a central pillar of its military exports, the BDS movement was already targeted as a threat to Israeli interests. Offensive cyber technology in the form of spyware has been, from the start, a tool to silence the Palestinian liberation movement as well as acts of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
When former Israeli anti-BDS minister Gilad Erdan said that Israel would use intelligence techniques to fight the BDS movement, he especially meant the unit 8200, whose graduates founded NSO Group, to develop spyware and surveillance against Palestinian human rights activists and international activists for Palestinian rights.
Today, we know that not only Palestine-solidarity groups are targeted, but activists for any cause could find that their phones have been hacked.
Even those who trust their own government not to spy on them cannot be safe from Israeli spyware technology because another state or non-state agency may buy Pegasus or a similar program to spy on them across country borders, as was the case when Morocco purchased Pegasus to spy on French President Emmanuel Macron.
The fight against this technology is a common cause among all journalists worldwide who believe in their right to investigate government policies, activists for justice and human rights, and lawyers who believe in attorney-client privilege as a basic right.
The following links provide useful, reliable, and comprehensive information on Israeli spyware technology:
- Amnesty International
- Forbidden Stories
- Citizen Lab report on Pegasus
- Citizen Lab report on Circles
- Citizen Lab report on Predator
- The European Union
- The Guardian
- The Nation call to ban spyware
- New York Review of Books article on Israeli export of the technology of occupation
- 7amle report on Supply and Demand
- Global call to ban spyware
- Brochure on spyware
