Revealed: Israel's Cyber-spy Industry Helps World Dictators Hunt Dissidents and Gays

Haaretz investigation spanning 100 sources in 15 countries reveals Israel has become a leading exporter of tools for spying on civilians. Dictators around the world – even in countries with no formal ties to Israel – use them eavesdrop on human rights activists, monitor emails, hack into apps and record conversations

During the summer of 2016, Santiago Aguirre divided his time between part-time university lecturing and working for an organization that helps locate missing people. Mexico was then in the news internationally because of presidential candidate Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall on the American border with its southern neighbor. However, for Aguirre, a Mexican human rights activist, the problems of the present were far more pressing than any future wall. At the time, he was in the midst of a lengthy investigation to solve the mystery of the disappearance and presumed murder of 43 students in the city of Iguala two years before. It was becoming increasingly clear that his findings were incompatible with the results of the investigation conducted by the government.

Aguirre wasn’t concerned when he received a series of text messages containing broken links. “Please help me with my brother, the police took him only because he is a teacher,” one message read. And another: “Professor, I encountered a problem. I am sending back my thesis, which is based on your dissertation, so that you can give me your comments.” The messages looked no different from many of the legitimate messages he received every day as part of his work. And therein lay the secret of their power. When Aguirre clicked on the links, however, he was inadvertently turning his smartphone into a surveillance device in the hands of the government.

“Those text messages had information that was personal,” Aguirre notes, “the kind of information that could make the message interesting for me so I would click. It wasn’t until later that I actually thought – well, it is actually pretty weird that I received three messages with broken links.”

Mexican human rights activist Santiago Aguirre, left, and colleague Mario Patron. Centro Prodh
The discovery had a brutally chilling effect on the work of his organization. For the first time, he says, speaking with Haaretz by phone, he really and truly feared that every step he took was being watched, and that perhaps his family too was under surveillance.

“Over the past 10 years, we have a figure of around 30,000 people who disappeared” in Mexico, Aguirre explains. “Many places in Mexico are controlled by organized crime. It has under its influence and power the authorities of some regions of the country, so they use the police to detain and then disappear people that they think are the enemy. I can tell you of many examples in which the Mexican military, for example, has presented the work human rights defenders as [benefiting] the drug cartels and organized crime. So there’s a pattern of thinking about the human rights sector in Mexico as a sector that needs to be surveilled.”

The public revelation of the fact that Aguirre was under surveillance was made possible by cooperation between Mexican organizations and the Canadian research institute Citizen Lab. It turned out that Aguirre was one of a group of 22 journalists, lawyers, politicians, researchers and activists who were being tracked by local authorities. An examination of Aguirre’s telephone revealed that the links in the text messages were related to Pegasus spyware, which the authorities were using.

But how did Pegasus get to Mexico? The trail of the malware led to Herzliya Pituah, the prosperous Tel Aviv suburb that is one of the major hubs of Israel’s high-tech industry.
It’s there, in a narrow stretch of land between Israel’s coastal highway and the Mediterranean Sea, that NSO Group, the company that developed this Trojan-horse program, has its headquarters. Pegasus, which Forbes magazine called “the world’s most invasive mobile spy kit” in 2016, allows almost unlimited monitoring, even commandeering, of cellphones: to discover the phone’s location, eavesdrop on it, record nearby conversations, photograph those in the vicinity of the phone, read and write text messages and emails, download apps and penetrate apps already in the phone, and access photographs, clips, calendar reminders and the contacts list. And all in total secrecy.

Pegasus’ invasive capability was rapidly transformed into dazzling economic success. In 2014, less than five years after entering the world from a space in a chicken coop in Bnei Zion, a moshav in the country’s center, 70 percent of the company’s holdings were purchased for $130 million. The buyer was Francisco Partners, one of the world’s largest private equity firms, which specializes in high-tech investments. That deal followed Francisco Partners’ earlier purchases of Israeli firms Ex Libris and Dmatek, According to Reuters, a year after the NSO takeover, Francisco Partners enjoyed a profit of $75 million.

But the big money of NSO is only a small part of the big picture. Within a few years, the Israeli espionage industry has become the spearhead of the global commerce in surveillance tools and communications interception. Today, every self-respecting governmental agency that has no respect for the privacy of its citizens, is equipped with spy capabilities created in Herzliya Pituah.

Supreme secrecy
The reports about Pegasus prompted Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg and human rights lawyer Itay Mack to go to court in 2016 with a request to suspend NSO’s export permit. At the state’s request, however, the deliberations were held in camera and a gag order was issued on the judgment. Supreme Court President Justice Esther Hayut summed up the matter by noting, “Our economy, as it happens, rests not a little on that export.”

The Defense Ministry benefits from the news blackout. Supervision takes place far from the public eye – not even the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee is privy to basic details of the lion’s share of Israel’s defense exports. Contrary to the norms that exist in other democracies, the ministry refuses to disclose the list of countries to which military exports are prohibited, or the criteria and standards that underlie its decisions.

A comprehensive investigation carried out by Haaretz, based on about 100 sources in 15 countries, had as its aim lifting the veil of secrecy from commerce based on means of espionage. The findings show that Israeli industry have not hesitated to sell offensive capabilities to many countries that lack a strong democratic tradition, even when they have no way to ascertain whether the items sold were being used to violate the rights of civilians. The testimonies show that the Israeli equipment has been used to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of the LGBT community, silence citizens who were critical of their government and even to fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don’t maintain formal relations with Israel. The Haaretz investigation also found that Israeli firms continued to sell espionage products even when it was revealed publicly that the equipment was used for malicious purposes.

Private Israeli companies, the investigation discovered, have sold espionage and intelligence-gathering software to Bahrain, Indonesia, Angola, Mozambique, the Dominican Republic, Azerbaijan, Swaziland, Botswana, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Panama and Nicaragua. In addition, the investigation corroborated earlier reports over the years about sales to Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, Peru, Colombia, Uganda, Nigeria, Ecuador and United Arab Emirates.
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And the truth is that all of the above claims are correct. The law does not prohibit the sale of surveillance and interception equipment to foreign governments and law-enforcement agencies, the exports are approved by the Defense Exports Control Agency (a unit in the Defense Ministry), and the items in question are used to thwart terrorism and crime. For example, systems of the Verint company assisted in the effort to stop abductions in Mozambique and in a campaign against poaching in Botswana. In Nigeria, Israeli systems assisted in the battle against the terrorist organization Boko Haram. However, senior officials in the Israeli firms admit that once the systems are sold, there is no way to prevent their abuse.

“I can’t constrict my client’s capabilities,” says Roy, who is experienced in cyberware. “You can’t sell someone a Mercedes and tell him not to drive faster than 100 kilometers an hour. The truth is that the Israeli companies don’t know what use will be made of the systems they sell.”

“It’s hard to supervise,” adds Yaniv (a pseudonym, like all the other names cited here), who is employed in the industry and served in the Israel Defense Forces’ vaunted Unit 8200 in the Intelligence Corps.

“Even when limitations are placed over the capabilities of the computer programs, the companies don’t know who they will be used against. Everyone in this field knows that we are manufacturing systems that invade people’s lives and violate their most basic rights. It’s a weapon – like selling a pistol. The thing is that in this industry people think about the technological challenges, not about the implications. I want to believe that the Defense Ministry supervises exports in the right way.”

However, even the supervisors in the ministry have no way of knowing who’s being spied on with the Israeli products. Israelis who train the buyers in the use of the systems sometimes learn about the purposes for which they have been acquired.
“I happened to see a super-wrong use of the systems,” says Tomer, who has trained intelligence bodies all over the world. “I’m telling foreign trainees about the system’s capabilities, and they pounce on it and start to place people under surveillance for negligible reasons, right before my eyes. Someone was critical of the president’s move to raise prices, someone else shared a hashtag identified with the opposition – and in an instant they’re both on the surveillance list.”
Guy Mizrahi, co-founder of Cyberia, a cyber solutions company, divides the industry into two types of firms. “There are companies that know how to do only one thing, but really well,” he notes, “while other companies have a range of products. Some of them control the databases of internet providers and cellular operators, some are capable of getting to the [targeted] device itself, by all kinds of means.”

NSO, the developer of Pegasus, is probably the best-known example of the first category, which consists of one exceptional ability. Verint Systems, one of the multifaceted giants of the industry, is an example of the second type, with diverse products. Verint started as the intelligence unit of Comverse Technology, which was established by Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, an American-Israeli businessman who was recently released from prison in the wake of fraud charges brought against him by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Verint subsequently went its own way and is now headed by CEO Dan Bodner. The company has 5,200 employees in a number of countries, of whom 1,000 work at its Herzliya Pituah headquarters.

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Indonesia is no haven for the LGBT community, either: Same-sex relations are classified as a criminal offense there. Reports by human rights organizations have noted the tough policy against the community, as well as against religious minorities, under legislation that bans

“blasphemy.” Three sources who spoke to Haaretz talked about wrongful use of Verint products in Indonesia.

In one case, the systems were used to create a database of LGBT rights activists who had been targeted for surveillance. In another, the victims of the spyware were religious minorities. “As soon as I arrived in the country, the client told me that my help was needed with an investigation that was bogged down,” Netanel, who worked with the Indonesians to activate the systems, relates. “Very quickly the investigation turned out to be a case against a non-Muslim public figure who was accused of blasphemy, an offense that carries the death penalty.”

Leave no traces
Back to NSO. The Israeli cyber giant was founded in 2010 by three friends: Omri Lavie, Shalev Hulio and Niv Carmi (the latter left early on). Lavie and Hulio, who are today in their late 30s, knew each other from high school in Haifa. They embarked on their path in business a few years after Hulio completed his army service in a classified intelligence unit.
What is their business path? “We are a ghost,” Lavie was once quoted as saying. “We are completely transparent to our goal and we leave no traces.” Some years later, the traces of the ghosts from Haifa could be detected in every corner of the world.
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https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/...gays-1.6573027