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Defense Firm Said U.S. Spies Backed Its Bid for Pegasus Spyware Maker [1]
['Mark Mazzetti', 'Ronen Bergman']
Date: 2022-07-10
Israeli defense ministry officials were open to this arrangement. But following heavy pressure from the Israeli intelligence community, it balked at another request: that the Israeli government allow NSO to share the computer source code for Pegasus — which allows it to exploit the vulnerabilities in the phones it targets — with the Five Eyes countries. They also did not agree, at least not in the first phase, to allow L3’s cyber experts to come to Israel and join NSO’s development teams at the company’s headquarters north of Tel Aviv.
Representatives of the defense ministry also insisted that Israel retain its authority to grant export licenses for NSO’s products, but said they were willing to negotiate over which countries received the spyware.
Over the course of the discussions, there were numerous issues that would have required the approval of the United States government. L3Harris representatives said that they had discussed the issues with American officials, who had agreed in principle, according to the people familiar with the discussions.
To help negotiate the sale of NSO, L3Harris hired an influential lawyer in Israel with deep ties to Israel’s defense establishment. The lawyer, Daniel Reisner, is the former head of the International Law Department at the Israeli Military Prosecutor’s Office and acted as a special adviser on the Middle East peace process to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the months since the Biden administration announced the blacklist in November, and as the Israeli government pressed for a way to keep NSO from going under, the Commerce Department in Washington sent a list of questions to NSO and another Israeli hacking firm that had been blacklisted at the same time, about how the spyware works, who it targets and whether the company has any control over how its nation-state clients deploy the hacking tools.
The list, reviewed by The Times, asked whether NSO maintained “positive control over its products” and whether Americans overseas were protected from having NSO’s products deployed against them.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/10/us/politics/defense-firm-said-us-spies-backed-its-bid-for-pegasus-spyware-maker.html
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