Today we learned that Israel, using software designed by NSO, the notorious Israeli surveillance company blacklisted by the United States just last week (meaning it’s barred from doing business with any U.S. entity) hacked into the phones of six Palestinian human rights activists. Half of the Palestinian activists who were targeted are affiliated with three of Palestinian rights organizations Israel designated as “terrorist” in a clampdown on human rights work. Knowing the blacklisting of NSO was in the works, Israel manufactured the attack on Palestinian civil society to justify its spying.
NSO Group is known for its Pegasus software which allows a client to hack into phones without detection, accessing passwords, photos, emails, and even activating the phone's microphone and video to spy on calls and activities. With the approval of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, NSO has sold Pegasus software to numerous governments and other clientele, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Morocco, and Hungary. In fact, NSO software was used to track the whereabouts of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the lead up to his horrific murder by Saudi government officials in 2018.
We must demand that the U.S. hold Israel accountable for its spying on Palestinian human rights defenders. Our friends at Americans for Justice in Palestine Action have created an action tool that you can access by clicking on the button below.
It is no coincidence that Israel is home to leading tech companies producing highly invasive spyware. The apartheid state has been using Palestinians as a laboratory to perfect its surveillance technologies for years.
New Israeli software dubbed Blue Wolf is being used to surveil and track Palestinians. To create Blue Wolf's facial recognition database, “[Israeli] soldiers competed last year in photographing Palestinians, including children and the elderly, with prizes for the most pictures collected by each unit.” After being tested on Palestinians, Israel will likely export it to interested governments around the world.
What we found out this week is that the clampdown on six Palestinian rights organizations is connected to last week's US government's decision to blacklist NSO. Labeling Palestinian orgs as 'terrorist' was Israel’s attempt to protect its annual $6.85 billion Israeli cybersecurity exports. In other words, Israel is insisting on justifying these invasive and dystopian surveillance programs that have and will continue to produce material violence on the ground, not just in Palestine, but across the globe as more governments and corporations invest in NSO software.
The next steps are simple: The US must demand Israel reverse its designation against the six Palestinian rights organizations and wholly reject the attack on civil society organizations past and present. And it must impose sanctions on the people responsible for turning a profit from Pegasus and spying on Palestinian activists.
Apartheid, occupation, surveillance, extrajudicial killings, unlawful detention...how much longer must the list become for the US government to stop funding Israel?
