A group of US lawmakers is asking the Treasury Department and State Department to sanction Israeli spyware firm NSO Group and three other foreign surveillance companies they say helped authoritarian governments commit human rights abuses.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
Their letter sent late Tuesday and seen by Reuters also asks for sanctions on top executives at NSO, the United Arab Emirates cybersecurity company DarkMatter, and European online bulk surveillance companies Nexa Technologies and Trovicor.
The lawmakers asked for sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which punishes those who are accused of enabling human rights abuses by freezing bank accounts and banning travel to the United States.
DarkMatter could not be reached for comment. The other three companies did not immediately reply to requests by Reuters for comment.
The letter was signed by the Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and 16 other Democratic lawmakers. Along with other reporting on the industry, they cite a recent Reuters article this month showing that NSO spyware was used against State Department employees in Uganda.
The lawmakers said the spyware industry relies on US investment and banks. "To meaningfully punish them and send a clear signal to the surveillance technology industry, the US government should deploy financial sanctions," they wrote.
The letter says the companies facilitated the "disappearance, torture and murder of human rights activists and journalists." Surveillance firms have drawn increasing scrutiny from Washington as a barrage of media reports has tied them to human rights abuses.
"These surveillance mercenaries sold their services to authoritarian regimes with long records of human rights abuses, giving vast spying powers to tyrants," Wyden told Reuters. "Predictably, those nations used surveillance tools to lock up, torture and murder reporters and human rights advocates. The Biden administration has the chance to turn off the spigot of American dollars and help put them out of business for good."
In November, the Commerce Department put NSO on the so-called Entity List, prohibiting US suppliers from selling software or services to the Israeli spyware maker without getting special permission.
A number of legal challenges also threaten the industry. Last week a prominent Saudi activist and the non-profit Electronic Frontier Foundation sued DarkMatter, alleging the group hacked into her phone.
Apple sued NSO Group in November, saying that it violated US laws by breaking into the software installed on iPhones.
A 2019 Reuters investigation cited in the letter also exposed a secret hacking unit within DarkMatter, known as Project Raven, that helped the UAE spy on its enemies. In a September settlement with the Justice Department, three members of that unit, all former US intelligence operatives, admitted to breaking hacking laws.
In an interview with Israel Hayom in July, NSO Group co-founder and then-CEO Shalev Hulio denied the company was directly or knowingly involved in human rights abuses allegedly perpetrated by some of its customers and suggested that NSO was under a coordinated attack by vested parties.
"If it turns out that there was some client who exploited our system to track journalists or human rights workers, they'll be cut off immediately. We've proven that in the past, including with some of our biggest customers, and we stopped working with them," he said.
"It looks like someone decided to come after us," Hulio added. "This whole story isn't just incidental. The Israeli cyber sector is under attack, in general. There are so many cyber intelligence companies in the world, but everyone just focuses on the Israeli ones… it looks like there's a guiding hand behind it."
Asked if he knew the identity of those behind the allegations, Hulio said: "I believe that in the end, it will turn out to be Qatar, or the BDS movement, or both. In the end, it's always the same entities. I don't want to sound cynical, but there are people who don't want ice cream to be imported here [to Israel] or for technology to be exported."
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
Indeed, many companies across the globe, and in Israel, sell the exact same products as NSO Group.
Meanwhile, high-profile American companies such as Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others have been trying to gain a foothold in the market occupied by NSO Group and other competitors, and the Biden administration has allocated billions of dollars to these companies for research and development.
"This has nothing to do with human rights, and everything to do with business," Isaac Ben-Israel, a world-renowned expert in the field, told Israel Hayom in August. "They can stop with their sanctimony."
