Israel to review controls on export of spyware

LONDON: An Israeli commission reviewing allegations that NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware was misused by its customers to target journalists and human rights activists would examine whether rules for Israel’s export of cyberweapons such as Pegasus should be tightened, a senior MP said, The Guardian reported.

The move came ater French President Emmanuel Macron convened an emergency cybersecurity meeting following reports that his mobile phone and those of government ministers appeared in the leaked list.

An official in Macron’s Elysee Palace said that the president’s phone and phone numbers had been changed.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, added her voice to the escalating controversy on Thursday, telling reporters in Berlin that spyware such as NSO’S should be denied to countries where there was no judicial oversight, ater it emerged 14 heads of state were on the list, the report added.

Asked whether she regreted that technology sold by NSO Group had helped to undermine freedom of expression in countries governed by autocratic regimes, Merkel said: “I believe it is important that sotware developed for certain situations does not fall into the wrong hands. There have to be restrictive conditions and such sotware should not be sold to countries where judicial oversight over such atacks cannot be guaranteed.”

The growing fallout from the revelations of the Pegasus project, a collaboration of 17 media organisations including The Guardian, which launched on Sunday with a series of claims about misuse of the sotware, has continued to resonate.

In Israel the prospect of tighter controls on the export of spyware such as Pegasus was raised by Ram Ben-barak, the head of parliament’s foreign affairs and defence commitee — and a former deputy head of the Mossad spy agency — on Army Radio as he disclosed that Israel’s “defence establishment [has] appointed a review commission made up of a number of groups,” The Guardian said.