Israel’s weaponised spyware: embargo its sale across the world
Israel uses its sophisticated surveillance capabilities to occupy Gaza at a distance. In southern Africa the technology is employed as a tool to quash dissent. But its trade should now be stopped. By Jane Duncan
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that there was a sufficiently plausible case of genocide to be made against Israel in its military actions against Gaza, and ordered provisional measures to prevent genocide.
This ruling marks a historic turning point. The era of impunity for the Israeli state in committing acts of violence in Palestinian occupied and de-facto annexed territories may have come to an end.
The status quo has been for many countries to work with Israeli companies through the occupation, but no more. The ICJ ruling has opened the door to legal action, underpinned by mass action, in countries that may be aiding and abetting genocide. For the first time, there could be real consequences for governments in the West continuing to support the Israeli state.
Overwhelmingly, the focus of efforts to stop arms sales to Israel has been on the importation of conventional arms to the country. But there is a need for a two-way arms embargo with Israel, where countries are prevented from selling arms to Israel and where Israel is prevented from selling arms to the rest of the world, including its surveillance technologies. This is because doing so may well make those countries complicit in war crimes, including genocide.
World leader in surveillance
Israel has become a world leader in the manufacture and export of surveillance technologies, especially targeted spyware that allows its users to gather data from a person’s device without their knowledge and send it to third parties. Israeli spyware has been linked to many human rights abuses around the world. Repressive governments have used it to target journalists, activists and political leaders.
It is not coincidental that Israel became a world leader in surveillance, since these technologies have become critical to its ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories. While Israel disputes the fact that it continues to occupy Gaza, technology has enabled occupation at a distance, while maintaining effective control.
Australian journalist Antony Loewenstein has referred to Palestine as Israel’s workshop to perfect the technologies of domination, and Israel then exports its occupation expertise to other parts of the world, using the calling card that these technologies have been battle-tested.
By 2016, according to Privacy International, Israel had the highest number of surveillance companies per capita. Many have been started by spies who leave state intelligence agencies and commercialise their skills, and the lack of controls makes these revolving doors between public and private security sectors possible.
From communication and drone surveillance to public space surveillance using facial recognition, these spy technologies have become an integral part of Israel’s military occupation by subjecting Palestinians to constant monitoring. So invasive has this monitoring become that, in 2014, veterans of Israel’s military signals intelligence unit 8200 wrote an open letter denouncing the ways in which the unit was being misused through harming and blackmailing innocent Palestinians by turning the most intimate details of their lives against them.
Southern Africa’s use of spyware
The global export control regime for spyware remains weak and not fit for purpose. In 2019, the then UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, David Kaye, concluded in a report to the UN
Human Rights Council that “it is insufficient to say that a comprehensive system for control and use of targeted surveillance technologies is broken. It hardly exists.”
So serious is the potential for abuses that Kaye called for “an immediate moratorium on the global sale and transfer of the tools of the private surveillance industry until rigorous human rights safeguards are put in place to regulate such practices and guarantee that governments and non-state actors use the tools in legitimate ways”.
Despite Kaye’s criticisms, the Israeli spyware industry has continued to benefit from this lack of regulation to find ready markets.
Southern Africa has proved to be very much open for business for Israeli spyware. A survey of communication surveillance laws in 12 southern African countries in 2020, and updated in 2022, found that governments across the region had given themselves powers to spy on people’s communications with insufficient limitations or safeguards, and for anti-democratic purposes. The intelligence agencies that use these surveillance powers are also largely poorly regulated, operating all too often as the political police of authoritarian leaders.
Rightfully, countries should be refusing these governments’ spyware on basic democratic grounds. But up to this point, business interests have spoken louder than principle. The Israeli industry’s marketing of surveillance offerings has been even more aggressive than China’s, which is also competing for a share of the southern African market.
Angola is a case in point, where, according to legal scholar Rui Verde, Israel’s collaboration with Angola’s poorly regulated intelligence agencies and corrupt political elites has deepened. Former Israeli spies have become spies for hire for the purposes of evading justice and suppression of dissent.
In his critique of Botswana’s inadequate privacy protections, the University of Botswana’s Tachilisa Balule has described how the country’s Directorate of Intelligence and Security engaged a company with strong Israeli ties to supply it with spyware with the capability to spy on internet communications, including the Circles spying system.
Circles specialised in leveraging weaknesses in communications infrastructure to send personal information to spy agencies, such as location information. It merged with the NSO Group after being bought out in a US private equity deal. Evidence is in the public domain of the directorate – which falls under the presidency – being used to spy on journalists, critics of the government and opposition members.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to legal scholars Trésor Maheshe Musole and Jean-paul Mushagalusa Rwabashi, former president Joseph Kabila’s government obtained spyware “that allowed it to wiretap opponents and activists, especially during electoral periods”.
All of this is in addition to the activities of the NSO Group, which has been active in selling its notorious Pegasus spyware to different African countries. An international collaborative journalism investigation identified South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa as one prominent surveillance target.
These companies argue that they only sell to governments for use in police and intelligence work. In the case of the above governments, though, spying is very poorly regulated, and the Israeli government could establish that through basic due diligence.
The Israeli industry’s marketing of surveillance offerings has been even more aggressive than China’s, which is also competing for a share of the southern African
market
Full embargo against Israeli spyware
Israeli surveillance tools have been critical to the occupation and it is at least plausible that they have become critical to the most recent military operations in Gaza too. To the extent that this is so, then the companies that provide these tools could be complicit in the commission of genocide.
Never has there been a more important time to call for the isolation of the Israeli state, including through a two-way arms embargo that escalates beyond targeted sanctions. This embargo needs to cover those commercial spyware companies that have been made possible by Israeli militarism and that have become de facto extensions of the Israeli state.