NSO, an Israeli intelligence company embarks on a campaign to crack down on international communications, including top leaders and journalists
An investigation by an international coalition of media organizations has found that one Israeli company dealing with cyber-spying has been conducting surveillance to track the movements of journalists, human rights activists, and political opponents around the world.
The prominent US newspaper The Washington Post, which is a member of the international media alliance, involved in the investigation, reported that among the journalists arrested by the Israeli network operating the NSO network were 189 journalists. , more than 600 politicians and 65 major business leaders and 85 human rights defenders as well as top leaders from around the world.
The French-based Forbidden Stories, an independent news organization, made up of journalists, conducted a joint investigation with the human rights organization Amnesty International and disseminated the information to 16 other news organizations. of 1,000 people in 50 countries alleged to be on the checklist by the online intelligence company NSO at the direction of their clients.
And among those people are journalists, politicians, government officials, corporate executives, human rights defenders, and the country's top leaders.
The media coalition is comprised of various international media outlets including the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and Financial Times. Amnesty International says its researchers have found that a special intelligence program called Pegasus was put on the phone of Jamal Khashoggi's fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, just four days after the journalist was killed at the embassy. of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul in 2018.
The NSO company in the past had been implicated in other incidents following Khashoggi. The Israeli networking technology company has however denied any involvement in the incident via e-mail in response to questions from the AP news agency, claiming that it has never once had a list of people planning to hack them and no one is hiring them In addition, the company has issued another statement stating that the Forbidden Stories report is loaded with untrue information and unsubstantiated theories.
But a study conducted by the international media body states that data-based investigations have revealed that the Israeli-based military intelligence program is used to crack down on journalists, human rights activists, and critics. political.
In the list of more than 50,000 mobile phone numbers obtained, Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, 1000 were found to belong to the people on the list of those scheduled to be hacked. But the NSO maintains its claim that it sells spyware programs to authorized government agencies for tracking terrorists and high-profile criminals and does not have the ability to access its customers' data.
