Pegasus spyware row is really about who controls cyber weapons
The Israeli spy software firm NSO Group has rarely been out of the headlines over the past year. Its spyware tool Pegasus worms its way into phones, accessing data and turning on the microphone and camera to act as round-the-clock surveillance equipment. Authoritarian states have reportedly bought the cyber weapon from NSO and put it to nefarious political uses, targeting journalists, human rights workers, civil rights lawyers and opposition parties. Perhaps most notoriously, associates of journalist Jamal Khashoggi , a critic of the Saudi government who was murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in 2018, were later found to have Pegasus on their phones . And last month, it was reported that the spyware was used on the phone of Kamel Jendoubi in 2019, when he was investigating potential Saudi war crimes in Yemen on behalf of the United Nations. US President Joe Biden’s administration placed NSO and Candiru, another ...