The lead sponsor of ISS World Europe is NSO Group, Israeli surveillance company that developed the infamous Pegasus spyware.

In July 2021, Amnesty International, in collaboration with tens of journalists and scholars, exposed how the Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware facilitated “human rights violations around the world on a massive scale.” Dictatorships and authoritarian regimes have employed Pegasus, a military-grade cyber weapon, to target 50,000 people, including lawyers, human rights activists, opposition politicians, and diplomats, as well as climate justice and women’s rights advocates. This Israeli spyware has also enabled the brutal murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabia consulate in Istanbul and countless other cases of arrests, torture, and killings.

Israeli spyware companies such as NSO Group hire graduates of Israeli military intelligence units who use illegal mass surveillance to blackmail Palestinians, sow divisions and distrust, and sell the tools that have been developed to maintain Israeli apartheid to the worst violators of human rights around the world as “field tested.”

The NSO Group has admitted it receives permission from the Israeli Ministry of Defense for each sale to its customers. This means that successive Israeli governments have authorized and licensed the sale of NSO’s spyware to the Saudi regime, the authoritarian government of Hungary, to the security forces who silence the investigators into the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, as well as to unknown parties that have used Pegasus to spy on South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, French president Emmanuel Macron, the UK government, the Catalan independence movement, US diplomats in Uganda, and many more.

In November 2021, for instance, it was exposed that Pegasus was used to spy on six Palestinian civil society organizations. Despite the surveillance, the Israeli authorities could not come up with any evidence to support their smears against those organizations, but they nevertheless banned them.

Marwa Fatafta of AccessNow said on July 12th, 2022, that “We heard NSO Group repeatedly claim […] that its notorious spyware Pegasus is used to save lives, fight terrorism, and crack down on criminal activity, yet it failed to bring even one example where this was the case.”

The Israeli apartheid regime and the private companies that sell spyware around the world are strongly connected. Exporting the technology of oppression turns Israeli apartheid into a global threat.

Unless we act now to stop this spyware technology and ban it altogether, unless the right to privacy, so necessary for the work of lawyers, journalists, and human rights defenders, is protected, none of us will be safe. We will not be secure until the criminals who profit from spyware are brought to justice, which will prevent additional companies from attempting to profit from these crimes.

Israel uses Pegasus and similar spyware as a diplomatic tool to buy votes at the UN and to secure military alliances and arms deals.

Today, we know that not only Palestine-solidarity groups are targeted, but activists for any cause could find that their phones have been hacked. Even those who trust their own government not to spy on them cannot be safe from Israeli spyware technology because another state or non-state agency may buy Pegasus or a similar program to spy on them across country borders, as was the case when Morocco purchased Pegasus to spy on French President Emmanuel Macron.

The fight against this technology is a common cause among all journalists worldwide who believe in their right to investigate government policies, activists for justice and human rights, and lawyers who believe in attorney-client privilege as a basic right.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has accused NSO of sending malware to 1,400 phones in order to break its encryption and access its customers’ messages.

Pegasus was also deployed by Slovak police, Czech police has bought similar software from the Italian company Hacking Team.