Israel tried to influence WhatsApp case against Pegasus spyware maker, rights group says

The Israeli government tried to influence a long-running court battle between a spyware manufacturer and the WhatsApp messaging platform by ordering the seizure of sensitive documents, leaked documents reportedly show.

The NSO Group, which makes the powerful zero-click Pegasus spyware, has been embroiled in a lawsuit with Meta-owned WhatsApp since 2019. The platform sued after discovering Pegasus hacks of about 1,400 WhatsApp users.

According to an investigation led by the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and supported by the Amnesty International Security Lab, Israel issued a gag order forbidding press coverage of the document seizures to keep them out of the public eye.

The country’s Justice Ministry also appears to have injected itself into the lawsuit by pushing for edits to NSO court filings, the new report said.

The Israeli government’s document seizure and the larger effort to influence the trial came ahead of a potential discovery process under which NSO Group would be required to produce internal documents for the court, according to Forbidden Stories.

The nonprofit said it obtained more than a million leaked emails, documents and files originating with the Israeli Justice Ministry from the nonprofit whistleblowing organization Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets).

The data obtained by DDoSecrets was reportedly first posted online by the hacktivist collective Anonymous for Justice.

The veracity of many of the documents was confirmed by Amnesty International. 

The findings suggest Israel is “actively trying to shield NSO Group from accountability for its role in severe human rights violations,” Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, who directs Amnesty’s Security Lab, said in a prepared statement.

“Such revelations call into question Israel's commitment to impartially regulate NSO Group and casts doubt on its ability to provide justice, truth and reparation to those affected by Pegasus spyware.”

The Security Lab was not able to “cryptographically verify the authenticity of the emails contained in the leak,” its press release said, citing the fact that they had been changed into HTML and therefore did not include “detailed” metadata. 

Nonetheless, “technical indicators in other files from the leak, including PDFs and Microsoft Word documents cited by Forbidden Stories in their piece, were reviewed and do not show obvious signs of having been tampered with,” the press release said.

The latest report from Forbidden Secrets and Amnesty’s Security Lab follows their explosive Pegasus Project, which in 2021 revealed how governments around the world were using Pegasus spyware to illegally surveil civil society leaders. That project found the spyware had been targeting potentially tens of thousands of phone numbers around the world.

Israel has long been seen as using Pegasus as a tool for diplomacy because so many worldwide governments want to buy the uniquely powerful technology.

Speaking at a May event heralding an artificial intelligence university institute cofounded by an NSO Group founder and former CEO, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog seemed to highlight the dynamic, saying “the reason countries do not boycott us is because of our human capital, the high-tech and the financial connections that they do not want to lose.”