Under Fire For Enabling Snooping, NSO Says Millions Sleep Peacefully Due To Tech Like Pegasus

NSO Group, the Israeli cybersecurity company that is in the eye of the storm for enabling several governments around the world including in India to spy on its citizens, has claimed that millions of people around the world sleep well at night and walk in the streets safely due to such technologies.

Pegasus, the spyware, which the company claims to sell only to vetted governments to combat terror and crime has however been used to spy on journalists, human rights defenders, politicians and others in a number of countries, including India.

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¡°Millions of people around the world are sleeping well at night, and safely walking in the streets, thanks to Pegasus and similar technologies which help intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies around the world to prevent and investigate crime, terrorism, and paedophilia rings that are hiding under the umbrella of end-to-End encryption apps," a spokesperson for NSO said.

¡°NSO, together with many of the other cyber intelligence companies in the world, provides cyber intelligence tools for governments because law enforcement agencies around the world are in the dark and there's no regulatory solution that allows them to monitor malicious acts on instant messaging and social media", the company said.

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On the controversy around its snooping software that has rocked the world, the spokesperson asserted that "NSO does not operate the technology, nor do we have visibility to the data collected".

'Doing best to create a safer world'

"We are doing our best to help creating a safer world." it said.

The company has so far been tight-lipped about its client list, including if the Indian government is one of them.

The NSO Group's Pegasus software is able to switch on a phone's camera or microphone and harvest its data.

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However, following the Pegasus Project, under which media houses from around the world looked into the list of people spied on using the software, and found that there were around 50,000 potential surveillance targets, globally, there is renewed scrutiny on the companies operations.

Israel has established a committee to review the allegations of misuse of the NSO group's surveillance software and hinted at a possible "review of the whole matter of giving licences".

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¡°The defence establishment appointed a review committee made up of a number of bodies," lawmaker Ram Ben-Barak, the head of Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, told Army Radio on Thursday.

¡°When they finish their review, we'll demand to see the results and assess whether we need to make corrections," Ben-Barak, who earlier was the former deputy head of Israel's Mossad spy agency, added. Israel's priority was ¡°to review this whole matter of giving licenses¡±, he stressed.