It turns out, however, that Netanyahu has himself been given the Pegasus treatment, with his downfall due in part to Israeli police deploying the software against a witness who turned state’s evidence in the disgraced politician’s corruption trial. The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that last Friday, the Jerusalem central court issued an order to the prosecution, demanding an explanation after reports surfaced that police had extracted information from the smart phone of a witness in the corruption trial without the witness’s knowledge. The prosecution has until Tuesday to reply.

The judge rejected a request by Netanyahu’s attorney that the court take up the issue on Monday. The trial will continue as usual until the prosecutor clears up the question about phone surveillance. Prosecutor Yehudit Tirosh said Thursday that a thorough investigation was being carried out.

Netanyahu’s lawyers asked the court to order the prosecution to disclose all the material gathered by the police via the Pegasus program and any other spyware in the course of their investigation of Netanyahu. Despite making the request two weeks ago, the defense still has not received a response.

Natael Bandel at Haaretz explains that Netanyahu is being tried on three counts of corruption. One of the cases, #4000, alleges that when he was prime minister, Netanyahu offered regulatory concessions to Bezeq Communications if they would make sure to give the prime minister favorable coverage at their Walla news site, which Bezeq then owned. It is the second largest news site in Israel. It is in this case that the issue of cyber-spying on a prosecution witness arose.

The witness whose phone was spied on is Shlomo Filber, whom Netanyahu had appointed director of the Ministry of Communications. He says that Netanyahu’s regulatory favors to Bezeq, which included fast-tracking a big merger, were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Filber abruptly resigned last spring and agreed to testify against Netanyahu. It is not clear if the ability of the police to turn Filber and have him testify for the prosecution had anything to do with their surveillance of his phone, on which they could have found incriminating evidence they used to pressure him.

Some observers are wondering if the cyber-espionage against Filber could derail the trial of Netanyahu and get him off the hook. He had earlier been said to have accepted a plea deal that would ban him from politics for several years.

The Biden administration has banned Pegasus in the United States and Apple is suing NSO for hacking iPhones. The company may go bankrupt as a result of these measures.

Netanyahu had provided Saudi Arabia with the Pegasus program, which allowed the government of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman to hack the cell phone of Washington Post columnist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, which led to his murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Business Insider reported this week that after a personal call from Bin Salman, Netanyahu reinstated the Saudi license to the software, after the Israeli Ministry of Defense had cut Riyadh off for using it on Khashoggi. So, murdering dissidents was no bar to Israel peddling the dangerous program to the most oppressive dictatorships.

Israeli intelligence used Pegasus against Palestinian human rights groups.

So after Netanyahu had deployed this nasty cyber-espionage tool against stateless Palestinians and used it to curry favor with Mr. Bone Saw in Riyadh, someone else used it to gather intelligence on his extensive corruption.

He who lives by spyware dies by spyware.

AlHathloul is among the victims of an illegal spying program created and run by former U.S. intelligence operatives, including the three defendants named in the lawsuit, who worked for a U.S. company hired by United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the wake of the Arab Spring protests to identify and monitor activists, journalists, rival foreign leaders, and perceived political enemies.

Reuters broke the news about the hacking program called Project Raven in 2019, reporting that when UAE transferred the surveillance work to Emirati firm DarkMatter, the U.S. operatives, who learned spycraft working for the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies, went along and ran DarkMatter’s hacking program, which targeted human rights activists like AlHathloul, political dissenters, and even Americans residing in the U.S.

DarkMatter executives Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke, working for their client UAE—which was acting on behalf of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)—oversaw the hacking project, which exploited a vulnerability in the iMessage app to locate and monitor targets. Baier, Adams, Gericke, all former members of U.S. intelligence or military agencies, designed and operated the UAE cybersurveillance program, also known as Project DREAD (Development Research Exploitation and Analysis Department), using malicious code purchased from a U.S. company.

What’s Happening: “Loujain al-Hathloul Sues Three Ex-US Intel Operatives Over Hacking For UAE”

Baier, who resides in UAE, Adams, a resident of Oregon, and Gericke, who lives in Singapore, admitted in September to violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and prohibitions on selling sensitive military technology under a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Justice Department.

“Companies that peddle their surveillance software and services to oppressive governments must be held accountable for the resulting human rights abuses,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene. “The harm to Loujain AlHathloul can never be undone. But this lawsuit is a step toward accountability.”

AlHathloul, whose statement on the case is below, is a leader in the movement to advance the rights of women in Saudi Arabia, where females were barred from driving until 2018, are required by law to obtain permission from a male guardian to work or travel, and suffer discrimination and violence. She rose to prominence for her advocacy for women’s right to drive and put herself at great risk in 2014 by publicly announcing her intention to drive across the border from UAE to KSA and filming herself driving. She was stopped at the KSA border and imprisoned for 73 days. Undeterred, AlHathloul continued to speak out for women’s rights and continues to be a target of the kingdom’s efforts to suppress dissent.

DarkMatter intentionally directed the code to Apple servers in the U.S. to reach and place malicious software on AlHathloul’s iPhone, a violation of the CFAA, EFF says in a complaint filed in federal court in Oregon. The phone was initially hacked in 2017, gaining access to her texts, email messages, and real-time location data. Later, AlHathloul was driving on the highway in Abu Dhabi when she was arrested by UAE security services, and forcibly taken by plane to the KSA, where she was imprisoned twice, including at a secret prison where she was subject to electric shocks, flogging, and threats of rape and death.

“Project Raven went beyond even the behavior that we have seen from NSO Group, which has been caught repeatedly having sold software to authoritarian governments who use their tools to spy on journalists, activists, and dissidents,” said EFF Cybersecurity Director Eva Galperin. “Dark Matter didn’t merely provide the tools; they oversaw the surveillance program themselves.”

While EFF has long pressed for the need to reform the CFAA, this case represents a straightforward application of the CFAA to the sort of egregious violation of users’ security that everyone agrees the law was intended to address.

“This is a clear-cut case of device hacking, where DarkMatter operatives broke into AlHathloul’s iPhone without her knowledge to insert malware, with horrific consequences,” said Mukund Rathi, EFF attorney and Stanton Fellow. “This kind of crime is what the CFAA was meant to punish.”

In addition to CFAA violations, the complaint alleges that Baier, Adams, and Gericke aided and abetted in crimes against humanity because the hacking of AlHathloul’s phone was part of the UAE’s widespread and systematic attack against human rights defenders, activists, and other perceived critics of the UAE and KSA.

The law firms of Foley Hoag LLP and Boise Matthews LLP are co-counsel with EFF in this matter.

Loujain Alhathloul Lawsuit Statement

“Never have I envisioned myself being recognized for standing up for what I believed was right. My early realization of my privilege to speak up and out for women and myself drove me to engage in the sphere of human rights defenders.

“In a 2018 article titled Kidnapped Freedoms, I expressed my understanding of freedom to be safety and peace:

‘safety to express, to feel protected, to live and to love.
[And] peace to reveal the purest and most sincere humanity implanted deep within our souls and minds without experiencing unforgivable consequences.
Deprived of safety and peace, I have lost my freedom. Forever?’

“Previously, I had limited consideration of all aspects of harm a human rights defender, or any individual for that matter, could face, especially in the online world. Today, I incorporate online safety as well as protection from misuse of power by cyber companies to my understanding of safety. The latter should be considered a basic and natural right in our digital reality.

“No government or individual should tolerate the misuse of spy malware to deter human rights or endanger the voice of the human conscious. This is why I have chosen to stand up for our collective right to remain safe online and limit government-backed cyber abuses of power. I continue to realize my privilege to possibly act upon my beliefs.

“I hope this case inspires others to confront all sorts of cybercrimes while creating a safer space for all of us to grow, share, and learn from one another without the threat of power abuses.”

For the complaint:
https://www.eff.org/document/alhathloul-v-darkmatter

Mukund Rathi at EFF adds

When governments or private companies target someone with malware and facilitate the abuse of their human rights, the victim must be able to hold the bad actors accountable. That’s why, in October, EFF requested that a federal court consider its amicus brief in support of journalist Ghada Oueiss in her lawsuit against DarkMatter, a notorious cyber-mercenary company based in the United Arab Emirates. Oueiss is suing the company and high-level Saudi government officials for allegedly hacking her phone and leaking her private information as part of a smear campaign.

EFF’s brief argues that private companies should not be protected by foreign sovereign immunity, which limits when foreign governments can be sued in U.S. courts. Hundreds of technology companies sell surveillance and hacking as a product and service to governments around the world. Some companies sell surveillance tools to governments—in 45 of the 70 countries that are home to 88% of the world’s internet users—and others, like DarkMatter, do the surveillance and hacking themselves.

DarkMatter’s hacking has serious consequences. In her lawsuit, Oueiss recounts being targeted by thousands of tweets attacking her, with accounts posting stolen personal photos and videos, some of which were doctored to further humiliate her. And earlier this month, EFF filed a lawsuit against DarkMatter because the company hacked Saudi human rights activist Loujain AlHathloul, leading to her kidnapping by the UAE and extradition to Saudi Arabia, where she was imprisoned and tortured.

U.S. companies are on both ends of DarkMatter’s misconduct—some are targets, like Apple and iPhone users, and other companies are vendors. Two U.S. companies sold zero-click iMessage exploits to DarkMatter, which it used to create a hacking system that could infiltrate iPhones around the world without the targets knowing a thing.

Human rights principles must be enforced, and voluntary mechanisms have failed these victims. U.S. courts should be open to journalists and activists to vindicate their rights, especially when there is a connection to this country—the smear campaign against Oueiss occurred here in part. EFF welcomed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ recent ruling that spyware vendor NSO Group, as a private company, did not have foreign sovereign immunity from WhatsApp’s lawsuit alleging hacking of the app’s users. Courts should similarly deny immunity to DarkMatter and other surveillance and hacking companies who directly harm Internet users around the world.

For more on state-sponsored malware:
https://www.eff.org/issues/state-sponsored-malware

Via EFF

Mostafa Salem, Jennifer Hansler and Celine Alkhaldi at CNN, however, reveal that that the Emirates backed off the purchase because the Biden administration was giving them too much grief about their growing relationship with China. It wasn’t a relationship the Emirates were willing to sacrifice.

The immediate catalyst was the American allegation that the Chinese were allowed to build a military base in the UAE. According to CNN, the allegations were denied by Anwar Gargash, former minister of state for foreign affairs and current diplomatic advisor to UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. He said that the UAE did not believe China was using the buildings for military purposes, but had closed down the facility anyway.

Washington is touchy about China’s growing naval presence. It will soon have three aircraft carrier battle groups, and has a base at Djibouti on the Red Sea.

The US has also long pressured the Emirates not to use the Chinese telecom firm Huawei, which Washington believes builds back doors into its 5G network allowing Chinese intelligence to engage in cyber-spying. The UAE has defied Washington in this regard, however, and seems intent on going full bore ahead with Huawei.

In an op-ed for China Daily, Ali Obaid Al Dhaheri, the UAE ambassador to Beijing, points out that the UAE has gone in the past 50 years from having an annual gross domestic product of $11 billion to having a GDP of $421 billion.

The current bilateral trade of the UAE and China is $50 billion annually, but Abu Dhabi wants to up that to $200 billion over the next decade. The ambassador boasts of the way that the Emirates has signed on to China’s vast pan-Asian infrastructure project, One Belt, One Road. The US, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia have been trying to propose an alternative, fearing that all roads will lead to Beijing if 1BR is successful.

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

The UAE has also thrown the US “maximum pressure” campaign on Iran onto the trash heap, and is doing over $20 billion a year in trade with Tehran this year, exceeding the volume before Trump slapped his financial and trade embargo on Iran.

In short, the UAE was willing to sign the Abraham Accords with Israel to reassure the Israel lobbies in Washington that it could be trusted with high tech weaponry and wouldn’t turn it over to Hamas. The UAE also got access to Israeli capital and the prospect of Israeli technology transfer. So the $28 billion in advanced weaponry that Trump offered to Abu Dhabi, and which the Biden administration is perfectly happy to continue with, was a nice tip to the UAE for signing the accords. But the real ruler of the UAE, Mohammed Bin Zayed, did not think he was joining NATO or anything. He has lots of irons in the fire, and doesn’t want to give up his national independence.

I’m just speculating here, but if it is true that Huawei abets Chinese cyber-espionage, the Israeli tech firms being set up in Dubai could well prove leaky. And maybe the UAE, which has been at the forefront of hacking and cyber-espionage, will get a cut. We thought the Abraham Accords were a fig leaf for a big arms deal. But maybe it was the technological equivalent of a honey trap. The eagerness of Trump to dump the most sophisticated US weaponry on an actor like the UAE, which also has ties to Russia, was always questionable.

In the meantime, the UAE is the fifth largest arms purchaser in the world and has a deal with France for 80 advanced Rafale fighter jets. If the price of the F-35 is to further alienate China and risk plans for an expansion of trade with that country to $200 billion a year (half the UAE’s current GDP!), then, well, as the French would say, tant pis. Too bad.

The officials were informed of the hacking of their iPhones by Apple, which is suing NSO, essentially for tortious interference.

The State Department personnel were all either in Uganda or working on Uganda issues. While forensics cannot identify the source of the attack, the Uganda government of Yoweri Musaveni has taken a strong turn toward authoritarianism and repression and is rated by Freedom House as “not free.” NSO maintains that it sells its spyware only to vetted governments for use against terrorists, but that’s pretty laughable given that they sold it to Saudi Arabia, which used it to spy on dissident Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, whom they murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Cybersecurity analysts have found NSO spyware on the phones of 37 prominent human rights workers, journalists, and activists.

Former pop star turned politician Bobi Wine ran against Musaveni in last winter’s presidential election. He was arrested several times on various pretexts but released each time. After Musaveni won in January, in an election widely viewed as fraudulent, Wine was arrested again on January 15 of this year, and US ambassador in Kampala Natalie E. Brown attempted to visit him while he was under house arrest but was blocked by Musaveni’s troops. The Musaveni government accused the United States of intervening in Ugandan politics and of supporting Wine and his National Unity Platform party.

2021 has seen further political repression by Musaveni, including mass arrests of opposition party workers. In November, 50 protesters were shot down..

So it is only, you know, circumstantial evidence, but if we were looking around for someone who might want to know everything US State Department officials were doing and saying, you might just finger Yoweri Musaveni.

This revelation explains why the Biden administration banned NSO software in November, with the Department of Commerce saying of NSO that it “developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers. These tools have also enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists outside of their sovereign borders to silence dissent. Such practices threaten the rules-based international order.”

Personal checks should be made out to Juan Cole and sent to me at:

Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)

Apple maintains that NSO is heavily backed by the Israeli government. We know it has been deployed by that government in an attempt to smear and repress Palestinian human rights organizations.

So the US government’s long history of winking at Israeli authoritarian practices against Palestinians has come back to bite the State Department in the behind, since it turns out that with the right spyware, high-powered diplomats can be treated just like stateless Palestinians.

—–

Bonus Video:

Forbes: “State Department Workers’ Phones Reportedly Hacked Using NSO Group Software”

According to Breaking the Silence’s testimony collection director Shai Daniely, “Soldiers are making it clear to the Palestinians that Big Brother is watching them, gathering every piece of information about their lives and recording their movements.”

It is ironic that “Big Brother”, the state, in George Orwell’s predictive novel “1984” was published in 1948, the year of Israel’s war of establishment. Orwell sought to warn against the threat of total control of citizens’s lives practiced by totalitarian regimes like those emerging in the wake of World War II. In this book, he did not envisage the uses of state-of-the-art technologies to control a population living under the hostile occupation of a democratic country, like Israel.

Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporting in the Post on November 8th, wrote that Israel is “conducting a broad surveillance effort in the occupied West Bank to monitor Palestinians by integrating facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and smartphones, according to descriptions of the programmeme by recent Israeli soldiers” belonging to Breaking the Silence, which opposes the occupation.

The effort involves a smartphone technology called “Blue Wolf” which soldiers use to photograph Palestinians of all ages with prizes for the most photos accumulated by involved units. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has released video of an Israeli soldier lining up sleepy Palestinian school children and photographing them during a late night raid on their home.

B’Tselem observed, “It seems that for the military, all Palestinians, including school-age children, are potential offenders. At any time, it is permissible to wake them up at night, enter their homes and subject them to a lineup.”

The Israeli military responded to this report by saying soldiers were seeking to identify chidren who threw stones.

Thousands of Palestinians have been photographed, some multiple times, and their photos stored in a data base. When a soldier photographs a Palestinian, an app matches it to a stored profile and flashes red, yellow or green to signal whether a person should be arrested, detained for questioning, or permitted to pass.

One soldier told the Post that “this database is a pared-down version of another, vast database, called ‘Wolf Pack’, which contains profiles of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including photographs of the individuals, their family histories, education and a security rating for each person”.

The “Wolf Pack” database identifies Palestinians as “terrorists” or “potential terrorists”, encouraging the Israeli army to treat them as such.

Another smartphone app, dubbed “White Wolf”, has been used by Jewish colonists since 2019 to scan a Palestinian’s identity card before he or she enters a colony. Israeli checkpoints also employ facial recognition equipment to identify Palestinians seeking to enter Israel “proper”.

Israel has also installed cameras in Hebron — where 200,000 Palestinians contend with 500-800 aggressive Israeli colonists, to scan faces and identify Palestinians approaching checkpoints before they show their identity cards. The Post also reveals that closed-circuit television cameras provide “real-time monitoring of the city’s population”, not colonists but Palestinians, some of whose homes can be accessed by these cameras.

Israelis have, naturally, rejected the deployment of facial-recognition equipment in their cities, towns and neighbourhoods.

Face-recognition and spying via closed-circuit television are not the only means Israel uses to monitor Palestinians and others. Military-grade Pegasus spyware created by NSO, an Israeli firm, not only hacks into Palestinian phones on behalf of the Israeli army but is also sold to governments for hacking the phones of journalists, businessmen, and others.

NSO spyware was used to hack the phones of staff of six Palestinian human rights organisations which were subsequently declared “terrorist organisations” by current Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz, Middle East Monitor writes. The hacking was exposed by Dublin-based Front Line Defenders, which investigated 75 phones and found Pegasus spyware on six. Three of the six targets belonged to Al Haq, Bisan Centre fpr Research and Development, and Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association based in Jerusalem. The other three blacklisted organisation are Defence for Children International, the Union of Agricultural Workers, and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees which is connected to the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

Gantz charged them with working on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine which Israel regards as a “terrorist organisation” although these groups have cooperated for years with the UN, the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and the International Court of Justice. The “terrorist” designation has prompted criticism from the US and Europe and led UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, to say the organisations are some of the “most reputable human rights and humanitarian groups in the occupied Palestinian territory” that have worked closely with the UN for decades.

“Claiming rights before a UN or other international body is not an act of terrorism, advocating for the rights of women in the occupied Palestinian territory is not terrorism and providing legal aid to detained Palestinians is not terrorism.” she stated.

Middle East Eye (MEI) reports another Israeli firm, Candiru, has misused Microsoft’s Windows operating system to target human rights activists, politicians, journaists, academics, embassy staff and political dissidents, half of whom dwell in enclaves administered by the Palestinian Authority. MEI says it was targeted by Candiru along with other sites promoting the Palestinian cause. The firm sells spyware which can identify people who visit an infected website. This effort could impact thousands of people around the globe who simply seek to keep up-t0-date with regional developments.

Unable to set up cameras in besieged and blockaded Gaza, Israel uses cameras on the border, phone hacking and drones to monitor its 2 million inhabitants, making the total 5 million of inhabitants of the West Bank are added.

Big Brother Israel has become a “stalker state” which uses what it calls its “fight against terrorism” as a means to subject Palestinians under its control to constant, increasingly invasive and intimidating surveillance.

Reprinted from the Jordan Times with the author’s permission.

—-

Bonus Video:

TRT: “Apple announces it is suing Israeli spyware firm NSO Group over hacking allegations”

The BBC points out that Apple takes pride in the privacy it provides to users, and alleges that it has been in a constant race with NSO to close off vulnerabilities, as the Israeli hackers constantly developed new exploits. NSO spyware can vacuum up all the data on a person’s phone, turn on the microphone and camera and, well, spy on them.

The Biden administration in early November banned NSO from the U.S. for “malicious cyber-activities.” Israeli government attempts to intervene with Biden to reverse the decision have been rebuffed.

NSO is an example of the way the Israeli occupation of the stateless Palestinians generates tools and techniques that then are sold or adopted abroad for use on human rights activists around the world, including on American citizens.

In its lawsuit, filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California, Apple alleged of the Israeli-backed NSO:

“Defendants are notorious hackers—amoral 21st century mercenaries who have created highly sophisticated cyber-surveillance machinery that invites routine and flagrant abuse. They design, develop, sell, deliver, deploy, operate, and maintain offensive and destructive malware and spyware products and services that have been used to target, attack, and harm Apple users, Apple products, and Apple. For their own commercial gain, they enable their customers to abuse those products and services to target individuals including government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and even U.S. citizens.”

The US Commerce Department seems to agree with this characterization, saying of NSO that it

“developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers. These tools have also enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists outside of their sovereign borders to silence dissent. Such practices threaten the rules-based international order.”

There appears to have been an uptick in NSO-backed hacking in 2021. Apple alleged in its complaint,

“Because of Apple’s investment in, and longstanding commitment to, product security and privacy, there is critical need for the company’s products around the world. There are 1.65 billion active Apple devices worldwide, consisting of over a billion iPhones and hundreds of millions of other active Apple devices such as Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch. 5. This action seeks redress for Defendants’ multiple violations of federal and state law arising out of their egregious, deliberate, and concerted efforts in 2021 to target and attack Apple customers, Apple products and servers and Apple through dangerous malware and spyware that Defendants develop, distribute to third parties, and use (or assist others in using) to cause serious harm to Apple’s users and Apple.”

The consequences for human rights workers of NSO’s malware have often been fatal.

An investigation by The Guardian demonstrated that the Saudi government used NSO spyware to hack into the phones of dissident Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and his friends and family. On the basis of what the Saudi secret police learned about his activities, they lured him to the Istanbul consulate where they strangled him to death on October 3, 2018, and then cut up his corpse with a bone saw to smuggle it in pieces out of the consulate.

Citizen Lab in Toronto found that the 6 Palestinian human rights organizations recently branded “terrorists” by the Israeli state were under NSO surveillance. European governments have slammed the Israeli charges against these organizations as false. Some observers believe that the surveillance was about to be revealed, leading the Israelis to attempt to distract the world with its outrageous charges against human rights workers.

In 2017, NSO hacking tools were used to break into 1,400 American Whatsapp accounts, provoking a complaint from Facebook (now Meta) that led to an FBI investigation of the firm. It is likely this very FBI investigation began the scrutiny that led to the software being banned in the United States. NSO has engaged in widespread influence peddling among former Bush, Biden and Trump administration security officials by putting them on payroll.

There is a lot of talk of OSY Technologies, which owns NSO, being forced into bankruptcy as the US ban is causing it to lose contracts, including in Europe.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

NDTV: “Apple Sues Pegasus-Maker Israeli Firm For Targeting Its Users”

Even at the height of various controversies involving government surveillance in 2013, Israel remained on the margins, despite the fact that its government, more than any other in the world, uses racial profiling, mass surveillance and numerous spying techniques to sustain its military occupation of Palestine.

In Gaza, two million Palestinians are living under an Israeli blockade. They are surrounded by walls, electric fences, underground barriers, naval vessels and a multitude of snipers. From above, the tannaana, the Arabic slang used by Palestinians for unmanned drones, watch and record everything. These armed drones are used to destroy anything deemed suspicious from an Israeli “security” perspective. Moreover, every Palestinian wishing to leave or return to Gaza — and only a relative few are allowed the privilege — is subjected to the most stringent “security” measures, involving various government agencies and endless military checks. This applies as much to a Palestinian toddler as it does to a terminally-ill Palestinian man or woman seeking treatment unavailable in the besieged territory.

In the West Bank, Israel’s security “experiment” takes many forms. While the Israeli objective in Gaza is to entrap people, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem its aim is to control the everyday life of the Palestinians. Aside from the 1,660 kilometre-long Apartheid Wall in the West Bank, there are many other walls, fences, trenches and other types of barriers that are aimed at fragmenting Palestinian communities. These isolated communities are only connected through an elaborate system of Israeli military checkpoints, many of which are permanent, but with many more duly erected or dismantled depending on the “security” objectives on any given day.

Much of the surveillance occurs daily at these Israeli checkpoints. While Israel uses the convenient term “security” to justify its practices against Palestinians, actual security has very little to do with what takes place at checkpoints. Many Palestinians have died and many mothers have given birth or lost their newborn babies while waiting for Israeli security clearance. It is a daily torment, and Palestinians are subjected to it because they are the unwitting participants in a very profitable Israeli experiment.

Fortunately, the details of Israel’s undemocratic practices are becoming better known. On 8 November, for example, the Washington Post revealed an Israeli mass surveillance operation, which uses “Blue Wolf” technology to create a massive database of all Palestinians.

This additional measure gives soldiers the opportunity to use their own cameras to take pictures of as many Palestinians as possible and match them “to a database of images so extensive that one former soldier described it as the army’s secret ‘Facebook for Palestinians’.”

We know very little about this “Facebook for Palestinians”, aside from what has been revealed in the media. However, we do know that Israeli soldiers compete to take as many photos of Palestinian faces as possible, as those with the highest number of photos could potentially receive certain rewards, the nature of which remains unclear.

While the “Blue Wolf” story is receiving some attention in international media, it is nothing new for Palestinians. To be a Palestinian living under occupation is to carry multiple permits and magnetic cards; to require numerous “security” clearances; to have your photo taken regularly; to have your movements monitored; and to be ready to answer any question about your friends, your family, your co-workers and your acquaintances. When that is impractical because, say, you live under siege in Gaza, then the work is entrusted to unmanned drones scanning the land, sea and sky.

The reason that “Blue Wolf” is receiving some traction in the media is that Israel has been implicated recently in one of the world’s biggest espionage operations. Pegasus is a type of malware that spies on iPhones and Android devices to extract photos, messages and emails, and to record calls. Tens of thousands of people around the world, many of whom are prominent activists, journalists, officials, business leaders and such like, have fallen victim to this operation. Unsurprisingly, Pegasus is produced by an Israeli technology company, the NSO Group, whose products are involved heavily in the monitoring of and spying on Palestinians, as confirmed by the Dublin-based Front Line Defenders, and as reported in the New York Times on 8 November.

It is a sad reflection of world affairs that Israel’s unlawful and undemocratic practices only became the subject of international condemnation when the victims were high-ranking personalities, such as French President Emmanuel Macron and others. When Palestinians were on the receiving end of Israeli spying, surveillance and racial profiling, the story was deemed to be unworthy of global outrage and coverage.

Moreover, for many years, Israel has promoted and sold its sinister “security technology” to the rest of the world as “field-tested”, meaning that it has been used against Palestinians living under occupation. That may have raised a few eyebrows among concerned individuals and human rights groups, but the tried and tested brand has, nonetheless, allowed Israel to become the world’s eighth-largest arms exporter. Israeli military and security technology is now used by governments around the world. It can be found at North American and European airports; at the Mexico-US border; in the hands of various intelligence agencies; and in European Union territorial waters, largely to intercept refugees from war (in which Israeli technology is also utilised) and asylum seekers.

Covering up Israel’s unlawful and inhuman practices against the Palestinians has become a liability for the credibility of the very people who justify Israeli actions in the name of “security” and “self-defence”, including successive administrations in Washington. On 3 November, the Joe Biden administration decided to blacklist the Israeli NSO Group for acting “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” This is a right and proper measure, of course, but it fails to address the ongoing Israeli violations against the people in occupied Palestine.

The truth is, for as long as Israel maintains its military occupation of Palestine, and as long as the Israeli military-industrial complex continues to see Palestinians as subjects in a mass “security experiment”, the Middle East — in fact, the entire world — will continue to pay the price.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Hindustan Times: “Biden administration blacklists Israel’s NSO group amid snooping row involving Pegasus spyware”

This damaging activity is part of what brings the company $40 billion a year in profits. Haugen maintains that Facebook would still be very profitable if it dialed back the negativity, just not quite as profitable.

Haugen is a specialist in algorithmic products that underlie search and recommendation systems. Such algorithms are what make the Facebook feed go. Haugen worked at other platforms, including Google +, and she concludes that of them all, Facebook is the most evil: “the choices being made inside of Facebook are disastrous for our children, for our public safety, for our privacy, and for our democracy.”

Haugen hangs a lot on the algorithm, and not everyone may have a firm idea of what that is. The word comes from the last name of the Baghdad-based Iranian Muslim mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c.780-850 CE), whose book on algebra was extremely influential. Alkhwarizmi got corrupted in medieval Europe as algorithm.

An algorithm is just a set procedure for performing a calculation. We don’t think about it, but we deploy an algorithm every time we do long division.

You could write a code that says, every time a customer searches for conflict, show them ads for guns, and when they click on guns you show them ads for bullets, and when they click on bullets show them ads for funeral homes and pictures of shooting victims. This algorithm at each stage escalates toward violence.

It gets worse, because another thing that keeps people on the site is “Meaningful Social Interactions” (MSI). What Facebook wants is to foster more MSIs downstream, i.e. as time goes on. It can be innocent. Reaching out to an old high school friend is MSI. But the problem is that a knock-down drag-out shouting match between two users counts as MSI.

Haugen is saying that this is the kind of algorithm that Facebook uses. The company makes money by showing you ads. It can make more money if it can keep you on the site. Human beings’ most powerful feelings come from fear and anger, flight or fight mechanisms, which depend on pumping adrenaline into the bloodstream. They are what keep you most interested in a scene. Facebook’s procedures or algorithms serve up to you an escalating series of images, posts and ads that lead you toward these negative emotions, or they encourage negative interactions with other uses that spill a lot of vitriol, making you angry or afraid, but definitely engaged.

Haugen noted, “Engagement-based ranking and these processes of amplification, they impact all users of Facebook. The algorithms are very smart in the sense that they latch on to things that people want to continue to engage with. And unfortunately, in the case of teen girls and things like self-harm, they develop these feedback cycles where children are using Instagram as to self-soothe, but then are exposed to more and more content that makes them hate themselves. ”

Facebook is a machine for ramping up adrenaline, which it does daily in billions of human beings, making them more and more frightened and more and more angry. Haugen is saying that Facebook software engineers didn’t necessarily set out to produce these results, but they know that the site has this effect, but since it produces advertising dollars they refuse to dial it back:

“I don’t think Facebook ever set out to intentionally promote divisive, extreme, polarizing content. I do think though that they are aware of the side effects of the choices they have made around amplification, and they know that algorithmic-based rankings, so engagement-based ranking, keeps you on their sites longer. You have long — you have longer sessions, you show up more often, and that makes them more money.”

One of the scarier implications of Haugen’s testimony is that Facebook administrators are not entirely in control of the algorithms. They can try to dial things back, but the algorithms have subroutines and they can continue to push your buttons hard even if the company puts in some dampers. The artificial intelligence knows what sets you off, and it serves more and more of that to you. When I said this on Twitter, one of my readers suggested that we are already in a Skynet scenario, from the James Cameron Terminator movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, where an artificial neural net develops consciousness and comes after human beings.

She said,

“During my time at Facebook, first working as the lead product manager for civic misinformation, and later on counter-espionage, I saw Facebook repeatedly encounter conflicts between its own profits and our safety. Facebook consistently resolves these conflicts in favor of its own profits.

The result has been more division, more harm, more lies, more threats, and more combat. In some cases, this dangerous online talk has led to actual violence that harms and even kills people. This is not simply a matter of certain social media users being angry or unstable or about one side being radicalized against the other.

It is about Facebook choosing to grow at all costs, becoming an almost trillion-dollar company by buying its profits with our safety. During my time at Facebook, I came to realize the devastating truth. Almost no one outside of Facebook knows what happens inside of Facebook. The company intentionally hides vital information from the public, from the US government, and from governments around the world.”

Haugen refers to the role Facebook has had in fanning ethnic violence:

“What we saw in Myanmar and are now seen in Ethiopia are only the opening chapters of a story so terrifying, no one wants to read the end of it. Congress can change the rules that Facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is now causing.”

The Muslim Rohingya minority has been ethnically cleansed and some would say genocided in Buddhist Burma or Myanmar, with 700,000 people chased out. Facebook was a primary means by which the genociders whipped up hate against the Rohingya, all of whom were blamed for the actions of a handful of radicals. It would be like all white people being blamed for the Capitol insurrection.

Facebook keeps apologizing when called on the mat, oops, sorry about that genocide we helped foment. Haugen is saying that these apologies are entirely insincere. Facebook makes money by keeping people glued to its site, and it accomplishes that by making them adrenaline junkies, simpering with terror and bursting with rage. Haugen is saying that this is the business model, and Facebook is not going to give it up unless someone makes them.

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Bonus video:

Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before Senate Commerce Committee

We’ve long known that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s phone was hacked. Large amounts of data were taken off of it, including intimate photographs and evidence of a romantic affair, which then showed up in The National Enquirer. The tabloid’s publication of this private material led to Bezos’s divorce and the loss of half of his fabulous wealth. A careful forensic investigation of the hack now shows that Bezos’s phone was compromised when he opened a message on Whatsapp from the personal cell phone of Saudi crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman. The message contained malicious software that installed itself as soon as Bezos clicked on it to open it. This according to Stephanie Kirchgaessner, reporting for The Guardian.

The revelation that Bin Salman himself played a pivotal role in the attempt to ruin Bezos’s life over the Washington Post‘s reporting on Saudi Arabia and on Donald Trump should send chills down the spine of everyone who has ever chatted with the prince over Whatsapp. Bin Salman made a public relations trip to the US in spring of 2018. He met with Silicon Valley CEOs, Hollywood producers, and New York businessmen. How many phone numbers did he gather up and later use to talk to these movers and shakers over Whatsapp? How much dirt and how many secrets might the prince have by now swept up from the American elite, useful for blackmail and pressure campaigns?

We know that Trump son-in-law and high muck-a-muck without portfolio Jared Kushner also has talked to Bin Salman extensively over Whatsapp. This information raises the question of whether Kushner’s phone was similarly compromised by Saudi intelligence, which may be blackmailing Kushner to influence US Middle East policy. Indeed, for all we know, Donald Trump’s own phone may have been hacked in this way by Bin Salman. We can only speculate about such matters, since this White House is the least transparent in history. But just for instance, we know that the Saudis have long wanted Iranian general Qasem Soleimani dead. Did they have the kind of dirt on Kushner and Trump that would allow them to blackmail the US into taking Soleimani out? Did they almost involve the US in ware with Iran (something that Wikileaks shows the Saudis were trying to do way back in 2006).

This method of hacking phones uses the Pegasus software of the Israeli NSO company, and it is known that NSO sold the program to Saudi Arabia and many other authoritarian Middle Eastern governments. Former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden has said that if the Israeli software firm NSO had not sold its “Pegasus” malware to authoritarian governments like Saudi Arabia, dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi (who worked for Bezos’s Washington Post) would still be alive.

We can now apparently add that if NSO hadn’t sold Pegasus to the Saudis, Jeff Bezos would still be married to his first wife, MacKenzie.

I had written last February:

David Pecker’s attempt to blackmail Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos would not ordinarily attract my eye. Except for this paragraph:

“And sometimes Mr. Pecker mixes it all together:

“After Mr. Trump became president, he rewarded Mr. Pecker’s loyalty with a White House dinner to which the media executive brought a guest with important ties to the royals in Saudi Arabia. At the time, Mr. Pecker was pursuing business there while also hunting for financing for acquisitions…”

We knew that Pecker had brought the French investment banker and Saudi publicist Kacy Grine to the White House.

Embed from Getty Images
“SAN ANSELMO, CA – AUGUST 24: Copies of the National Enquirer are displayed at a grocery store on August 24, 2018 in San Anselmo, California. American Media, Inc. chairman and CEO David Pecker was granted immunity in exchange for cooperation with prosecuters working on the Michael Cohen case of hush payments made to a porn star and former Playboy playmate at the direction U.S. president Donald Trump. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images).”

And Spencer Ackerman had reported on Pecker’s strange move to put a pro-Saudi glossy magazine in grocery store check out lanes in spring of 2018. It is as though he thought American housewives would thrill to the soap opera in Riyadh, where the Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman had in summer of 2017 sidelined his rival Mohammed Bin Nayef, dethroning him as crown prince and greedily taking his place, before he kidnapped many in the Saudi elite to shake them down for $100 bn while imprisoning them in the Ritz Carlton. Days of Our Lives had nothing on the Saudis.

In short, there is every reason to believe that Pecker is entangled with the Saudi royal court of King Salman, perhaps, as Bezos alleges, in search of investment opportunities.

One question I have long had is whether investigators looking at the Russian element in the election of Trump are not unduly downplaying a United Arab Emirates and Saudi angle. That is, did those two oil monarchies help put Trump in power in the first place, and is there a prehistory to their entanglements with his circle?

Embed from Getty Images
“BOCA RATON, FL – AUGUST 16: David Pecker, the CEO of American Media, speaks to the news media August 16, 2002 in front of the American Media Building in Boca Raton, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/ Getty Images).”

But what Bezos goes on to allege is that he had hired a private investigator to find out how Pecker got hold of his texts and exchanges of smartphone photographs with his lover, Lauren Sanchez.

And the investigator, Gavin de Becker, looked into whether Pecker’s National Inquirer is influence-peddling for Saudi Arabia for some sort of quid pro quo.

Bezos also hints that Pecker was upset about the Washington Post’s quest to get to the bottom of the Saudi government’s murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2, 2018. Bezos owns the Post, though he maintains he is a hands-off owner.

Bezos alleges that the investigation of the Saudi connection most alarmed Mr. Pecker, and precipitated the attempt to blackmail the Amazon CEO into falling silent and backing off, with the threat of releasing further compromising photographs and text messages of a private nature.

Ronan Farrow said on Twitter that Pecker’s hired gun, Australian Dylan Howard, had also attempted to intimidate him when he was investigating Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment of all the women in Hollywood.

This charge makes me wonder if Pecker isn’t America’s answer to Rupert Murdoch, whose British tabloids were famous for hacking Britons’ telephone messages and then blackmailing or smearing them with the stolen material. Former prime minister John Major alleged that Murdoch threatened him with bad press unless he bent himself to Murdoch’s will.

I have to say that I never took Pecker or the National Inquirer seriously, but maybe he is secretly one of the more powerful men in the world, holding files on politicians and celebrities and coercing them behind the scenes.

One piece of jeopardy for Mr. Pecker is that he was granted immunity, for cooperating with the Mueller probe, from charges of election fraud for paying off nude model Karen McDougall, Mr. Trump’s lover, to gain her silence during the 2016 election campaign silence. That immunity depends on his avoiding further acts of illegality. It is not clear that the courts would accept Bezos’ claim of extortion. But Pecker wouldn’t be so nervous about Bezos investigating his Saudi ties unless there was something to hide in that regard.

Then last April I added:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ security team has alleged in The Daily Beast that Saudi Arabian intelligence hacked his phone and passed to the National Enquirer intimate photos that the married Bezos had sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez. Although the Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, has alleged that it received the material from Sanchez’s brother, this allegation may be be a cover story intended to deflect attention from the Saudi role (of which AMI may or may not have been aware. AMI reiterated its denials after the Daily Beast story appeared.

Bezos owns the Washington Post, which has often been critical of Trump, who in turn has viciously attacked the newspaper and its owner.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman established a strong relationship with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in 2017, which had been prepared for by the de facto head of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammad Bin Zayed, who secretly flew into the US after the November election to meet with Trump officials.

It has been alleged that the crown prince targeted expatriate Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in part because he had written critically about Trump at the Washington Post, where he was given a column after he fled Bin Salman’s increasingly dictatorial government.

Post columnist David Ignatius, considered close to the CIA, revealed that Khashoggi himself was hacked by a cyber espionage ring run from Riyadh by Saud al-Qahtan, one of Bin Salman’s chief lieutenants. Al-Qahtan had assembled a suite of hacking tools from Italy, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Here’s another corner to the conspiracy: allegations keep surfacing that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, attempted to get Qatar to take a billion-dollar white elephant, 666 Fifth Avenue, off his hands. He and his father had purchased the building for way too much money, and were not able to get their money back. A balloon payment was coming due, and they were desperate to unload the property. They approached Qatar, but its investment fund knows a pig of an investment when it sees one.

So the allegation is that Kushner conspired with Bin Salman, who had his own reasons to be annoyed with Qatar, to frame Qatari Emir Tamim Bin Hamad for terrorism and Iran ties, and to put his country under blockade or even invade and take it over.

The June 5, 2017, attack on Qatar involved hacking into the state broadcasting facilities and altering the speech Tamim gave. It is also alleged that the Saudis hacked the smartphones of the emir and his circle.

Qatar, under siege and blockade, may have greenlighted an investment company in which it has an interest to lease the Kushner property.

With the Kushners mollified, Trump suddenly began tweeting positively about Qatar, after having branded it a font of terrorism when the blockade was launched.

So Emir Tamim of Qatar was hacked to benefit Trump and his in-laws.

Then Khashoggi turned critical of Trump, and he was hacked by al-Qahtan’s team, and then the order went out to murder him.

Then the Saudi hackers went after Bezos, obtaining photos of him naked, and broke up his marriage, costing him half his fortune, because of the Washington Post’s criticism of Trump and possibly because it wouldn’t let Khashoggi’s murder go.

The Washington Post connection links Bezos and Khashoggi. The Saudi connection links Qatar and Kushner, though it cannot be assumed that he was involved in the Bezos gambit.

Trump dirty tricks and influence-peddling abroad are reshaping the globe.

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Bonus Video:

Wochit News: “Bezos’ Phone Reportedly Hacked By Saudi Prince”