This week’s revelations around NSO’s Pegasus snooping software is an argument for an immediate moratorium on trade in the technology
The Israeli surveillance company NSO Group has created, developed and sold hacking software, known as Pegasus, that covertly allows access to mobile devices. Once it gains access, via hitherto unknown flaws in everyday apps, the code can extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones. Such is their ubiquity that mobile phones offer a window into our souls. What spyware, like that hawked by NSO, provides is access to our most intimate secrets.
One might have thought those peddling such intrusive powers would have imposed onerous responsibilities. NSO says that it only sells its software to vetted government clients to prevent “terrorism and serious crime”. Unfortunately, that does not appear to have been the case. And it’s not just NSO. Instead, an unregulated global industry has grown up in the shadows to provide cheap spying tools that were once the preserve of the most advanced state intelligence services.
