A team of executives from a U.S. military contractor has been silently visiting Israel numerous times in recent months to try to carry out a daring but risky plan: buy NSO Group, the notorious and technologically accomplished cyber piracy company.
The impediments were substantial for the team of the American company L3Harris, which also had experience with spyware technology. They started with the awkward fact that the U.S. government had blacklisted NSOs a few months earlier because the Israeli company’s spyware, called Pegasus, had been used by other governments to penetrate the phones of political leaders. human rights activists and journalists.
Pegasus is a “zero-click” hacking tool that can remotely extract everything from a target’s mobile phone, including messages, contacts, photos and videos without the user having to click a fishing link to give -remote access. You can also turn your mobile phone into a tracking and recording device.
NSO had acted “contrary to national security or U.S. foreign policy interests,” the Biden administration said when announcing the blacklist in November, banning U.S. companies from doing any business with the Israeli company. .
But five people familiar with the negotiations said the L3Harris team had brought with them a surprising message that made an agreement seem possible. U.S. intelligence officials said they quietly backed up their plans to buy NSO, the technology of which over the years has been of intense interest to many intelligence agencies. and law enforcement around the world, including the FBI and CIA.
The talks continued in secret until last month, when news of the possible sale of NSO was leaked and caused all parties to revolt. White House officials said they were outraged to learn of the negotiations and that any attempt by U.S. defense companies to buy a blacklisted company would face serious resistance.
Days later, L3Harris, which is heavily dependent on government contracts, notified the Biden administration that it had abandoned its plans to buy NSO, according to three U.S. government officials, although several people were familiar with the talks. they said there had been attempts to resurrect the negotiations.
Instead, questions remain in Washington, other Allied capitals and Jerusalem about whether parts of the U.S. government, with or without the knowledge of the White House, had seized the opportunity to try to bring control of NSO’s powerful spyware under the US authority, despite the administration’s very public position against the Israeli company.
It also left uncomfortable the fate of NSO, whose technology has been a tool of Israeli foreign policy, although the company has become a target of intense criticism for the way governments use their Spyware Against Its Citizens
The episode was the latest skirmish in an ongoing battle between nations to gain control of some of the world’s most powerful cyber weapons, and reveals some of the headwinds a coalition of nations faces, including the United States under the Biden administration, while trying. to curb a lucrative global market for sophisticated commercial spyware.
L3Harris and NSO spokespersons declined to comment on the negotiations between the companies. A spokeswoman for April Haines, the director of national intelligence, declined to comment on whether any U.S. intelligence officer silently blessed the discussions. A Commerce Department spokesman declined to give details of any discussion with L3 Harris over the purchase of NSO.
A spokesman for the Israeli defense ministry declined to comment, as did a spokeswoman for the Israeli prime minister.
The Biden administration’s decision to blacklist the Department of Commerce came after years of revelations about how governments had used Pegasus, NSO’s main hacking tool, as a domestic surveillance tool. . But the United States itself has also bought, tested, and deployed Pegasus.
In January, The New York Times revealed that the FBI had purchased the Pegasus software in 2019 and that lawyers from the FBI government and the Department of Justice had debated whether to deploy the spyware to use it. in investigations of the application of national law. The Times also reported that in 2018 the CIA had bought Pegasus for the Djibouti government to conduct counterterrorism operations, despite the country’s record of torturing political opposition figures and imprisoning journalists.
L3’s decision to end the acquisition talks would leave NSO’s future in doubt. The company had seen an agreement with the U.S. defense contractor as a potential lifeline after it was blacklisted by the Commerce Department, which has paralyzed its business. American companies cannot do business with blacklisted companies, under penalty of sanctions.
As a result, NSO is unable to purchase any U.S. technology to sustain its operations, whether it be Dell servers or Amazon cloud storage, and the Israeli company has hoped that the sale to a U.S. company could lead to lifting sanctions.
For more than a decade, Israel has treated NSO as a de facto arm of the state, licensing Pegasus to numerous countries, including Saudi Arabia, Hungary, and India, with which the Israeli government hoped to encourage security and stronger diplomatic ties.
But Israel has also denied Pegasus to countries for diplomatic reasons. Last year, Israel rejected a request from the Ukrainian government to buy Pegasus for use against targets in Russia, for fear that the sale would damage Israel’s relations with the Kremlin.
The Israeli government also makes extensive use of Pegasus and other locally made cyber tools for its own intelligence and law enforcement, giving it an additional incentive to find a way for NSO to survive northern sanctions. -American.
During discussions about the possible sale of NSO to L3 Harris – which included at least a meeting with Amir Eshel, the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which should approve any agreement – L3Harris representatives said they had received The US government’s permission to negotiate with NSO, despite the company’s presence on the US blacklist.
Representatives of L3 Harris told the Israelis that U.S. intelligence agencies supported the acquisition as long as certain conditions were met, according to five people familiar with the discussions.
One of the conditions, these people said, was that NSO’s “zero-day” arsenal – computer source code vulnerabilities that allow Pegasus to hack cell phones – could be sold to all U.S. partners in the world. called Five Eyes Intelligence Sharing Relationship. The other partners are Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A senior British diplomat declined to comment on questions about the degree of knowledge British intelligence had about a possible deal between L3 and NSO.
This plan would have been very unusual if it had been finalized, as the Five Eyes countries usually only buy intelligence products that have been developed and manufactured in those countries.
Israeli Defense Ministry officials were open to this deal. But after strong pressure from the Israeli intelligence community, he rejected another request: that the Israeli government allow NSO to share Pegasus’ computer source code, which allows it to exploit the vulnerabilities of the phones it targets. , with the countries of Five Eyes. Nor did they agree, at least not in the first phase, to allow L3 cyber experts to come to Israel and join NSO’s development teams at the company’s headquarters in North Tel Aviv.
Defense ministry representatives also insisted that Israel retained its authority to grant export licenses for NSO products, but said they were willing to negotiate which countries received the spyware.
Throughout the discussions, there were numerous issues that would have required the approval of the United States government. Representatives of L3Harris said they had discussed the issues with U.S. officials, which they had agreed to in principle, according to people familiar with the discussions.
To help negotiate the sale of NSO, L3Harris hired an influential lawyer in Israel with deep ties to Israel’s defense establishment. The lawyer, Daniel Reisner, is the former head of the International Law Department of the Israeli Military Prosecutor’s Office and served as a special adviser on the Middle East peace process under former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In the months since the Biden administration announced the blacklist in November, and while the Israeli government was pushing to prevent the NSO from collapsing, the Washington Department of Commerce sent a list of questions to NSO and another Israeli piracy company that had been blacklisted. at the same time, about how spyware works, who it is aimed at, and whether the company has any control over how its national customers implement the hacking tools.
The list, reviewed by The Times, asked whether NSO maintained “positive control over its products” and whether Americans abroad were protected from having NSO products deployed against them.
Another asked if NSO “would close access to its products if the US government informs them that there is an unacceptable risk that the tool will be used to violate human rights by a particular customer?”
Aside from the proposed deal with NSO and L3 Harris, Israeli officials negotiated unsuccessfully with the Commerce Department to remove NSO from the U.S. blacklist ahead of President Biden’s trip to Israel next week.
Last month’s news of L3Harris talks to buy NSO seemed to blind White House officials. After the Intelligence Online website reported on the possible …