The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel-spyware.html Jan. 28, 2022
NSO’s products seemed to solve one of the biggest problems facing law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in the 21st century: that criminals and terrorists had better technology for encrypting their communications than investigators had to decrypt them. The criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going global...
.. Pegasus was designed to be unable to hack into American numbers. Then the Pegasus engineers, as they had in previous demonstrations around the world, opened their interface, entered the number of the phone and began an attack. ... This version of Pegasus was “zero click” — unlike more common hacking software, it did not require users to click on a malicious attachment or link — so the Americans monitoring the phones could see no evidence of an ongoing breach. ..
..Israel, wary of angering Americans by abetting the efforts of other countries to spy on the United States, had required NSO to program Pegasus so it was incapable of targeting U.S. numbers.
...NSO had recently offered the F.B.I. a workaround. During a presentation to officials in Washington, the company demonstrated a new system, called Phantom, that could hack any number in the United States that the F.B.I. decided to target.
Another company, called CommuniTake, that offered cellphone tech-support workers the ability to take control of their customers’ devices — with permission.
If they (law-enforcement and intelligence agencies) could control the device itself, though, they could collect the data before it was encrypted. CommuniTake had already figured out how to control the devices. All the partners needed was a way to do so without permission.
For Israel, the weapons trade has always been central to the country’s sense of national survival. It was a major driver of economic growth, which in turn funded further military research and development.
In July 2017, Narendra Modi, who won office on a platform of Hindu nationalism, became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. For decades, India had maintained a policy of what it called “commitment to the Palestinian cause,” and relations with Israel were frosty. The Modi visit, however, was notably cordial, complete with a carefully staged moment of him and Prime Minister Netanyahu walking together barefoot on a local beach. They had reason for the warm feelings. Their countries had agreed on the sale of a package of sophisticated weapons and intelligence gear worth roughly $2 billion — with Pegasus and a missile system as the centerpieces. Months later, Netanyahu made a rare state visit to India. And in June 2019, India voted in support of Israel at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council to deny observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization, a first for the nation.