< https://youtu.be/wuK1r7IWwzE >
Transcript India's 2017 Pegasus Deal With Israel Involved Top Intel Leaders https://thewire.in/rights/transcript-india-israel-2017-pegasus-deal-siddharth-varadarajan-ronen-bergman-interview Israeli investigative reporter Ronen Bergman speaks at length about the explosive story he co-authored in the New York Times on the sale of Pegasus spyware around the world, including to India.
Sukla Sen highlights Three takeaways:
I. From the Israeli side the clinching of the contact (for sale of Pegasus) requires direct involvement of the Prime Minister. That's a strong clue as to what is the level of representation on the Indian side.
II. A The system sold to India enables it to monitor a number of phones - the maximum number lies somewhere between 10 and 50, concurrently.
B. The capacity is determined/fixed at the time of initial purchase itself and cannot be scaled up later.
C The contact is renewable (every year or at the end of the term).
D. In the Indian case, it's a multi-year contact.
III. The system has to be installed (onsite) by the NSO engineers. They're to provide periodic maintenance services (onsite). Maybe also assistance to operate in some selected cases.
Extracts: by s sen
(on cost to India) I would say it’s a few dozens of millions… of the $2 billion, the [cost of purchasing] Pegasus in terms of [the] real number is not the majority whatsoever, this is, they were like missiles that are far, far more expensive...
The NSO engineers need to be physically present on-site to install the system, test it, and then from time to time come and do the maintenance. In this case, Indian intelligence service, which was the entity that purchased the Pegasus – the overall connection is also with the involvement of the agency in Israel that is in charge of running secret intelligence and political relationships, which is the Mossad.
It’s not [a] license given by the ministry of defence. The MOD is giving a license to sell Pegasus according to some kind of a breakdown of details and capabilities. But besides that, in the commercial negotiation between NSO and Indian entities or Indian agencies, it’s very important to, and this has a significant impact on the pricing, different kinds of capabilities of the Pegasus, one of them – and most important per bandwidth capability, power and price – is how many licenses are sold. License is the ability to monitor one phone at the concurrent time. And this is … as far as I know, those [which] were sold to India, were I think between – I don’t remember what was the exact number – but it’s between 10 and 50. So each one can, it depends on what was decided, can monitor between 10 phones up to 50 phones.
Other comments:
Ronen Bergman asserted that NSO is now on the verge of extinction.. hinting that the tech is out there or that some other entity corporate, State, or perhaps rogue entity could make use of this. So the horse's shit would hit the fan, and so some serious work needs to be done to outlaw and prevent this kind of disruption. Nuremberg3.0 is called for. It also became quite clear that it was not a software which could be sold and distributed on a disk. It is engineered from perhaps some base tools and custom-made for each client, contract by contract.
He said that the NSO has perhaps deliberately engineered things in such a way that they don't know the content of the invasion.. mainly because their clients themselves would not want it and also because of deniability.. true they have a log of the numbers and the attempts to hack.. and they have a front door access based on dual-both sides concurrence for maintenance.
Ronen Bergman No client of NSO would want a back door, because then they can be a backdoor to a back door. I was impressed that he was following the story right from the inception of NSO and is clear that NSO is near extinction.. but the tech lives on.. perhaps large chunks of the tech has already been sold or new corporations setup .. perhaps some hackers are already on the job