Documents Filed In US Court Prove Israel Government's Nod Is Must To Sell WhatsApp Spyware To Any Government

Documents filed by Facebook which owns WhatsApp in a US court in California suggest that the Pegasus spyware created by the Israeli company NSO Group can be sold exclusively to governments and that too only after written permission from Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

As a matter of fact, the NSO Group itself has long maintained that it sells its spyware exclusively and strictly to governments only.

Though the NSO Group has refused to name its client governments across the world, one of the documents filed by Facebook in a California court happens to be a signed contract with Ghana’s National Communications Authority, which states that the spyware could be deployed only after written sanction from Israel’s Ministry of Defense.

According to the signed contract filed in the California court by Facebook, if the Israeli government denied approval, the NSO Group “shall have the right to terminate this agreement”.

Also, the spyware system which is used to tap phones and snoop on WhatsApp, requires an estimated four weeks of testing on local networks, which suggests that the NSO Group would need ready as well as prolonged access to Indian mobile and internet networks to work properly.

This suggests at least two troubling scenarios. The first is that the Indian government itself is the culprit behind the mass WhatsApp snooping in India.

The second troubling scenario is that a group of Indian lawyers, activists and intellectuals were spied upon by a foreign government, with the full knowledge and sanction of Israel’s Ministry of Defense, with ready and prolonged access to Indian mobile networks.

An NSO Group software user guide, which has also been filed in the California court by Facebook suggests, that installing the Pegasus spyware is a laborious, expensive and time-consuming process.

The Pegasus deployment plan described in the user guide states the entire process can take up to 15 weeks including installation, testing and deployment.

In the first phase, spanning seven weeks, four of these weeks are spent on “local network adjustments”. The NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware user guide states that, “When required, the Pegasus system is integrated with local infrastructures and systems”.

This suggests that NSO Group’s Israeli technicians would need to spend a significant amount of time in India to get the system to a point where it could reliably break into phones on Indian mobile networks.

Incidentally, senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan who plans to file a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court, seeking a probe by cyber experts into spying and surveillance by means of hacking into WhatsApp accounts, has stated that this type of spyware can only be used only by governments and that this was clearly something that the Indian government wanted to do.