Private equity executive sought to undermine #NSO critics, data suggests
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/28/private-equity-executive-sought-to-undermine-nso-critics-data-suggests
Ron Deibert, the longtime director of the Canadian research group, is one of the world’s leading experts on identifying digital threats against civil society.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at #Citizen_Lab, is among a relatively small group of experts globally who can identify which iPhones and Android devices have been infected with #Pegasus, and which government clients are likely to have been responsible.
It is unsurprising, then, that the pair were an intense focus at #Novalpina, the London-based private equity group which took over NSO Group in 2019, and quickly sought to stem its reputation for enabling repressive governments to commit widespread human rights abuses.
Using UK data protection laws, Deibert and Scott-Railton last year sought the personal data held on them by Novalpina. The results of their so-called subject access requests, recently shared with the Guardian, contain snippets of hundreds of emails and attachments that included their names.