The Dark Side of Israel’s Cold Peace With Saudi Arabia
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-03/israel-s-cold-peace-with-saudi-arabia-has-a-dark-side
The Saudis’ phone hacking is enabled by a privately owned Israeli company called the NSO Group Ltd. Its cyberweapon suite, Pegasus, has come under deserved scrutiny in the last year because governments have misused the weapon to hack the phones of journalists and human-rights activists. Last year, two groups of victims sued the company in Israel and Cyprus for providing phone surveillance to the Mexican and Emirati governments, which then used it against political targets.
Pegasus and similar hacking programs are now able to break into a phone without requiring the user to even click a link. In some cases, a bogus WhatsApp call is enough to infect the phone and make it a powerful tracking device. That makes it particularly suited to monitor Arab dissidents like Al-Baghdadi, who rely on the encrypted messaging service to make contact with networks of activists across the Middle East.