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The Everywhere Border. Digital Migration Control Infrastructure in the Americas

The US is building a digital border infrastructure in neighbouring countries that expands and deepens surveillance, while hiding state violence. The implications of this new infrastructure will be long-lasting and need to be integrated into strategies of resistance of migrant justice movements worldwide.

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In 2021, José Eusebio Asegurado, a farmer in El Salvador, was arrested by the Salvadoran National Civil Police for ‘promoting human trafficking’. The basis for the arrest was a WhatsApp group chat (external link)
that Asegurado and other migrants1 were using to coordinate a caravan, which had been infiltrated by a police agent. According to the screenshots used to incriminate him, Asegurado’s only participation in the chat was responding ‘OK’ to a migrant’s message that he would be at a meeting point at around 5 o’clock. Police arrested Asegurado at the meeting point, telling him he was ‘profiled’ as a caravan organiser.

The same day, the Salvadoran police also charged Fátima Pérez, a cook, and Juan Rufino Ramírez, a private security guard, with promoting ‘human trafficking’ based on messages on a WhatsApp group they had created to coordinate a caravan. Screenshots in Ramírez’s case show him giving instructions to the 55-member group to meet at the bus station, and the prices of tickets to Guatemala. The police arrested Ramírez and Pérez the morning they were planning to leave.

These three arrests took place in the span of four hours. The then-US ambassador in El Salvador, Katherine Dueholm, promptly congratulated (external link)
the General Prosecutor’s office, stating: ‘I applaud the Salvadoran authorities who are taking action against those who want to deceive citizens with caravans and false promises. They promote only #UnViajeEnVano (external link)
’ – ’a journey in vain’.

The arrests and Ambassador Dueholm’s praise reflect the critical role of covert surveillance and data-driven ‘smart’ technologies in US migration-control practices operating deep within countries outside the US. Over the past twenty years, the US (and other wealthy countries) have made strides to externalise border-control regimes well beyond their actual territory. This often involves effectively enrolling agencies in other countries in migrant surveillance, policing, and exclusion.

The new digital infrastructure that enables border externalisation, however, is little understood. This digital infrastructure relies on both military-grade technology built by major weapons manufacturers and Silicon Valley innovation: inter-operable databases that share fingerprints seamlessly between police agencies across borders; biometric collection devices used by Mexican detention authorities to track migrants for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP); social media apps that serve as critical communications networks for migrants and surveillance tools for police; digital ID systems that enable access to essential services, but double as tracking devices.

Infrastructure – digital or material – has real sticking power; that’s the point. Once a highway splits a community in half, a new permanence stifles the din of protest, and people move on. We use the term digital infrastructure to describe the establishment of a foundation that will be fundamental to how world powers will practise migration control; and, as it embeds itself, increasingly beyond challenge – a unified strategic intervention by powerful countries, with the US coveting the vanguard. While it may look like technological experimentation (like AI-powered robot dogs on the border) or one-off opportunistic data-grabs (like networks of international data-sharing agreements), the growth of digital border infrastructure is by design. This is enabled through joined-up digital technologies that settle into the kind of rigid, ‘motiveless’ permanence granted to other infrastructures, like submarine communications cables, protocols and servers that run the internet, an electrical grid or a superhighway.2

The profound implications of new infrastructures persist long after their creation, as is the case for the digital infrastructure deployed to police migrants in the so-called US ‘backyard’. Its impacts are frequently rendered invisible. Governments promote border policing technologies as fundamentally safe, humane and non-violent (external link)
while migrant advocates struggle to make visible the violence on the other side of this unseen ‘borderland circuitry’.3

The implications range from digitally triggered violence and killings by local police in Central America to actions by the US, its allies and competitors in geopolitical contests over the control of global security. The US government and private industry have worked themselves into a largely covert entrepreneurial frenzy to own and control the migration policing interface of the future. Monitoring and control capabilities – a longstanding and routine part of US aid packages to fight organised crime – both expand domestic spying by partner governments for their own ends and serve US border externalization interests in controlling the movement of people and diverting them away from the US territorial border.

This essay will focus primarily on how digital infrastructure serves US interests . What do we know about this strategy and how it is already affecting mobility and human rights in the region? What are its historical foundations? What challenges lie ahead? It is impossible to answer these questions simply by dissecting the cruelty or provenance of any single technology, system or actor. We first need to understand the transnational motivations driving these incremental, more observable, facts on the ground. We need, in other words, to make visible the invisible digital infrastructure.
Digital infrastructure is key to border externalisation and a rise in unaccountable violence

Understanding border externalisation through the lens of digital infrastructure captures the true scale of border practices envisaged by the US (and its competitors and allies) as well as their envisaged permanence within the future world order. Digital border infrastructure feeds on histories of domination, control and atrocities in the name of transnational ‘crime-fighting’ projects, setting the stage for tremendous social costs.

First, as to scale, we are witnessing an escalation of US border imperialism and borderland violence4 – both in terms of geographical reach far into national territories and the further extension of ‘policeability’5 to an increasing number of individuals and groups through this digital infrastructure. This includes anyone an algorithm decides might be ‘dangerous’, those who might migrate, as well as humanitarian actors, migrant advocacy groups, and aid organisations. Scaling and the rapid growth it engenders is a quintessential property of digital technologies, regardless of their origin or application. The shifts to new targets under digital infrastructure are frictionless compared to earlier analogue-based border policing tactics. Asegurado, the farmer assisting migrants in El Salvador, was swept up in the US border externalisation dragnet with a simple ‘OK’ on a WhatsApp chat.

Second, as to permanence, advocates of digital borders in national capitals, industry and development agencies embrace the term ‘digital public infrastructure’ as a brand, to bestow (unearned) trust, normalisation and the inevitability of contested digital tools such as biometric IDs and payment systems.6 Ceding the privilege of defining ‘digital infrastructure’ to actors with vested interests in current migration-control practices is reckless. Without a counternarrative that articulates their violent disposition, digital border externalisation tools – including widespread biometrics collection, real-time transaction data-collection in payment systems, and the confiscation of smartphones at the border – can easily be normalised as ‘digital public infrastructure’, rather than resisted.

The scale and enduring impact of the rapidly hardening digital infrastructure that fuels border externalisation calls for urgent transnational organising. As writers and activists, we have come together to resist the use of digital infrastructure in US migration-control policy in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. We have only traces and not the whole picture. Building on the work of others, we weave all this together to show how the fusion of state and digital power to construct digital border infrastructure is neither humane nor safe: rather, it is increasing unaccountable forms of violence.

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Convergence: Drugs war, border externalisation, digital infrastructure and the militarisation of US’ neighbouring regions

Economic and political initiatives since the 1970s have driven relentlessly towards US investments in more militarised, criminalising, and digitised migration-control practices. Since 9/11, the US convergence of ‘national security’ with unauthorised migration has fueled an ever expanding border externalisation regime—currently there are 23 CBP offices and 48 ICE offices worldwide—and consequently has provided an especially lucrative market for digital surveillance corporations.7 Through programmes such as the Mérida Initiative and the Central American Regional Security Initiative, the US has tied aid to countries such as Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to increased militarisation, policing, incarceration, and migration control.

Yet migration patterns to the US from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean cannot be divorced from the practices and policies that the US employed for over a century to dominate countries in these regions. Decades of US practices and policies have fuelled economic, political, and environmental instability – key factors that drive migration to the US. Over the past 20 years the number of people migrating from Central America has more than doubled (external link)
, the largest increases coming from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. The US-backed ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico and Central America has dramatically increased violence and instability.8 In Mexico, the fight against organised crime has resulted in 350,000 deaths and more than 72,000 disappearances (external link)
between 2006 and 2021. According to the World Bank, 60% of rural Central Americans live in poverty (external link)
. While the largest contributors to the climate crisis are wealthy countries, these already impoverished populations suffer the most acute impacts of climate change. For decades, prolonged droughts together with natural catastrophic events such as hurricanes (external link)
and floods (external link)
have deeply affected Central America. The number of people facing food insecurity tripled between 2019 and 2021, affecting 6.4 million people (external link)
. Asegurado, Pérez and Ramírez – like many others – are grasping for alternatives to this intolerable situation.

Rather than acknowledge these underlying causes, the US response has been to extend its border ever further. General John Kelly, former Secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), stated (external link)
, ‘I believe the defense of the Southwest border starts 1,500 miles to the south’. Mexico has long been central to the US border-externalisation regime, and digital infrastructure plays an increasingly critical role. Tony Crowder, former director of CBP’s Air and Marine Operations, shared Kelly’s sentiment ‘We have taught the Mexicans how to fish…[but] even though we have all this surveillance capability, we don’t have enough, we need more’.9

While part of a continuum of US efforts to enlist Mexico in support of its regional objectives, this ‘security and rule-of-law partnership (external link)
’ accelerated following 9/11. In 2007, the US shifted the focus of its drug war (external link)
from Colombia to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Under this frame of securitisation, the drug war merged with the migrant-control regime. In 2008, the Mérida Initiative was launched – a bilateral partnership between the US and Mexico in the name of the US war on drugs. It initially provided financing for Mexico to purchase equipment for its military and police forces and for intelligence gathering. In 2013, Mérida was revamped to include four pillars (external link)
, incorporating the creation of a ‘21st century US-Mexican border, while improving immigrant enforcement in Mexico and security along Mexico’s southern borders’. Effectively an extension of US policy, some $3.5 billion (external link)
has helped shape Mexico’s migration-control agenda since 2008.

In 2014, Programa Frontera Sur further securitised Mexico’s southern border by increasing the migration policing and deportation apparatus. Consequently, Mexico now has one of the world’s largest (external link)
immigration detention systems. Between 2014 and 2017, Mexico deported more Central Americans (external link)
than the US Border Patrol. Doris Meissner, the former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS, the predecessor to ICE and CBP), underscored the importance of Mexican migration control, explaining in 2017 the need to look at both US and Mexican data to assess the effectiveness of US border enforcement (external link)
.10

Under these agreements, the US Department of Defense has provided training and sold millions in military equipment to Mexico, including an array of ‘smart border’ technologies provided by corporations (external link)
such as Dev Technology, General Dynamics, Amazon Web Services, and NEC. The CBP and ICE have provided training on intelligence-gathering, info-sharing, and migration policing. A key element of US support to Mexico has been to develop an infrastructure to collect and share data – such as biometric and biographical information, and criminal history – in a manner that interfaces seamlessly with US databases.

The digital infrastructure that tracks and catalogues migrants is central to US migration policy in Mexico. The US-backed Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) strategy relies on this infrastructure (external link)
as the primary means to control migration rather than sealing Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala. Biometric collection is essential to making migrants more legible to the state. In 2011, the US provided four biometric kiosks (external link)
to Mexico’s southern border, and 117 additional biometric scanners (external link)
the following year. Between 2018 and the first half of 2022, the Mexican government gathered and shared information on over 360,000 migrants in detention facilities.11 Information from CBP reveals that Mexican authorities shared information from 10,000 humanitarian visa (external link)
applications with DHS. The release of approximately 1,800 unregistered migrants from a shelter in Piedras Negras was conditional on the registration of their data.12

An ‘Information Sharing Environment’ that includes inter-operable data-sharing systems (external link)
is central to achieving the objectives of the homeland security state. ‘Inter-operability’ enables seamless connectivity between police, immigration agencies, foreign governments, and more.13 Key forms of US-initiated digital infrastructure rely on widespread information-gathering and seamless sharing of data for surveillance across borders.

This vast amount of data-collection and sharing has been fuelled by unleashing the power of the carceral state – including the centrality of the ‘criminal alien’, ‘gang member’ and ‘drug trafficker’ as threats to national security – at all geographic levels of the US migrant-control regime. For example, the Biometric Identification Transnational Migration Alert Program (BITMAP) allows DHS and its partner countries to know where and when an individual arrives in the Western Hemisphere (external link)
and their travel patterns before they reach the southwest US border. BITMAP is currently deployed to 18 countries (external link)
, including Mexico. DHS also has a Criminal History Information Sharing (CHIS) programme that allows for the global sharing of biographic, biometric, and descriptive information on individuals deported from the US (e.g. alleged immigration, employment, family, and criminal histories).

The structural criminalisation of poverty in both countries is amplified with CHIS. According to the National Survey of Imprisoned Population in Mexico, conducted by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (INEGI) in 2021, nearly 44% of the respondents declared having been imprisoned on the basis of false accusations or incriminations (external link)
. Forty-two percent claimed they had been forced to plead guilty or to incriminate someone else. Nearly half of those who are jailed have not been convicted (external link)
, and nearly half of all convictions are for theft of under US$100 (external link)
. This is the kind of data that feeds CHIS.

In another example, DHS is developing the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART) (external link)
to replace its current centralised biometric database, IDENT, through a contract with Peraton (external link)
(a subsidiary of Veritas Capital, a private equity firm). Hosted by Amazon Web Services, HART will enable DHS to aggregate and compare biographical and biometric data on hundreds of millions of people across the globe. This includes so-called encounter data from police stops, facial recognition, DNA, iris scans, and voice prints – usually gathered without the individual’s knowledge or consent. The massive HART database draws from widespread biometrics collection in all realms – for example, the US DOS INL’s development of integrated DNA databases in Mexico and Central America in the name of combating trafficking or the proposed national biometric digital ID in Mexico (external link)
. In this way, multiple state initiatives merge, and the power of the state to police, track and control migrants and all people under their watch grows exponentially.

While the Mérida Initiative formally ended in 2019, its approach has been sustained by the Mexican government. In 2021, the Mexican government increased (external link)
the military by 46% and the National Guard dedicated to stopping migrants by 300%. In July 2022, President López Obrador committed $1.5 billion in smart border infrastructure (external link)
over the next two years.

For US partner states, any technological and data-sharing channels that are financed and exported to them become assets – not just for monitoring migrants, but to advance multiple agendas of coercive power-building. This infrastructure can therefore end up fuelling violence and criminalisation, undermining the right to asylum, exacerbating inequality, and expanding the power of paramilitaries and the police (external link)
, while privileging securitised neoliberal and corporate prerogatives.
The geopolitical nature of digital infrastructure

In their research on digital payment systems, Marieke de Goede and Carola Westermeier use the term ‘infrastructural geopolitics’ to stress the growing centrality of infrastructure to geopolitics and the ways in which US economic power is rooted in financial infrastructures (which, like migration control, are rapidly digitising).14

The global financial messaging network SWIFT is an example of infrastructure that is invisible to most people and yet plays a major role, as the writers describe, in reinforcing power relations of the post-war global order in which it emerged. Seventy years after the Second World War and fifty years since SWIFT’s establishment, bank messaging routes flow through former colonial capitals and map onto a ‘core’ of Western countries, leaving large swaths of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East in a permanent, but effectively invisible, economic periphery. Similarly, digital IDs, social media monitoring and infiltration, and data-sharing platforms are essentially component parts, nodes, or partially visible layers of deeper, longer-term geo-strategic digital infrastructure projects.

Extension of borders through digital infrastructure serves US political and economic goals well beyond the policing of human mobility. Geopolitical contests for control over infrastructures play out across several domains. Military establishments covet ‘identity dominance (external link)
’, an objective that drove US forces to gather massive stores of biometric data in Afghanistan and Iraq as a weapon of war. US digital services giants like Amazon and Google mastered ‘platformisation’ by building e-commerce (digital advertising, search, social media, etc.) infrastructure to dominate the digital economy. Often, public and private-sector interests converge, including in the form of public–private partnerships (PPPs) to build infrastructure. In each case, the true contest among states and corporate giants centres on control over the interface, or the most essential, invisible, infrastructural methods of digital communication and control. As Michael Kwet explains (external link)
, ‘Transnational “Big Tech” corporations based in the United States have amassed trillions of dollars and gained excessive powers to control everything, from business and labor to social media and entertainment in the Global South. Digital colonialism is now engulfing the world’. The US quest for domination through externalised migration policing infrastructure goes hand in hand with its geopolitical and corporate designs for economic power.

These forms of infrastructural digital power pose unique challenges for documentation and ultimately for any form of systemic change. Challenges include blurred lines of responsibility, mission, and function; governments and corporate actors are seen or presented as passive conduits or intermediaries in digital public infrastructure; and infrastructures can easily appear to be ‘ahistorical’ and motiveless. In Mexico and Central America, migration control converges with ongoing US foreign policing operations (such as the war on drugs, and gang wars). We explore the several simultaneous effects of this complex merger: the turn to digital infrastructure; its relationship to violence and human suffering; and its foreclosure of accountability for these harms.
Digital border infrastructure in your phone: Information and Communications Technology (ICT) policing techniques along migration routes

Surveillance infrastructure is tangible in physical migration detention centres and in police arrests: mugshots, cheek swabs, confiscation of the detainee’s mobile phone. The deepening integration of daily life, telecommunications and computers open extensive avenues for more covert, opportunistic surveillance of private communications and activity by users who rely on social media, mobile communication and messaging apps. The surveillance of mobile phones and social media ranges from overt disclosure requirements for visa and benefits applications to government listing and tracking of protesters and other ‘undesirable’ actors. Migrant surveillance is immersed in these control schemes where surveillance technology serves as a silent tool for government violence and repression.

This has had an impact on how migrants travel and keep safe, such as through safety in numbers. Travelling in caravans has therefore become both a survival and a protest strategy: sources of both physical and economic security (external link)
and opposition (external link)
to the economic policies that contributed to their displacement. Social media and messaging apps are key tools for the coordination of caravans and for migrants more broadly. Migrants use these tools to identify routes, look for shelter and food, communicate with their support networks, warn each other about risks (external link)
, and coordinate travel. Governments as well as organised crime understand these dynamics and use these same tools to monitor and extort migrants.

On 5 June 2019, Irineo Mujica, from Sin Fronteras – a civil society organisation (CSO) dedicated to the protection of human rights of migrants in Mexico and the US, and which has supported multiple migrant caravans – was arrested in Mexico, falsely charged with human trafficking (external link)
. Mujica appeared in the CBP’s watchlist database published in 2019 (external link)
that contained photos, names, professions, and other details of journalists, activists, and social media influencers both from Mexico and the US with links to the migrant caravan.

A DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) report (external link)
on the database and other surveillance practices found that CBP established electronic alerts (lookouts) on journalists, attorneys, and advocates who were connected by social media to the migrant caravans. Those tagged by the lookouts were constantly flagged for secondary screening (external link)
when entering the US, and interrogated about their work, organisation, family, education, and political leanings.

The weaponisation of such information had grim effects on the Mexican side of the border. According to Sin Fronteras activist Alex Mensing (external link)
, after the CBP shared information gathered through lookouts with the Mexican government, other members from his organisation who assisted migrant caravans in the same period saw an increase in border scrutiny and death threats (external link)
. Organising and supporting migrants threatens lucrative operations that depend on the criminalisation of migration across the region. Civil society assistance makes migrants less prone to kidnapping and extortion, which therefore reduces the income for organised crime linked to these activities, and, as a domino effect, bribes to authorities also drop, pitting the collective interests of such groups against activists and those providing humanitarian assistance.

Surveilling anyone who might pose a threat to the system has long been a generalised and systematic form of government control in Mexico. A leaked document from the NSO Group, the Israeli company that created Pegasus, revealed that 50,000 people were possible surveillance targets (external link)
in Mexico. The list included opposition politicians, journalists investigating government corruption and extrajudicial killings, activists advocating the taxing of sugary drinks, judges, academics, and international experts who investigated the case of the enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing of the 43 students, among others.

In 2022, mobile phones from two journalists and an activist who investigated abuses committed by the Mexican army were found to be infected with the malware Pegasus (external link)
. In 2020, the Mexican government sought to create a SIM card registry that would link to the card owner’s biometrics and other personal data. This would have intensified government digital surveillance via ICT infrastructure, and was opposed by civil society (external link)
.

CBP internal documents show (external link)
that government agencies across the border continually share information about the location of migrants, their origin, and the number of people in each group, even before they start to migrate. In 2018, US DHS agents infiltrated a WhatsApp group (external link)
of Honduran migrants travelling in a caravan of about 4,000. These policing practices are also being reproduced by the Mexican government.15

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Impact: Infrastructural violence and accountability deficits in globalised migration policing

Roberto M., a young man in El Salvador, was shot and taken away by police shortly after being deported from the US. The rural police officers who shot Roberto also threatened an eyewitness at gunpoint, telling him that Roberto was a gang member and if he revealed what he’d seen, the same would happen to him. Police in El Salvador receive data on gang-member affiliation from the US, and share these lists (external link)
with neighbourhood-level police where deportees plan to live. These databases have been found to be problematic and unreliable (external link)
. Police departments confirmed (external link)
that this information is used to target people (external link)
: ‘We think that if a person wasn’t wanted in the United States, it must be because the deported person is bad’.

Violence can increasingly be tied to digital border technologies, particularly in combination with one another and with physical and environmental realities that envelop them. Studies show the effects of integrated fixed-tower surveillance on migrant mortality rates in Arizona’s Altar Valley. Here, digital infrastructure merges with the ineffective yet longstanding US deterrence policy that purposefully makes migration routes more dangerous, on the theory that migrants would not risk the journey. The fusion of technology and policies that inflict deliberate harm produces these predictable results of increased migrant deaths (external link)
.

The story of Roberto M. and the witness to his post-deportation shooting and disappearance in El Salvador reflects another pattern of violence tied to information-sharing through digital infrastructures. The criminologist Ana Muñiz documents a ‘cycle of violent policing, migration, more violent policing, detention, deportation, violent policing, migration, and so on’, in which the labels themselves (‘criminal alien’ or ‘gang member’) become inescapable vectors of precarity.16 Such labels channel individuals into a ‘sort of statelessness’ as constant, quantifiable scapegoats that provide an easy diversion for state security forces and corporations that produce and perpetuate the ‘structural causes of violence’.17

Digital infrastructure merges not with a physical terrain, but with pre-existing social and political factors that make violence a foregone conclusion. Today’s multipurpose digital infrastructure also permits the efficient incorporation of new undesirable criminalised categories, including ‘caravan organisers’ or ‘migration promoters’ – as in El Salvador’s attempt (external link)
to reform its penal code, criminalising the ‘promotion of migration’ on social media.
Challenges and way forward

We are interested in developing deeper knowledge about the political origins of these infrastructures to challenge the violence of global migration control systems. This essay only sets out the field of engagement. Far more collective work is required to document and design models of resistance to meet such challenges.

The diffuse and structural nature of power behind the seemingly ahistorical, and motiveless characteristics of digital infrastructures undermine classic approaches to accountability. Furthermore, the familiar national and international judicial avenues to hold perpetrators of these forms of indirect violence responsible – however imperfect or ineffective they may already be – are exceptionally ill-suited to the conditions at play in the migration policing context specifically, for several reasons.

First, the technologies in use such as biometric databases, and the means of using civilian technologies like social media and other ICTs, are simply not designed to respect or be held to democratic scrutiny; they are military-grade and converted for use in quasi-militarised spaces, by institutions permeated with military ideology. Nearly a third of CBP personnel previously served in the US military. Biometric surveillance technologies advanced by leaps and bounds within US military operations before being integrated with ‘civilian’ border policing. Private-sector military contractors play an integral role in this transition.

As journalist Annie Jacobsen documents, as part of the US military biometric data-collection in Afghanistan, Palantir Technologies served as a critical link between US intelligence operations to track and kill military targets and quasi-civilian policing operations like the piloting of rapid DNA samples from migrant families at the US border in 2019.18 Today, the biometric kits used in Afghanistan, some still storing biometric data collected on the battlefield, are for sale on eBay (external link)
.

Second, justice and oversight bodies are ill-equipped to serve their intended function in this ecosystem. Within criminal proceedings and investigations, the use of technologies that capture and record evidence of allegedly criminal activity or purport to biometrically match records are extremely difficult to challenge because of their scientific veneer and opaque data-collection and analysis methods, which leaves no practical room (external link)
to impeach or exclude such evidence. The design of technologies that predetermine risk factors keyed to criminalised behaviour, including migration, contravenes the presumption of innocence. In the civil context, national-level justice mechanisms deny standing to non-nationals located outside the US who are victims of violations linked to digital surveillance.

Finally, there are huge incentives for both state and corporate power to hide violence. The political positioning of ‘smart borders’ as more ‘humane’ conceals the state’s role in violence and insulates corporations from negative PR or constraints by participating in repugnant markets. Their task is made easy by rendering physical pain abstract rather than affecting real human beings,19 and features of the data economy like the way corporates have helped the movement towards running government functions like private digital platforms.

Mitigation ‘risk assessment’ tools like data protection or human rights impact assessments provide cover (external link)
, favouring the continuation of these business practices because firms undertake them voluntarily and face little or no consequences for a poor risk assessment. Unsurprisingly, these industry-led tools often fail to provide (external link)
a means for real accountability; they reveal scant information that would be actionable if and when products do cause harm; and the burden of proving rights violations and finding an effective remedy (external link)
after the fact is shouldered entirely by victims. The interests of powerful actors converge around a web of financial stakes in the system, leading to the aggressive harassment and potential silencing of activists as the case of Irineo Mujica and Sin Fronteras illustrates.

We need tools and methods for transnational cooperation to document, gather and share information safely, and organise. Fusing new understandings about how digital power functions within existing resistance movements transnationally, holds potential for challenges to the digital infrastructure of border externalisation.

We are in the initial stages of our collective effort to understand and expose this digital infrastructure. Through this analysis, we can begin to identify the interventions to start to tear it apart and break it down. Transnational organising against tech corporations offers opportunities for shared understanding and meaningful solidarity. This year, organisations in France and Kenya, with support from actors in other countries, sued biometrics giant IDEMIA (external link)
for its failure to meet even minimum human rights standards of due diligence as it reaps billions in secret border security tech sales to low- and middle-income countries. This emerged from collaborative evidence-gathering and organising across borders.

As the US military establishment recognised decades ago: whoever dominates the field of externalised borders defines ‘friend and foe’ everywhere.20 The faster the US establishes economic and political dominance over digital migration-control infrastructure, the greater its security in maintaining global digital power. Digital infrastructure serves multiple purposes at once, but the ultimate geopolitical function is raw, generalised power over global affairs. The tools examined here will ‘contain’ human life within spaces of catastrophic violence, by design. This specific effect betrays the most fundamental commitments of international human rights and humanitarian law in the face of unprecedented challenges to human survival across most of the world. But this pernicious effect is also ruthlessly beside the point.

In reality, as facets of infrastructural power, the technologies that fix the ‘calculation of who must live and who must die’22 do not do so as an end in itself, but in the service of power and its reproduction in this digital age.23 In this way the complicity of state and corporate actors in the production of violence is cast in the starkest relief. This geopolitical analysis is our starting point for building resistance towards transformation.

▻https://www.tni.org/en/article/the-everywhere-border
#externalisation #migrations #frontières #réfugiés #USA #Etats-Unis #infrastructure #infrastructure_numérique #violence #violence_d'Etat #surveillance #caravane #whatsapp #criminalisation_de_la_migration #arrestation #technologie #technologie_intelligente #externalisation_des_contrôles_frontaliers #bases_de_données #interopérabilité #empreintes_digitales #coopération_policière #impérialisme #biométrie #Mérida_Initiative #Central_American_Regional_Security_Initiative #war_on_drugs #Amérique_centrale #Mexique #Programa_Frontera_Sur #rétention #détention_administrative #ICE #smart_borders #frontières_intelligentes #Dev_Technology #General_Dynamics #Amazon_Web_Services #complexe_militaro-industriel #NEC #Instituto_Nacional_de_Migración (#INM) #Guatemala #Biometric_Identification_Transnational_Migration_Alert_Program (#BITMAP) #Criminal_History_Information_Sharing (#CHIS) #criminalité #Homeland_Advanced_Recognition_Technology_System (#HART) #IDENT #Peraton #Veritas_Capital #reconnaissance_faciale #ADN #DOS_INL #infrastructural_geopolitics #géopolitique #SWIFT #multinationales #colonialisme_numérique #téléphones_portables #smartphones #criminalisation_de_la_solidarité #NSO_Group #border_deaths #décès #morts_aux_frontières #mourir_aux_frontières

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▻https://lvsl.fr/laxe-budapest-tel-aviv-au-dela-des-convergences-ideologiques

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#International #CPI #extrême_droite #Fidesz #génocide #Likoud #NSO #Orban

#Pegasus : l’Espagne « suspend » son enquête sur les piratages de ses ministres

Le juge en charge de ce dossier dénonce l’absence « absolue » de coopération d’Israël pour contraindre #NSOGroup, l’entreprise qui commercialise le logiciel espion, à répondre dans le cadre de l’enquête.

▻https://www.lemonde.fr/projet-pegasus/article/2023/07/12/pegasus-l-espagne-suspend-son-enquete-sur-les-piratages-de-ses-ministres_618

Nikki Haley slams foreign lobbyists while accepting funds from them - ABC News
▻https://abcnews.go.com/US/nikki-haley-slams-foreign-lobbyists-fundraising/story?id=99704708

https://s.abcnews.com/images/US/nikki-haley-iowa-ap-ps-230531_1685542838909_hpMain_16x9_992.jpg

One of Haley’s top fundraisers, Oswaldo Palomo, the managing director of Connecticut-based consulting firm Chartwell Strategy Group, is himself a registered foreign agent.

[…]

According to FARA registration records, Palomo represents a number of foreign entities, including the government of Georgia in Eastern Europe, which he had worked for at least since 2018, and the Social Democratic Party of Romania, one of his more recent clients. Each of those clients pays him between $35,000 and $40,000 each month, and he has reported making contacts with hundreds of U.S. lawmakers in the course of his #lobbying, FARA filings show.

Palomo also represents the Israeli cyberintelligence firm #NSO Group, and the partially state-owned Chinese information technology company iFLYTEK, and has previously also worked for the government of Kosovo.

Palomo’s work has brought him hundreds of thousands of dollars from each of his foreign clients over the last six months, according to filings.

#états-unis

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.

#surveillance

Une nouvelle affaire d’espionnage implique la société de surveillance israélienne #NSO en Jordanie
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/04/08/une-nouvelle-affaire-d-espionnage-implique-la-societe-de-surveillance-israel

« Le fait que le ciblage que nous avons découvert ait eu lieu après la large publicité faite autour du procès intenté par Apple est à relever ; une entreprise qui respecterait vraiment ces préoccupations aurait au moins mis en pause les opérations de ses clients gouvernementaux, comme la Jordanie, dont les antécédents en matière de violation des droits de l’homme ont été largement documentés », notent les rédacteurs de Front Line Defenders et du Citizen Lab.

#impunité #crimes #sionisme

Le directeur exécutif du groupe israélien de cybersécurité NSO quitte ses fonctions
25 janvier 2022 Par Le Figaro avec AFP
▻https://www.lefigaro.fr/secteur/high-tech/le-directeur-executif-du-groupe-israelien-de-cybersecurite-nso-quitte-ses-f

Les départs se multiplient depuis que l’entreprise technologique se trouve au cœur d’un scandale d’espionnage depuis plusieurs mois.

Le directeur exécutif de NSO, fabricant du logiciel d’espionnage Pegasus, a quitté mardi ses fonctions tout en assurant que ce départ n’était pas lié aux controverses récentes concernant cette société israélienne de cybersécurité.

NSO s’est retrouvé exposé en 2021 après des enquêtes publiées par un consortium de 17 médias internationaux affirmant que Pegasus avait permis d’espionner les téléphones de journalistes, d’hommes politiques parmi lesquels des chefs d’États, des militants et des chefs d’entreprise dans différents pays.

Et la semaine dernière, la justice israélienne a annoncé l’ouverture d’une enquête sur l’utilisation du logiciel espion par la police à la suite d’affirmations en ce sens dans la presse locale.
Départ du PDG en novembre dernier

Mardi, NSO a confirmé à l’AFP le départ de son directeur exécutif, Asher Levy, en poste depuis 2020. « Mais il n’y a pas de lien entre mon départ et des publications récentes liées à NSO », a affirmé M. Levy dans une déclaration transmise à l’AFP par la société de cybersécurité basée en banlieue de la métropole économique Tel-Aviv.

Il précise avoir été nommé à l’époque à son poste par Novlepina Capital, alors un des principaux actionnaires de NSO. « Après un changement de propriété et le transfert (des parts) au fonds BRG (Berkeley Research Group, ndlr) j’avais annoncé aux nouveaux propriétaires que je considérais qu’il était mieux pour eux de nommer à la direction une nouvelle personne pour les représenter », a ajouté M. Levy.

En novembre dernier, Isaac Benbenisti, vice-président promu PDG deux semaines auparavant, avait claqué la porte en raison des difficultés du groupe aux États-Unis, poussant ainsi son fondateur Shalev Hulio, à reprendre son poste à la tête de NSO.

#NSO #Pegasus

The Uganda files: How Israel arms brutal dictators who recruit child soldiers
Eitay Mack | Dec. 24, 2021 | Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.HIGHLIGHT.MAGAZINE-uganda-docs-how-israel-arms-brutal-dictators-wh

https://img.haarets.co.il/img/1.10491054/2474218772.jpg

Newly declassified Israeli Foreign Ministry documents show that Jerusalem has aided and abetted brutal leaders and military forces in Uganda for years

It was a startling declaration. After all, it’s not every day that the U.S. Treasury Department announces that two Israeli companies – in this case, NSO and Candiru – are to be placed on the list of entities operating contrary to America’s national interest. That exceptional decision, about a month ago, did not come about in a vacuum. Washington discovered that the two offensive-cyber firms sold foreign governments means of surveillance that were used against government officials as well as political activists, journalists and business people in those countries.

Shedding some light on the details, the Reuters news agency reported that NSO’s Pegasus software had been used to hack into the phones of nine American diplomats who deal with matters related to Uganda. The report did not say who purchased the spyware from NSO, but everything points to the Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni. It’s doubtful that there are many other leaders who might be desperate enough to risk breaching the phones of American officials. Museveni, who believed that Washington was fed up with him and acted to overcome vote-rigging efforts prior to last January’s presidential election and to assist the opposition movement to topple him – apparently saw no other way out.

Added to the information involving that episode are recently declassified documents from Israel’s State Archives, which illuminate the aid that Israel gave Ugandan dictators over the years. There’s a fixed pattern behind this support: First, Israel’s government helps the ruler in his effort to crush whatever forces are revolting against him, but then if the attempt to topple the government succeeds, Israel immediately changes sides and supports the new regime, with no regrets for the government with which it had cooperated earlier. Moreover, Israel typically extends such aid, in the form of diplomacy and arms, even when the regime’s brutal acts, the iron fist it wields against opponents and even its use of children in battle are well known.

The pattern repeated itself with Museveni. The archival documents reveal that in July 1985, the commander of the Ugandan army, Gen. Tito Okello, who was then also ruling the country with a brutal hand, requested military aid from Israel to quell the rebel forces opposing him. The strongest and best organized of the rebel groups was the National Resistance Army, the NRA, which was led by Museveni. According to reports filed by Foreign Ministry officials, Israel decided to assist Okello to stamp out Museveni’s uprising, in exchange for formal renewal of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which had been severed by President Idi Amin in 1972.

To conceal the quid pro quo behind the thaw in relations, the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry used the services of former diplomat and ex-coordinator of government activities in Lebanon, Uri Lubrani, who was a private businessman at the time. Companies he had ties with carried out the transactions on behalf of the Defense Ministry, and Lubrani himself visited Uganda on several occasions in order to coordinate weapons shipments from Israel. The connection between Israel and Okello is reflected in cables and minutes from a number of meetings held around that time. In November 1985, for example, Gen. Okello’s son visited Israel; the following month, Lubrani, a representative of the Mossad and the commander of the Border Police visited Uganda; on January 10, 1986, Okello’s defense minister arrived in Israel for a visit.

Lubrani explained the importance of the arms deliveries in a now-declassified report he drew up on January 19, 1986: “Indeed, we carried out (fortunately without these facts having been leaked to date) three special flights of chartered planes to send to Entebbe three shipments of combat material, which were apparently important to the regime both substantively and in terms of the timing, and this helped us pave the way toward advancing the effort to renew relations.”

‘No great bargain’

Officials at the two Israeli ministries knew that Okello’s government was tottering and that Museveni stood a good chance of toppling it with support he was receiving from Libya. However, they believed that in any case, Museveni would not easily be able to reverse the diplomatic progress achieved between the two countries. In a cable dated November 22, 1985, the director of the Africa Desk in the Foreign Ministry wrote: “There is no stability since the coup, and the government is not in control of the whole country. The rest is controlled by the rebels, and their forces are more united… We are being guided by the view that the establishment of relations will also be binding on the future governments of Uganda, and therefore we have an interest in diplomatic ties despite the instability of the present government.”

Additional cables show that from December 1985 until early January 1986, Israel sent three planes full of weapons and that in exchange Gen. Okello agreed that the two countries would appoint nonresident diplomatic representatives.

On December 19, Museveni agreed to sign a cease-fire agreement – which in Okello’s assessment was due to the deterrence provided by the Israeli arms. However, the agreement soon collapsed and the fighting resumed. Israel, too, continued to be involved in the goings-on in the African country. On January 19, 1986, Arye Oded, Israel’s representative to Uganda, visited the capital, Kampala, and on January 22, Okello’s helicopters fired Israeli-supplied rockets at Museveni’s rebels, forcing them to withdraw from several positions they had captured.

But the Israeli assistance was of no avail. On January 26, Museveni’s forces took Kampala, and Gen. Okello’s junta fled to the north of the country to continue the fight from there.

From January 24, when the foreign and defense ministries realized that Museveni stood a good chance of victory, they decided to halt the arms shipments and rejected every subsequent request for aid from Okello – who had now morphed from ruler to rebel. According to a cable sent by Arye Oded on January 26, a shipment of 2,000 rockets, payment for which had apparently already been transferred to Israel, was halted. In a cable he had sent two days earlier, Oded had noted that these were rockets “of the type they purchased in the third shipment, and which have proved their effectiveness.” The cessation of arms deliveries at this critical moment not only diminished the military capability of Okello’s forces, it was also a severe blow to their morale.

According to a cable sent by Avi Primor, director of the Foreign Ministry’s Africa Desk, four days after the conquest of Kampala and the consequent takeover by the new regime, a representative from Museveni was already in contact with the Israeli Embassy in Washington. The next day, Israeli representatives met with his envoys in Nairobi, and contacts between the sides began. Museveni’s representatives complained that Israel had armed Okello’s faction and had ignored their requests for aid – to which the Israelis replied that Israel supports governments, not rebels. Henceforth the Israeli Defense Ministry would back Museveni’s regime, and train and arm his military forces.

As the cables in the state archives show, the foreign and defense ministries were well aware that Libya, under Muammar Gadhafi, was supporting the new regime of Museveni and that the latter was using child soldiers in battles his forces were fighting. For example, in late August 1986 the Israeli ambassador to Swaziland, Shlomo Dayan, alerted his colleagues to the fact that Uganda was mobilizing children for the military. He also sent the director of the Foreign Ministry’s Africa Desk an article about children who had been deployed as combat personnel in the NRA, “which you may find of interest.” Apparently the director didn’t agree.

Israel also knew that forces under the new government had killed thousands and that Museveni had arrested government ministers and political rivals, executed dozens of jailed detainees and was working to establish a one-party regime. None of this brought a halt to bilateral contacts, nor did Museveni’s decision to approve the opening of a Palestine Liberation Organization office in Kampala, or the visit by Libyan ruler Gadhafi to Uganda in September 1986.

In early September 1987, senior Foreign Ministry figures met with representatives of the U.S. State Department. In the meeting, the head of the department’s Bureau of African Affairs noted that though Museveni “is no great bargain, he is Uganda’s last chance to stand on its feet.”

Museveni was definitely not a “great bargain,” but he quickly became a useful dictator in the eyes of Israel and the United States. If there’s anyone in the world who’s entitled to a pension from Israel’s Defense Ministry, it’s Museveni. Not least, because he helped Israel and the United States in their struggle against the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir. Museveni also tried to promote Israeli and American interests in Rwanda, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo he was instrumental in the rise to power of the Kabila family, which had extensive security and economic ties with the Jewish state and many of its businesspeople.

When an independent state was established in South Sudan under Salva Kiir in 2011, sparking a civil war two years later, Israel sought a way to continue supporting the new regime, even though it had perpetrated crimes against humanity and was using child soldiers. Again Museveni came to the rescue and sent Kiir shipments of Israeli arms, in 2014. Israeli officials later told an investigative team from the United Nations Security Council that they had not known about this shipment, but made no effort to look into the matter and did not halt the deliveries to Museveni, despite the suspicion that he was sending them on.

Two birds with one stone

In the past year, Museveni has realized that his role as a useful dictator has ended. Despite the violence and rampant corruption characterizing his regime, Uganda has seen the rise of one of the most impressive and vibrant opposition movements in Africa, one that is sweeping many young Ugandans in its wake. It’s difficult today to support suppression of this opposition movement without incurring international wrath. In addition, geopolitical shifts have made Museveni less relevant from the perspective of the United States. Omar al-Bashir is gone, South Sudan is under a Security Council embargo and President Kiir has become a pariah.

But the Israeli Defense Ministry never misses an opportunity: If indeed Israeli-developed offensive cyber technology was sold to Uganda, the export can be assumed to have had ministry authorization. That green light would have been given even though ministry officials knew that Museveni was fighting for his political life and had become embroiled in disputes with the United States. The government in Kampala even dared on January 16 of this year to prevent the U.S. ambassador to the country from visiting the leader of the opposition, Bobi Wine, while he was being held under house arrest. Last February, The New York Times reported that President Joe Biden had lost patience with Museveni and was considering imposing sanctions on him and others responsible in Uganda for election-related violence and infringement of democracy, in January.

As has been reported in the past, Israel’s NSO company apparently does not balk at selling surveillance systems to regimes that have no red lines with regard to their citizenry. As long as those affected by Pegasus are civilians, the company seems not to be concerned – although now even it is appalled that its technology was used against U.S. diplomats.

This is an excellent opportunity for the United States to kill two birds with one stone – without sentiment: NSO and Museveni. But in contrast to the legal entanglements plaguing the company and the dictator, justice will likely skip over the Israeli Defense Ministry once more. Undoubtedly at some point in the future the ministry will authorize the sale of yet another company’s malware to the next dictator who will follow Museveni.

#archives_israéliennes #Ouganda #IsraelOuganda

iPhone hack: #NSO malware builds a computer inside your phone to steal data | New Scientist
▻https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302113-nso-iphone-malware-builds-a-computer-inside-your-phone-to-stea

https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/16145607/PRI_215373210.jpg

#immunité

Israël : l’étau se resserre autour de la société mère de Pegasus
Alice Froussard – 6 décembre 2021 à 12h59 — Mediapart
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/061221/israel-l-etau-se-resserre-autour-de-la-societe-mere-de-pegasus

https://static.mediapart.fr/etmagine/og/journal/files/2021/12/06/20211206-img-israel-l-etau-se-resserre-autour-de-la-societe-mere-de-pegasus-1.jpg

Le scandale international autour de son logiciel d’espionnage Pegasus continue à plomber l’entreprise israélienne NSO Group, placée sur la liste noire du commerce américain et récemment attaquée en justice par Apple.

Tel-Aviv (Israël).– C’est l’année la plus dramatique de l’histoire du groupe. En Israël comme ailleurs, NSO – d’après les initiales des prénoms de ses trois fondateurs, Niv Carmi, Shalev Hulio et Omri Lavie – est inséparable de Pegasus, le célèbre logiciel espion capable d’infiltrer n’importe quel smartphone et d’en extraire, à distance, toutes les informations sans que son utilisateur ou son utilisatrice n’ait besoin de cliquer sur un lien malveillant. (...)

#Pegasus #NSO

Pegasus, Big Brother du XXIe siècle - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLxs-gBVzdc

Controverse - Pegasus, Big Brother du XXIe siècle
20 octobre 2021

Rencontre avec :
Edwy Plenel,

René Backmann, journaliste, spécialiste du Proche-Orient. Il a été chef du service « Monde » au Nouvel Observateur pendant plus de dix ans et maintenant pour Mediapart. Il a obtenu, en 1991, le prix Mumm pour son enquête sur les financiers de l’islam intégriste.

Rosa Moussaoui, journaliste grand reporter à L’Humanité. Elle a couvert une grande variété de sujets pour ce quotidien depuis plus de 17 ans. Elle a notamment rédigé de nombreux articles au sujet du Maroc, en particulier sur l’état des droits humains dans le pays.

Modération : Dominique Vidal, journaliste et historien.

#Pegasus #NSO

Bennett and Macron agree to deal with NSO scandal ’discreetly’ at climate talks
Lee Yaron | Nov. 1, 2021 | Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-bennett-to-discuss-iran-nso-with-macron-at-climate-change-summit-1

https://img.haarets.co.il/img/1.10343843/657831270.jpg?precrop=1600,930,x0,y36&height=698&width=1200

Earlier at the Glasgow climate summit, Bennett asked Australia’s Morrison to designate Hezbollah a terror organization and condemn Iran at the board meeting of the UN’s nuclear watchdog

GLASGOW – Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and French President Emmanuel Macron agreed on Monday to deal “discreetly” with the alleged hacking by Israeli firm NSO’s spyware on French targets, including the president himself, an Israeli source said.

The company’s Pegasus software was reportedly used to surveil French phones, with Macron on a Moroccan list of targets, according to Le Monde.

“It was agreed between the leaders that the subject will continue to be handled discreetly and professionally, and with the spirit of transparency between the two sides,” the unnamed official said.

The two leaders discussed global challenges, including Syria and Lebanon, while Bennett’s office said that Iran was a priority in the talks at the Glasgow climate summit.

Earlier on Monday, Bennett met with Australian counterpart Scott Morrison at the UN and discussed the Iranian threat and the Iran-backed group Hezbollah.

Bennett asked Morrison to officially designate Hezbollah a terror organization, and both leaders discussed the Iranian threat at length. He also requested Morrison to harshly condemn Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors meeting slated for later this month.

The prime minister told Morrison he expects to further strengthen the ties between Israel and Australia and thanked him for Australia’s steadfast support of Israel in the international arena.

Touching on climate change, Bennett told Morrison that “Israel had pledged to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2050,” adding that “this matter should be politicized. We are talking about our children’s future.”

Bennett also invited Morrison and his wife for an official visit in Israel.

Reuters contributed to this report .

#Pegasus #IsraelFrance #NSO

Maroc. La surveillance des journalistes n’a pas attendu Pegasus | Alexandre Garnier et Eliott Aubert
▻https://orientxxi.info/magazine/maroc-la-surveillance-des-journalistes-n-a-pas-attendu-pegasus,4994

L’enquête de Forbidden Stories a mis au jour en juillet 2021 l’usage intensif du logiciel israélien Pegasus pour venir à bout de la presse indépendante au Maroc. Mais depuis des décennies, des journalistes marocains subissent surveillance et harcèlement, grâce notamment à des logiciels fournis par des sociétés italiennes et françaises. Source : Orient XXI

#pegasus (comment ça marche ?)

Derrière Pegasus : le mode d’emploi d’un logiciel espion
▻https://theconversation.com/derriere-pegasus-le-mode-demploi-dun-logiciel-espion-164742

Comment fonctionne Pegasus
Le logiciel Pegasus est développé par l’entreprise israélienne NSO Group. C’est un logiciel espion (spyware) visant les smartphones dont l’objectif est de siphonner l’ensemble de ses données : coordonnées GPS, contenus des messages, écoute des appels, bref tout ce qui passe par votre téléphone est vu, lu et entendu par le logiciel et transmis à son utilisateur (l’attaquant). Ce logiciel espion évolue depuis plusieurs années et s’adapte aux évolutions de niveaux de sécurité des téléphones.

#NSO #spyware #surveillance

Gérard Araud : « On oublie le bon usage de Pegasus, qui a déjoué des attaques terroristes »
Paris Match | Publié le 29/07/2021 | Interview Emilie Lanez
▻https://www.parismatch.com/Actu/Societe/Ge-rard-Araud-On-oublie-le-bon-usage-de-Pegasus-qui-a-de-joue-des-attaqu

https://resize-parismatch.lanmedia.fr/r/940,628/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/actu/societe/ge-rard-araud-on-oublie-le-bon-usage-de-pegasus-qui-a-de-joue-des-attaques-terroristes-1750813/28824741-1-fre-FR/Ge-rard-Araud-On-oublie-le-bon-usage-de-Pegasus-qui-a-de-joue-des-attaques-terroristes.jpg

Retraité, l’ancien ambassadeur de France à Washington Gérard Araud fut, de septembre 2019 à septembre 2020, recruté comme conseiller extérieur par l’entreprise NSO, le fabricant de Pegasus.

Paris Match : Quelle était votre fonction lorsque vous travailliez pour NSO ?
Gérard Araud : Il m’a été demandé de mettre en place des processus de prise de décision, d’aider à établir des listes de pays selon leur fonctionnement démocratique, leurs positions géostratégiques. Puis j’ai réfléchi avec la direction aux questions et conditions qu’il fallait imposer aux acheteurs. Nous avons aussi organisé des procédures internes afin que des lanceurs d’alerte puissent se manifester sereinement et nous avons travaillé à une meilleure représentation du personnel dans les prises de décision. (...)

#Pegasus #NSO

« On voyait bien toutes les dérives possibles » de Pegasus : un ex-conseiller NSO témoigne
▻https://www.sudouest.fr/international/on-voyait-bien-toutes-les-derives-possibles-de-pegasus-un-ex-conseiller-nso

#Gérard_Araud, ancien ambassadeur de France, a été consultant auprès de NSO Group en 2019. Aujourd’hui retraité, il témoigne de cette entreprise aux allures de « start-up technologique » qui a conçu le logiciel espion Pegasus

Peu de personnes extérieures ont accès au monde ultra-secret de NSO Group, le fabricant israélien du logiciel espion Pegasus, au cœur d’un scandale mondial de piratage téléphonique. Gérard Araud, ancien ambassadeur de France, est l’une d’entre elles.

Le diplomate récemment retraité a pris un poste de consultant auprès de NSO en 2019, pour conseiller sur les questions liées aux droits humains, peu après avoir quitté son poste d’ambassadeur de France à Washington pendant les années tumultueuses de la présidence de Donald Trump. « J’y suis allé parce que ça m’intéressait. C’était un monde nouveau (pour moi) », a expliqué par téléphone Gérard Araud, qui a également été ambassadeur de France en Israël au début des années 2000.

« Ils votent tous à gauche naturellement… »
Dans les bureaux de NSO, il découvre l’environnement typique d’une start-up technologique : des équipes de programmeurs « tous âgés de 25 à 30 ans, en tongs, en t-shirts noirs, tous titulaires d’un doctorat en computer science (sciences informatiques). Ils votent tous à gauche naturellement… »

Sa mission d’un an à partir de septembre 2019, en compagnie de deux autres consultants externes américains, consistait à examiner comment l’entreprise pouvait améliorer son bilan en matière de droits humains après une série de faits divers négatifs. Plus tôt cette année-là, la technologie du groupe avait été liée à l’espionnage ou à la tentative d’espionnage du journaliste saoudien Jamal Khashoggi, assassiné par les forces de sécurité saoudiennes, ce que NSO a démenti.

L’entreprise a été rachetée en 2019 par un groupe de capital-investissement basé à Londres, Novalpina, qui a engagé Gérard Araud pour qu’il émette des recommandations visant à rendre les procédures de sécurité « plus rigoureuses et un peu plus systématiques », selon lui.

« Comme une vente d’armes »
Depuis lundi, un consortium de médias, dont Le Monde et Franceinfo, a révélé des failles présumées dans ces procédures. Les organisations Forbidden Stories et Amnesty International ont obtenu une liste de 50 000 numéros de téléphone, sélectionnés par les clients de NSO depuis 2016 pour être potentiellement surveillés, et l’ont partagée avec ce consortium de 17 médias. NSO Group a nié l’existence d’une telle liste, qui comprendraient militants des droits de l’homme, journalistes, politiciens d’opposition et même dirigeants mondiaux.

Pegasus est considéré comme l’un des plus puissants outils de piratage de téléphones portables disponibles, permettant aux clients de lire secrètement tous les messages d’une cible, de suivre sa localisation et même d’utiliser sa caméra et son microphone à distance.

Son exportation est réglementée « comme une vente d’armes », explique Gérard Araud. NSO doit donc demander l’approbation du gouvernement israélien pour le vendre, et les États clients signer un long contrat commercial stipulant comment le produit sera utilisé. Ils sont censés ne déployer Pegasus que pour lutter contre le crime organisé ou le terrorisme -argument commercial de la société- mais « on voyait bien toutes les dérives possibles d’ailleurs dont l’entreprise n’était pas toujours responsable », souligne l’ancien diplomate.

Backdoor ?
L’entreprise disposait-elle d’un moyen de vérifier le déploiement réel de son programme que certains souhaitent voir interdit ? Gérard Araud ne le croit pas. Pour lui, le seul levier dont dispose l’entreprise après avoir vendu Pegasus est de cesser de proposer des mises à jour logicielles aux clients s’il est prouvé qu’ils violent les termes du contrat. « C’est une petite entreprise privée, il doit y avoir quelques dizaines d’employés. Je ne pense pas qu’il puisse y avoir de suivi. »

Dans une entreprise qui pratique « une forme de secret extrême », il dit avoir néanmoins acquis la conviction que NSO Group travaillait avec les services secrets israéliens du Mossad, et peut-être avec la CIA. Selon lui, trois Américains siégeant au conseil consultatif du groupe avaient des liens avec l’agence de renseignement américaine, et la société a déclaré que sa technologie ne pouvait pas être utilisée pour cibler des numéros basés aux États-Unis.

« Il y avait ce point d’interrogation de la présence du Mossad ou de la CIA. Je pensais que c’était les deux, mais je n’avais aucune preuve, aucune preuve. Mais je pense que le Mossad et le CIA sont derrière, avec ce que l’on appelle ‘un backdoor’ » -terme signifiant que les services de sécurité seraient en mesure de surveiller le déploiement de Pegasus et éventuellement les renseignements recueillis en conséquence. Israël a nié avoir accès aux informations de Pegasus.

La cybersurveillance, une redoutable arme politico-commerciale pour Israël
▻https://orientxxi.info/magazine/la-cybersurveillance-une-redoutable-arme-politico-commerciale-pour-israe
Dans son livre L’État d’Israël contre les Juifs (La Découverte, février 2021) , Sylvain Cypel décrit les origines et l’activité de NSO et de ses semblables. Extraits.
Économie > Sylvain Cypel > 20 juillet 2021

(...) Toutes sortes de régimes, en effet, ont déjà fait appel à ces compétences-là. Une enquête approfondie publiée par Haaretz, fin 2018, dressait une première liste, non exclusive, des pays ayant acheté du matériel israélien de contrôle des populations et bénéficié des formations israéliennes. Des sociétés privées israéliennes ont vendu du matériel de collecte de renseignements a l’Indonésie, aux Philippines, a la Thaïlande, la Malaisie, le Bangladesh, le Vietnam, l’Angola, le Mozambique, la Zambie, le Botswana, le Swaziland, l’Éthiopie, le Sud-Soudan, le Nigeria, l’Ouganda, le Mexique, l’Équateur, El Salvador, Panama, Trinidad et Tobago, le Nicaragua, la République dominicaine, le Honduras, le Pérou, la Colombie, l’Azerbaïdjan, l’Ouzbékistan, le Kazakhstan, l’Arabie saoudite, les Émirats arabes unis et Bahreïn. Selon des sources officieuses, Israël vendrait ces matériels a plus de cent États. Le ministère de la Défense, dont l’imprimatur est obligatoire, n’en a jamais publié la liste. Par ailleurs, des dizaines de pays ont déjà fait appel aux « programmes de formation » israéliens à l’usage des services secrets, de la police et des forces armées, qui incluent désormais un recours de taille a la cybersurveillance. (…)

#Pegasus #NSO

« Projet Pegasus » : NSO Group au cœur du « soft power » d’Israël
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/projet-pegasus/article/2021/07/22/projet-pegasus-nso-group-au-c-ur-du-soft-power-d-israel_6089189_6088648.html

https://img.lemde.fr/2021/07/22/50/0/600/300/1440/720/60/0/6d069c2_645001528-000-1j61pc-media-appel.jpg

EnquêteL’entreprise à l’origine du logiciel espion Pegasus et le gouvernement israélien travaillent main dans la main pour nouer de nouvelles alliances et servir leurs intérêts sur la scène internationale.

Parcourir la liste des cibles du logiciel de surveillance Pegasus, un service fourni par l’entreprise israélienne NSO Group à une dizaine d’Etats du Proche-Orient, d’Afrique, d’Europe et d’Asie, c’est suivre une histoire de la diplomatie israélienne. Ces données, vastes mais encore partielles, partagées par l’organisation Forbidden Stories et Amnesty International avec dix-sept médias, dont Le Monde, accompagnent depuis une décennie l’expansion tous azimuts du « soft power » israélien. Elles en constituent une face sombre, discrète mais assumée.

Fondée en 2009, au moment du retour au pouvoir de l’ancien premier ministre Benyamin Nétanyahou (2009-2021), NSO a bénéficié de l’élargissement des relations diplomatiques d’Israël. Un moment est emblématique : juillet 2017. M. Nétanyahou accueille Narendra Modi à Tel-Aviv. C’est la première fois qu’un chef du gouvernement indien se rend dans le pays en vingt-cinq ans de relations diplomatiques. M. Modi est une prise de choix dans l’effort que mène M. Nétanyahou pour diversifier les alliances d’Israël.

Puissant, ultranationaliste, autoritaire et populiste, l’Indien vient signifier l’ouverture à Israël d’un marché en plein essor, et ne cherche à s’appesantir ni sur l’occupation des territoires palestiniens ni sur la question des droits de l’homme. Peu de temps après que les deux hommes ont posé pour les photographes, les pieds dans l’eau dans la Méditerrannée, l’Inde fait pour la première fois l’essai du logiciel espion Pegasus. Depuis lors, elle n’a cessé d’en user, moins contre de potentiels terroristes que contre des opposants, des journalistes et des défenseurs des droits humains.

Le service fourni par NSO pèse peu face aux contrats d’armement traditionnels qu’Israël et l’Inde négocient en 2017, portant sur des missiles et des systèmes de défense antiaériens, et évalués à 1,7 milliard d’euros. Mais M. Nétanyahou l’affirme, lui qui a cherché dès 2009 à favoriser la recherche et l’enseignement en matière de cybersécurité, et à mieux l’intégrer aux organes de défense : « Le cyber est une menace sérieuse et un business très lucratif. »

Globalement, « sur les 5 à 7 milliards d’euros que représentent annuellement les exportations militaires d’entreprises israéliennes [comme IAI, Elbit et Rafael], le cyber n’occupe qu’une portion modeste : à peine 3 % à 4 % », estime Eitay Mack, juriste et expert des exportations d’armes israéliennes, qui milite pour davantage de transparence dans ce domaine. (...)

#Payant

#Pegasus #NSO

Israel’s NSO and Pegasus are a clear and present danger to democracy around the world
Eitay Mack | Jul. 21, 2021 - Haaretz.com
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-backed-nso-pegasus-is-a-clear-present-danger-to-democracy-a

https://img.haarets.co.il/img/1.10016658/909331114.jpg?precrop=2188,1270,x0,y128&height=698&width=1200

NSO’s Pegasus spyware, a cyberweapon enabling state-sponsored terrorism against civil society, has outraged the world. In Israel, there’s complicity – or complete indifference

“The violation of Israeli settlers’ right to ice cream”: The Ben & Jerry’s “outrage” is what most of Israel’s media, government and the Israeli public have been obsessing over for the last 24 hours, while in the rest of the world, newspapers headlines have been publicizing Israeli surveillance company NSO’s complicity in the political persecution of journalists, lawyers, politicians and human rights activists.

Since 2017, when NSO’s involvement in political persecution in Mexico was exposed, there has been a steady flow of investigations around the world into its other human rights violations, and every few months more findings have been published.

And in Israel, there was, and is, general indifference, both in the public square and in the political sphere.

A charitable explanation of that indifference in Israel would be based as stemming from the (mistaken) belief that these were isolated, exceptional cases, or that the publications that exposed the misdoings were inherently “anti-Israel.”

But even now, when the trickle of information about NSO has become a tsunami, in particular its Pegasus spyware (believed to have been acquired by numerous authoritarian governments as a spyware weapon to target political opponents, journalists and human rights activists), Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling its products in the occupied territories is still the most discussed issue in Israel – and the trigger for the loudest outrage.

Perhaps there was never any reason to expect otherwise from a state that defines itself as democratic but, for 54 years, has been holding millions of Palestinians hostage to its whims.

After 12 years of Benjamin Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister, in which human rights activists and Knesset members were smeared as supporters of terrorism, critical journalists deemed enemies of the people and left-wing voters as traitors, why would the Israeli public, which had grown accustomed to view dissident voices as enemies, care about what happens to journalists in Azerbaijan, India or Hungary?

If Israel holds hundreds of Palestinians in administrative detention, without trial at all times, why would there be any outcry if new friends Saudi Arabia and Rwanda use an NSO system, born and bred in Israel, to incriminate opposition activists so they then rot in prison?

Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and other cabinet ministers decided it was urgent and essential to condemn in a unified demagogic wave the ice cream brand’s decision and even claimed, implicitly or explicitly, that it fueled antisemitism and terrorism.

But they all retain the right to remain silent regarding the Defense Ministry granting licenses to NSO, which serve in practice as licenses for state-sponsored terrorism against civil society around the world.

Even Meretz, the party which has traditionally championed human rights, has lost its voice. Now ensconced in government after 20 years of exile in opposition, with two senior government portfolios and representation in the foreign affairs-national security cabinet, the paty is now feigning innocence, or ignorance, and prefers to keep mum rather than fretting about a “minor” issue such as human rights.

Meretz has adopted the Machiavellian pragmatism of the Ministry of Defense, which, by licensing NSO, serially prioritizes the support of dubious allies to quash resolutions unfavorable to Israel in global forums - human rights and international law be damned.

It’s a dismal decline for a party that once led the Knesset to consider its moral conscience, proposing to amend the 2007 Defense Export Control Law to include a ban on exporting goods or services that could be used to violate human rights. Now-Minister Tamar Zandberg once filed a petition to actually revoke NSO’s export license to Mexico.

But now, Meretz is content to settle for a request for “clarification” from Defense Minister Benny Gantz. Why not demand that Gantz immediately freeze all NSO export licenses? What other clarifications does Meretz need? Would Meretz ask the science minister for “clarifications” as to whether the earth is round?

Two petitions have been filed in the courts regarding NSO’s export licenses. A gag order was issued in the court’s ruling in March 20, 2018 on the export of the company’s system to Mexico. Israeli Supreme Court President Justice Esther Hayut, and Justices Yosef Elron and Menachem Mazuz, who heard the petition, approved for publication only the bare fact that they’d rejected the petition to block sales to Mexico.

Judge Rachel Barkai, who heard another petition, following the exposure by Amnesty International of an attempt to attack one of its staff member with the Pegasus spyware, wasn’t satisfied with merely rejecting it but chose, in her ruling of 12 July 2020, to pay gratuitous tribute to the Ministry of Defense for its adherence to human rights norms in issuing licenses for defense exports.

Israel’s judicial system has thus serially missed opportunities to prevent NSO and Israel’s Ministry of Defense from becoming a real and present danger to democracy all over the world.

Two weeks ago, High Court justices Alex Stein, David Mintz and Anat Baron rejected a petition to revoke an export license to Russia granted by the Ministry of Defense to the Cellebrite system, which has been used to hack into the cellphones of activists in Alexei Navalny’s anti-Putin, anti-corruption organization.

The judges went even further, blocking further petitions on the issue, ruling that defense export policy, as the prerogative of the state, is not subject to judicial review - except for extreme cases “involving abuse of authority, conflict of interests or extremely unreasonable conduct.” It is no longer clear that there is a path through Israel’s courts to fight the sale of cybertech to repressive regimes.

Only time will tell whether escalating international pressure will succeed in changing the State of Israel’s defense export policy for the weaponry of spyware any more than international pressure is helping end the occupation. Clearly, past experience is no cause for optimism, no matter the riptide generated by the Pegasus revelations.

Eitay Mack is a human rights lawyer and activist based in Jerusalem specializing in the issue of Israel’s arms trade. He filed the petitions to revoke the NSO and Cellbrite defense export licenses and participated in writing the bill banning the export of defense-related goods or services that could be used to violate human rights mentioned in the article above

Translated from Hebrew by Ofer Neiman

#Pegasus #NSO

Israël : Le racket mondial de la cybercriminalité en Israël
(article publié le 04.08.2020)
Par Asa Winstanley
▻http://www.ism-france.org/analyses/Le-racket-mondial-de-la-cybercriminalite-en-Israel-article-publie-le-040

Au début de ce mois, un tribunal israélien a décidé que la célèbre société de logiciels espions de guerre cybernétique NSO Group conserverait sa licence d’exportation. Cette décision a été prise malgré le fait que les avocats d’Amnesty International ont présenté ce que le groupe de défense des droits de l’homme a décrit comme des « montagnes de preuves » concernant les crimes de NSO.

NSO est responsable de Pegasus, une cyber-arme sophistiquée (et coûteuse) qu’elle gère au nom de certains des pires auteurs de violations des droits de l’homme dans le monde - dont l’Arabie saoudite.

Pegasus envahit les téléphones des personnes ciblées, récupérant des masses de données privées, y compris des courriels, des textes, des photos, des fichiers et des mots de passe, et essentiellement tout ce à quoi vous pouvez penser qui vit sur un smartphone moderne.

La cyber-arme est capable d’allumer à distance les microphones et les caméras des smartphones, les transformant essentiellement en dispositifs d’espionnage travaillant contre leurs propriétaires.

Selon les experts, Pegasus a été utilisé pour cibler des journalistes, des défenseurs des droits de l’homme, des hommes politiques et des dissidents vivant sous des régimes oppressifs dans le monde entier.

Même Jamal Khashoggi - le chroniqueur saoudien en exil brutalement tué et démembré par des agents de Mohammed Bin Salman en 2018 - a été indirectement visé par le NSO au nom du régime saoudien meurtrier.

Avec le rejet par le tribunal israélien du procès d’Amnesty International, l’entreprise criminelle malveillante NSO a maintenant l’approbation officielle d’Israël - à la fois du gouvernement et du pouvoir judiciaire.

L’excuse selon laquelle la NSO est une entreprise privée ne tient pas debout. (...)

#Pegasus #NSO

« Projet Pegasus » : Emmanuel Macron a été ciblé par le Maroc
20 juillet 2021 Par Ellen Salvi | Mediapart
▻https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/200721/projet-pegasus-emmanuel-macron-ete-cible-par-le-maroc?onglet=full

https://static.mediapart.fr/etmagine/og/journal/files/2021/07/20/20210720-img-pegasus-macron-maroc-1.jpg

(...) Dans un communiqué transmis au consortium de journalistes, NSO affirme qu’Emmanuel Macron « n’a pas, et n’a jamais été, une cible ou n’a jamais été sélectionné comme une cible par des clients de NSO ». Comme le souligne Le Monde, la société israélienne ne précise pas sur quoi elle se base pour l’affirmer, alors qu’elle n’a « pas accès aux données de ses clients, qui doivent toutefois [lui] fournir ce type d’informations » en cas d’enquête. Le Maroc a quant à lui affirmé à plusieurs reprises ne pas être client de NSO Group ni utilisateur de Pegasus. (...)

(...) Nul doute que le Projet Pegasus engendrera lui aussi une explication entre la France et le Maroc, au regard des liens qu’entretiennent les deux pays et de leurs nombreuses coopérations, notamment en matière de renseignement. Le rôle joué par le gouvernement d’Israël, structurellement lié à la société NSO, interroge aussi. (...)

#Pegasus #NSO

Les États-Unis mettent hors service une société israélienne de logiciels d’espionnage Moon of Alabama
▻https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/07/us-takes-down-israeli-spy-software-company.html#more
▻https://lesakerfrancophone.fr/les-etats-unis-mettent-hors-service-une-societe-israelienne-de-lo

Un certain nombre de journaux, dans le monde entier, parlent aujourd’hui ►https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-gr de la société de piratage israélienne NSO qui vend des logiciels d’espionnage [nommés Pegasus, NdT] à divers régimes. Ce logiciel est ensuite utilisé pour espionner les téléphones des ennemis du régime, des adversaires politiques ou des journalistes qui déplaisent. Tout cela était déjà bien connu, mais l’histoire a pris un nouvel essor puisque plusieurs centaines de personnes qui sont espionnées peuvent maintenant être nommées.

La façon dont cela s’est produit est intéressante ▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2finvestigations%2fin :

Les téléphones sont apparus sur une liste de plus de 50 000 numéros concentrés dans des pays connus pour surveiller leurs citoyens et également connus pour avoir été clients de la société israélienne NSO Group, un leader mondial dans le secteur, en pleine expansion et largement non réglementé, des logiciels d’espionnage privés, selon l’enquête.

La liste ne permet pas de savoir qui y a inscrit les numéros, ni pourquoi, et on ignore combien de téléphones ont été ciblés ou surveillés. Mais l’analyse technique de 37 smartphones montre que beaucoup d’entre eux présentent une corrélation étroite entre les horodatages associés à un numéro de la liste et le déclenchement de la surveillance, dans certains cas aussi brève que quelques secondes.

Forbidden Stories, une organisation de journalisme à but non lucratif basée à Paris, et Amnesty International, une organisation de défense des droits de l’homme, ont eu accès à cette liste et l’ont partagée avec certains journaux, qui ont effectué des recherches et des analyses supplémentaires. Le Security Lab d’Amnesty International a effectué les analyses techniques des smartphones.

Les chiffres figurant sur la liste ne sont pas attribués, mais les journalistes ont pu identifier plus de 1 000 personnes dans plus de 50 pays grâce à des recherches et des entretiens sur quatre continents.

Qui aurait pu dresser une telle liste pour la donner à Amnesty et à Forbidden Stories ?

NSO est l’une des sociétés israéliennes utilisées pour mettre sur le marché le travail de l’unité de renseignement militaire israélienne, 8200. Les « anciens » membres de 8200 sont employés par NSO pour produire des outils d’espionnage qui sont ensuite vendus à des gouvernements étrangers. Le prix de la licence est de 7 à 8 millions de dollars pour 50 téléphones à espionner. C’est une affaire louche mais lucrative pour cette société et pour l’État d’Israël.

NSO nie les allégations selon lesquelles son logiciel est utilisé pour des objectifs malsains en racontant beaucoup de conneries ►https://www.nsogroup.com/Newses/following-the-publication-of-the-recent-article-by-forbidden-stories-we-wa :

Le rapport de Forbidden Stories est rempli d’hypothèses erronées et de théories non corroborées qui soulèvent de sérieux doutes sur la fiabilité et les intérêts de leurs sources. Il semble que ces "sources non identifiées" aient fourni des informations qui n’ont aucune base factuelle et sont loin de la réalité.

Après avoir vérifié leurs affirmations, nous démentons fermement les fausses allégations faites dans leur rapport. Leurs sources leur ont fourni des informations qui n’ont aucune base factuelle, comme le montre l’absence de documentation à l’appui de nombre de leurs affirmations. En fait, ces allégations sont tellement scandaleuses et éloignées de la réalité que NSO envisage de porter plainte pour diffamation.

Les rapports affirment, par exemple, que le gouvernement indien du Premier ministre Narendra Modi a utilisé le logiciel de NSO pour espionner ▻https://thewire.in/government/rahul-gandhi-pegasus-spyware-target-2019-polls le chef du parti d’opposition, Rahul Gandhi.

Comment NSO pourrait-elle nier cette allégation ? Elle ne le peut pas.

Plus loin dans la déclaration de NSO, la société se contredit ►https://www.nsogroup.com/Newses/following-the-publication-of-the-recent-article-by-forbidden-stories-we-wa sur ces questions :

Comme NSO l’a déclaré précédemment, notre technologie n’a été associée en aucune façon au meurtre odieux de Jamal Khashoggi. Nous pouvons confirmer que notre technologie n’a pas été utilisée pour écouter, surveiller, suivre ou collecter des informations le concernant ou concernant les membres de sa famille mentionnés dans l’enquête. Nous avons déjà enquêté sur cette allégation, qui, une fois encore, est faite sans validation.

Nous tenons à souligner que NSO vend ses technologies uniquement aux services de police et aux agences de renseignement de gouvernements contrôlés dans le seul but de sauver des vies en prévenant la criminalité et les actes terroristes. NSO n’exploite pas le système et n’a aucune visibilité sur les données.

Comment NSO peut-elle nier que le gouvernement saoudien, l’un de ses clients reconnus, a utilisé son logiciel pour espionner Jamal Khashoggi, puis l’assassiner, en disant qu’il « n’exploite pas le système » et « n’a aucune visibilité sur les données » ?

Vous ne pouvez pas prétendre à la fois a. recueillir des informations et b. n’avoir aucun moyen de les recueillir.

Mais revenons à la vraie question :
• Qui a la capacité de dresser une liste de 50 000 numéros de téléphone dont au moins 1 000 ont été espionnés avec le logiciel de NSO ?
• Qui peut faire « fuiter » une telle liste à ONG et s’assurer que de nombreux médias « occidentaux » s’en emparent ?
• Qui a intérêt à faire fermer NSO ou du moins à rendre ses activités plus difficiles ?

La concurrence, je dirais. Et le seul véritable concurrent dans ce domaine est l’Agence nationale de sécurité [la NSA, NdT] étatsunienne.

Les États-Unis utilisent souvent le « renseignement » comme une sorte de monnaie diplomatique pour maintenir les autres pays dans une situation de dépendance. Si les Saoudiens sont obligés de demander aux États-Unis d’espionner quelqu’un, il est beaucoup plus facile d’avoir de l’influence sur eux. Le NSO gêne cette activité. Il y a aussi le problème que ce logiciel d’espionnage de première classe que NSO vend à des clients un peu louches pourrait bien tomber entre les mains d’un adversaire des États-Unis.

La « fuite » à Amnesty et Forbidden Stories est donc un moyen de conserver un certain contrôle monopolistique sur les régimes clients et sur les technologies d’espionnage. (Les Panama Papers étaient un type similaire de « fuite » parrainée par les États-Unis, mais dans le domaine financier).

Edward Snowden, qui était autrefois un partisan convaincu de la NSA mais qui en a divulgué des documents parce qu’il voulait qu’elle respecte la loi, soutient cette campagne :

Edward Snowden @Snowden - 16:28 UTC - 18 juil. 2021 ▻https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1416797153524174854

Arrêtez ce que vous êtes en train de faire et lisez ceci. Cette fuite va être l’histoire de l’année : ►https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-gr

Edward Snowden @Snowden - 15:23 UTC - 19 juil. 2021 ▻https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1417143168752095239

Il y a certaines industries, certains secteurs, contre lesquels il n’y a aucune protection. Nous n’autorisons pas un marché commercial pour les armes nucléaires. Si vous voulez vous protéger, vous devez changer la donne, et la façon dont nous le faisons est de mettre fin à ce commerce.
Guardian : Edward Snowden demande l’interdiction du commerce de logiciels espions dans le cadre des révélations sur Pegasus ►https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/19/edward-snowden-calls-spyware-trade-ban-pegasus-revelations

Edward Snowden semble vouloir dire ►https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/19/edward-snowden-calls-spyware-trade-ban-pegasus-revelations que NSO, qui ne vend ses logiciels qu’aux gouvernements, devrait cesser de le faire mais que la NSA devrait continuer à utiliser cet instrument d’espionnage :

Dans une interview accordée au Guardian, M. Snowden a déclaré que les conclusions du consortium illustraient la manière dont les logiciels malveillants commerciaux avaient permis aux régimes répressifs de placer beaucoup plus de personnes sous une surveillance invasive.

L’opinion de Snowden à ce sujet est plutôt étrange :
chinahand @chinahand - 17:28 UTC - 19 juil. 2021 ▻https://twitter.com/chinahand/status/1417174487678656527

Fascinant de voir comment M."La surveillance étatique américaine est la plus grande menace pour l’humanité" s’énerve sur le fait qu’un peu de surveillance étatique est apparemment externalisée à un entrepreneur privé par des acteurs étatiques de niveau moyen et bas.

Edward Snowden @Snowden - 17:06 UTC - 19 juil. 2021 ▻https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1417168921472405504

Lisez les articles sur les fonctionnaires de Biden, Trump et Obama qui ont accepté de l’argent du groupe NSO pour enterrer toute responsabilité, même après leur implication dans la mort et la détention de journalistes et de défenseurs des droits dans le monde entier !
WaPo : Comment les assoiffés de pouvoir de Washington ont profité des ambitions de NSO en matière d’espionnage ▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?next_url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.washingtonpost.com%2ftechnology%2f2021%2

Le tumulte créé dans les médias par les révélations concernant NSO a déjà eu l’effet escompté ▻https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx5bw/amazon-aws-shuts-down-nso-group-infrastructure :

Amazon Web Services (AWS) a fermé l’infrastructure et les comptes liés au fournisseur israélien de logiciels de surveillance NSO Group, a déclaré Amazon dans un communiqué.

Cette mesure intervient alors que des médias et des organisations militantes ont publié de nouvelles recherches sur les logiciels malveillants de NSO et les numéros de téléphone potentiellement sélectionnés pour être ciblés par les gouvernements clients de NSO.

"Lorsque nous avons appris cette activité, nous avons agi rapidement pour fermer l’infrastructure et les comptes concernés", a déclaré, dans un courriel, un porte-parole d’AWS à Motherboard.
Cela fait des années qu’AWS est au courant des activités de NSO. NSO a utilisé CloudFront, un réseau de diffusion de contenu appartenant à Amazon :

L’infrastructure de CloudFront a été utilisée pour déployer les logiciels malveillants de NSO contre des cibles, notamment sur le téléphone d’un avocat français spécialisé dans les droits de l’homme, selon le rapport d’Amnesty. Le passage à CloudFront protège aussi quelque peu NSO contre des enquêteurs ou d’autres tiers qui tenteraient de découvrir l’infrastructure de l’entreprise.

"L’utilisation de services en nuage protège NSO Group de certaines techniques de balayage d’Internet", ajoute le rapport d’Amnesty.

Cette protection n’est plus valable. NSO aura bien du mal à remplacer un service aussi pratique.

Israël s’en plaindra, mais il me semble que les États-Unis ont décidé de faire fermer NSO.

Pour vous et moi, cela ne réduira que marginalement le risque d’être espionné.
Moon of Alabama
Traduit par Wayan, relu par Hervé, pour le Saker Francophone

#nso #NSA #israel #Amnesty #police #agences_de_renseignement #Edward_Snowden #CloudFront #surveillance #pegasus #spyware #écoutes #smartphone #journalisme #hacking #sécuritaire #espionnage #géolocalisation #jamal_khashoggi #Forbidden_Stories #Amazon #Amazon_Web_Services #AWS
#USA #CloudFront

« Projet #Pegasus » : révélations sur un système mondial d’#espionnage de #téléphones
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/projet-pegasus/article/2021/07/18/projet-pegasus-revelations-sur-un-systeme-mondial-d-espionnage-de-telephones

https://img.lemde.fr/2021/07/16/62/0/600/299/1440/720/60/0/2a18799_620397379-rea-273495-004-media-appel.jpg

#Paywall

En France comme au Maroc, Rabat cible les journalistes
▻https://www.franceculture.fr/geopolitique/en-france-comme-au-maroc-rabat-cible-les-journalistes

https://cdn.radiofrance.fr/s3/cruiser-production/2021/07/d8eb46e9-d9a9-447a-953f-e4d316783877/838_fotojet.jpg

Projet Pegasus | Le logiciel espion Pegasus de la société israélienne NSO a été utilisé par le Maroc pour surveiller des journalistes et des patrons de presse au Maroc mais aussi en France, selon l’enquête menée par le Forbidden Stories et ses partenaires, dont Radio France.

#Pegasus #NSO

Digital Violence: How the NSO Group Enables State Terror
https://www.digitalviolence.org

Forensic Architecture’s Digital Violence investigation is a multidimensional study of the global use of the malware Pegasus made by Israeli cyber-surveillance company NSO Group. Source: En anglais