The US added the Israeli spyware company NSO Group—Israeli technological firm and maker of the Pegasus software—to its “entity list,” a federal blacklist prohibiting the company from receiving some American technologies, reported The Washington Post.
The blacklisting came after determining the company’s phone-hacking tools had been used by foreign governments to “maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers”. The action is part of the Biden administration’s “efforts to put human rights at the centre of US foreign policy, including by working to stem the proliferation of digital tools used for repression”, according to the US Commerce Department.
US Secretary of Commerce Gina M Raimondo said in a statement on Wednesday: “The United States is committed to aggressively using export controls to hold companies accountable that develop, traffic, or use technologies to conduct malicious activities that threaten the cybersecurity of members of civil society, dissidents, government officials, and organizations here and abroad.”
The move is a significant sanction against a company spotlighted in July by the global Pegasus Project consortium, including The Washington Post and 16 other news organisations worldwide. The consortium published dozens of articles detailing misuse of the Pegasus spyware by customers of NSO. The NSO Group has consistently denied the findings of the Pegasus Project, which found that some of NSO’s dozens of law enforcement, military and intelligence customers in more than 40 countries target journalists, politicians and human rights workers on a routine basis with Pegasus, which can hack into a victim’s cellphone. NSO has acknowledged problems with certain customers in the past, according to The Washington Post.