📚 Efforts to Acquire Pegasus Spyware's Company Backed by US Spies, Says Stingray Maker

The New York Times describes Pegasus as "a 'zero-click' hacking tool that can remotely extract everything from a target's mobile phone [and] turn the mobile phone into a tracking and recording device." But they also report that the tool's "notorious" maker, NSO Group, was visited "numerous times" in recent months by a executives from American military contractor L3Harris — makes of the cellphone-tracking Stingray tool — who'd wanted to negotiate a purchase of the company. Their first problem? The U.S. government had blacklisted NSO Group in November, saying Pegasus had been used to compromise phones of political leaders, human rights activists and journalists. But five people familiar with the negotiations said that the L3Harris team had brought with them a surprising message that made a deal seem possible. American intelligence officials, they said, quietly supported its plans to purchase NSO, whose technology over the years has been of intense interest to many intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world, including the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. The talks continued in secret until last month, when word of NSO's possible sale leaked and sent all the parties scrambling. White House officials said they were outraged to learn about the negotiations, and that any attempt by American defense firms to purchase a blacklisted company would be met by serious resistance.... Left in place are questions in Washington, other allied capitals and Jerusalem about whether parts of the U.S. government — with or without the knowledge of the White House — had seized an opportunity to try to bring control of NSO's powerful spyware under U.S. authority, despite the administration's very public stance against the Israeli firm.... [NSO Group] had seen a deal with the American defense contractor as a potential lifeline after being blacklisted by the Commerce Department, which has crippled its business. American firms are not allowed to do business with companies on the blacklist, under penalty of sanctions. As a result, NSO cannot buy any American technology to sustain its operations — whether it be Dell servers or Amazon cloud storage — and the Israeli firm has been hoping that being sold to a company in the United States could lead to the sanctions being lifted.... L3 Harris's representatives told the Israelis that U.S. intelligence agencies supported the acquisition as long as certain conditions were met, according to five people familiar with the discussions. One of the conditions, those people said, was that NSO's arsenal of "zero days" — the vulnerabilities in computer source code that allow Pegasus to hack into mobile phones — could be sold to all of the United States' partners in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence sharing relationship. The other partners are Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. "Several people familiar with the talks said there have been attempts to resuscitate the negotiations..."

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