The Israeli government took extraordinary measures to thwart a high-stakes US lawsuit that threatened to reveal closely guarded secrets about one of the world’s most notorious hacking tools, leaked files suggest.
Israeli authorities have seized documents about the Pegasus spyware from its maker, NSO Group, in an effort to prevent the company from complying with demands made by WhatsApp in a US court to hand over information about the invasive technology.
The documents suggest the seizures were part of an unusual legal maneuver created by Israel to block the release of information about Pegasus, which the government believed would cause “serious diplomatic and security damage” to the country.
Pegasus allows NSO customers to infect smartphones with hidden software that can extract messages and photos, record calls and secretly activate microphones. NSO’s customers include both authoritarian regimes and democratic countries, and the technology has been linked to human rights abuses around the world.
Since late 2019, NSO has been fighting a US lawsuit filed by WhatsApp, which alleges that the Israeli company used a vulnerability in The courier service to contact More than 1,400 of its users in 20 countries were detained over a two-week period. NSO has denied the allegations.
The removal of files and computers from NSO offices in July 2020 – hitherto hidden from the public by a strict gag order issued by an Israeli court – sheds new light on the close ties between Israel and NSO and the overlapping interests of the private surveillance company and the country’s security establishment.
The July 2020 seizures came after Israeli officials and the company appear to have discussed how to respond to WhatsApp’s requests for NSO to reveal internal files about its spyware, raising questions about whether they coordinated to hide certain information from U.S. legal proceedings.
At one point, one of NSO’s lawyers, Rod Rosenstein, a former deputy US attorney general in the Trump administration, appears to have asked one of Israel’s US lawyers whether the Israeli government would “come to the rescue” in the legal battle with WhatsApp.
Israel’s hidden involvement in the case could be revealed after a consortium of media organisations led by the Paris-based non-profit… Forbidden storiesincluding The Guardian and Israeli media partners, obtained a copy of a secret court order related to the seizure of NSO’s internal files in 2020.
Details of the seizures and Israel’s contacts with NSO in connection with the WhatsApp case are revealed in a separate set of emails and documents reviewed by the Guardian. They originated from a hack of Israeli justice ministry data obtained by the transparency group. Distributed Denial of Secrets and shared with Forbidden Stories.
Combining US court records, information from sources and a forensic analysis by Amnesty International’s security lab of some of the files, the consortium has been able to confirm key details revealed in the hacked files.
According to Amnesty researchers, the files “are consistent with a hack and leak of a number of email accounts” but “it is not possible to cryptographically verify the authenticity of the emails as the hackers removed critical metadata from the email.”
In April this year, Israeli authorities obtained another censorship order to prevent the country’s media from publishing information about the attack. The large cache of emails and documents was published online by a self-proclaimed “hacktivist collective,” Anonymous for Justice. The identity of those behind the group is unclear.
Details of Israel’s behind-the-scenes activities in the WhatsApp case have emerged as litigation continues to play out in a federal court in Northern California.
Earlier this month, WhatsApp accused NSO of resisting its obligations to share internal files as part of a legal process, known as discovery, that would allow WhatsApp to gather information to help build its case and shed unprecedented light on how Pegasus has been used by the NSO government. clientele.
However, the Israeli government’s covert intervention has hampered WhatsApp’s ability to compel NSO to hand over crucial information. WhatsApp’s lawyers recently told the US court that NSO “has only produced 17 internal documents of its own.”
An NSO spokesperson said that “as a law-abiding company” it could not comment on the Guardian’s questions about the 2020 seizures. A Justice Department spokesperson said it “rejects the claim that it acted in any way to prejudice or obstruct (US) legal proceedings.”
‘Strange procedures’
Within months of WhatsApp filing the lawsuit against the company in October 2019, senior Israeli officials are believed to have been closely monitoring the progress of the case and considering how to prevent WhatsApp from gaining access to classified information held by NSO.
Both Israel and NSO anticipated large requests from WhatsApp for sensitive internal company files, such as customer lists.
In the first half of 2020, as a discovery loomed, NSO considered asking the Israeli government for a “blocking order” that would prohibit the company from handing over certain information to WhatsApp. In April of that year, NSO shared a memo with Israel’s Justice Ministry discussing the proposal.
NSO’s fears were confirmed in early June 2020 when WhatsApp filed its first discovery requests with the company, demanding access to a wide range of detailed information about its activities, customers, and Pegasus’s technological capabilities.
Leaked emails reviewed by The Guardian suggest senior Israeli officials met with NSO representatives “to discuss disclosure-related issues” a day after the company received WhatsApp’s document production requests.
At the time, NSO and its lawyers at the prestigious US firm King & Spalding appear to have been seeking Israel’s help in trying to defend itself against WhatsApp’s lawsuit.
After Rosenstein reportedly asked whether the Israeli government was going to “bail out” the company, one of Israel’s U.S.-based lawyers, John Bellinger, a former senior national security lawyer in the George W. Bush administration and now a partner at Arnold & Porter, appears to have told Rosenstein that Israel was “very focused on the dangers of discovery and is still considering its options.”
Three days later, in mid-July 2020, Israel made a major, albeit secret, intervention. In an urgent meeting with NSO, Israeli officials presented the company with a warrant issued by a Tel Aviv court granting the government powers to execute a search warrant at its office, access its internal computer systems and seize files.
The court order prohibited NSO from disclosing or transferring documents or technical materials to “any outside person or entity” without authorization from Israeli authorities. The order itself was also made secret; a censorship order has prevented government actions from being made public in Israel.
Scott Horton, an American lawyer and adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, said these were “strange procedures for a private entity,” suggesting that NSO was in fact an “integral part of the Israeli defense establishment and they are trying to shield (this) from public discovery.”
According to court records and Israeli Justice Ministry files, the order obtained by Israel had a specific loophole that allowed NSO’s lawyers to inform the US court in the WhatsApp case about seizures and restrictions that had been imposed on the company prohibiting disclosure.
NSO persuaded a US judge in charge of the case to keep information about these events secret, ensuring that they would not come to light publicly. It is unclear whether NSO has disclosed to the court its contacts and meetings with Israeli officials prior to the seizures.
The leaked files suggest that at one point NSO’s lawyers drafted a statement to be filed in the US proceedings informing the court that the Israeli embargo order had not been “announced in advance to the company or anticipated by it.” Ultimately, however, it appears that this statement was not included in the filed statement. A King & Spalding spokesperson said that it “does not appear” in the statement.
Israel’s actions appear to have had a material impact on the case. NSO has argued that its ability to participate in the discovery has been limited by several restrictions under Israeli law.
Earlier this month, WhatsApp lawyers told the court that they had not yet received any documents relevant to Pegasus and accused NSO of a “continued refusal to meaningfully engage in discovery.”
Additional reporting by Phineas Rueckert and Karine Pfenniger of Forbidden Stories.