Israel laid down a law on the use of foreign governments of its cyber exports after the private Israeli developer of Pegasus spyware was engulfed in scandal abroad.
The defence ministry-linked agency for military exports stated that a foreign state seeking a cyber or intelligence system must only use it to combat terrorism and serious crimes. Smartphones with Pegasus spyware developed by the private Israeli firm NSO Group are essentially turned into pocket spying devices.
This allows the user to read the target's messages, look through their photos, track their location and even turn on their camera without them knowing.
US authorities recently stopped exports to it from American groups because of allegations that Israeli firm allowed foreign governments to conduct transnational repression. An updated Israeli end user certificate issued Monday, signed by buyers, listed terrorism as including offenses committed with the aim of seriously intimidating a population or potentially putting a government through crimes such as hostage taking and potentially fatal attacks on a person's life.
An act of expressing an opinion or criticism, as well as presenting data regarding the state, including any of its institutions, will not constitute a serious crime or terrorism, the certificate says.
The agency warned that a violation of the provisions would result in the use of the spyware being blocked or disconnected.
The system will not be used in any way to inflict harm to an individual or group of individuals, based on their religion, sex or gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, country of origin, opinion, political affiliation, age or personal status. The military exports agency said provisions follow a series of measures taken in the last few years in which Israel approves the export of cyber systems solely to governments for the purposes of investigation and prevention of terrorism and crime. In a series of commercial cases, Apple sued the Israeli spyware maker last month, trying to block NSO Group from targeting the more than one billion iPhones in circulation.
NSO has denied any wrongdoing and defended the use of its software.
The data leak of up to 50,000 phone numbers believed to have been identified as people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016 has been investigated by the authorities.
The numbers included activists, journalists, business executives, and politicians around the world.