Report: Israel seized files from NSO in apparent bid to prevent US court subpoena

Seizure said to have been coordinated with company’s lawyers to head off ‘serious diplomatic and security damage’ from disclosures about its Pegasus spyware in WhatsApp lawsuit

A man holds his phone with NSO GROUP logo on a computer screen in the background, in Jerusalem, on February 7, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
A man holds his phone with NSO GROUP logo on a computer screen in the background, in Jerusalem, on February 7, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

The government seized key files from Israeli cyber-hacking firm NSO Group in July 2020, in an apparent bid to prevent them from being subpoenaed for a US court case against the company, the Guardian reported Thursday.

The newspaper said files leaked by hacker group Anonymous for Justice showed that Jerusalem was concerned that documents about the company’s Pegasus software could cause “serious diplomatic and security damage” to Israel.

The seizure of the documents, said to have been coordinated with NSO, was placed under an Israeli court-ordered gag order, the Guardian said. The gag order enabled NSO’s lawyers to tell the US court that they couldn’t hand over documents demanded by WhatsApp.

The Meta-owned company filed suit against NSO in federal court in October 2019, accusing the Herzliya-based company of hacking its servers to target more than 1,400 users of the chat application in 20 countries over two weeks.

In June 2020, WhatsApp’s lawyers demanded NSO turn over documents related to Pegasus.

Around that time, the Guardian said, NSO’s attorneys at the elite US law firm King & Spalding seem to have begun seeking Israel’s help to fend off the case. One of the attorneys, Rod Rosenstein — a deputy attorney general under former US President Donald Trump — asked if Israel would “come to the rescue” of NSO.

Former US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein prepares to leave after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, June 3, 2020. (Greg Nash/Pool via AP)

John Bellinger, a US-based lawyer for Israel who had worked for former US President George W. Bush, appeared to have replied that Israel was “acutely focused on the discovery dangers and is still considering its options,” according to the Guardian.

Three days later, in mid-July 2020, Israeli officials reportedly presented NSO with a Tel Aviv court order allowing the government to search the company’s offices and seize its files. The court order, placed under a gag order, prohibited NSO from transferring materials to “any external person or entity” without government approval.

The government obtained another gag order in April this year after Justice Ministry documents relating to the case were leaked by “hacktivist collective” Anonymous for Justice. Researchers from Amnesty International told the Guardian that the leaked files “are consistent with a hack-and-leak of a series of email accounts” but it is “not possible to cryptographically verify the authenticity of the emails as critical email metadata was removed by the hackers.”

The 2020 gag order was said to contain a loophole allowing NSO to inform the US court that the documents were seized and the company was under restriction. NSO’s lawyers reportedly convinced the judge to keep the developments under wraps. However, the Guardian said, it was unclear if NSO had informed the judge of its meetings with government officials before the seizure.

The NSO Group company logo is displayed on a wall of their offices in Sapir, southern Israel, April 2, 2022. (Noam Revkin Fenton/Flash90)

A leaked email showed that lawyers for the company had drafted a declaration saying the seizure was neither “announced in advance to, nor expected by” NSO. The declaration does not seem to have been submitted to the court, the Guardian said. A spokesperson for King & Spalding told the newspaper that the firm “does not appear” in the declaration.

The government’s intervention has curtailed WhatsApp’s ability to press the case against NSO, the Guardian said. In July, lawyers for WhatsApp were said to tell the court that they had yet to receive from NSO any documents about Pegasus, and accused the spyware company of a “continued refusal to meaningfully participate in discovery.”

Pegasus allows its users to remotely activate phones and extract their data. It has reportedly been used by repressive regimes to crack down on dissent, though NSO says the spyware is sold only to “authorized governments,” after Defense Ministry approval, to fight terrorism. In 2021, the company was blacklisted by the US government for facilitating “transnational repression.”

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