Pegasus Spyware Victims Ask U.K. Police to Charge Shadowy NSO Group

Anas Altikriti was in London, and busy, on the day in July 2020 when his phone was hacked. He frequently works as a hostage negotiator and, at the time, he was negotiating a deal to free a hostage being held on the Libya–Chad border. Altikriti also had a meeting with former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. But his schedule did not include having his phone infiltrated by Pegasus, the phone hacking software made by Israel’s NSO Group.

Four years later, Altikriti, an Iraqi-born British citizen and vocal critic of the United Arab Emirates, is filing a report to the Metropolitan Police in London accusing the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group of complicity in the targeted hacking of his phone. On Wednesday, he filed the complaint about NSO and its associates alongside three fellow U.K.-based human rights defenders whose phones were also hacked.

“This case has some real legs,” said Leanna Burnard, a lawyer at the nonprofit Global Legal Action Network, who prepared the complaint. “The U.K. shouldn’t stand for the hacking of human rights defenders on its own soil.”

Assembled with the help of advocates from GLAN on behalf of the victims, the extensively footnoted filing sent to the Metropolitan Police, which was obtained by The Intercept, puts the ball in the police’s court. The police now have discretion over whether to open an investigation and subsequently bring charges.

“The U.K. shouldn’t stand for the hacking of human rights defenders on its own soil.”

“Due to regulatory constraints, we cannot confirm or deny any alleged specific customers,” Gil Lanier, vice president for global communications at NSO, told The Intercept. “NSO complies with all laws and regulations and sells its technologies exclusively to vetted intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Our customers use these technologies daily, as Pegasus continues to play a crucial role in thwarting terrorist activities, breaking up criminal rings, and saving thousands of lives.”

The Metropolitan Police declined to comment.

The U.S. blacklisted NSO in 2021 after its software was accused of enabling human rights abuses by the company’s authoritarian government clients. Amnesty International has said NSO was complicit in many of these phone hackings.

The cyber spying firm, however, has never been sanctioned in the U.K., despite calls from members of Parliament. The failure to act was particularly jarring because the government itself had been a target of the software. In 2022, cybersecurity researchers at Citizen Lab said that the U.K. prime minister’s office and the Foreign Office likely had been victims of multiple Pegasus attacks, with the UAE as the main suspect.

While prosecutors around the........

© The Intercept