NSO Group's response Vetting and licence contract NSO Group did not deny the presence of its spyware, responding to the report by stating they rigorously vetted its customers' human rights records before allowing them to use its spy tools. Once sold, NSO Group says it does not know nor can see how its client governments use its spyware. The CEO of NSO Group categorically claimed that the list in question is unrelated to them, the source of the allegations can not be verified as a reliable one. "This is an attempt to build something based on a crazy lack of information... There is something fundamentally wrong with this investigation." The owner of the company that developed the Pegasus spyware categorically refutes all allegations, stating that the list of the phone numbers in question has nothing to do with the Pegasus spyware.
Haaretz argued such invasive monitoring technology is the weapon of choice for autocratic governments, allowing continuous monitoring of opponents, preventing protests from the beginning before they are organised, and discouraging sources to share information with journalists. This technology should, therefore, be shared only with countries with independent and solid
rule of law. The
International Press Institute, an international press freedom network, denounced the abuse of spying on journalists, calling formal investigations and accountability.
Tamer Almisshal, an investigative journalist for
Al Jazeera Arabic, said, "[The hacking of the Al Jazeera staffers' and journalists' phones is] a crime against journalism. Based on this spyware, journalists have been arrested, disappeared, or even killed. Khashoggi is just one example". In a statement, the said they were "shocked" by the revelations and also stated: "If this is the case, it is unacceptable, outrageous and illegal, full information must be disclosed to the public immediately". In a tweet, the
Press Club of India (PCI) issued a statement: This is the first time in the history of this country that all pillars of our democracy — judiciary, Parliamentarians, media, executives & ministers — have been spied upon. This is unprecedented and the PCI condemns unequivocally. The snooping has been done for ulterior motives. What is disturbing is that a foreign agency, which has nothing to do with the national interest of the country, was engaged to spy on its citizens. This breeds distrust and will invite anarchy. The Govt should come out clean on this front and clarify. Similarly, the
Editor's Guild of India also released a statement directed against the alleged spying made by the Indian government, saying: This act of snooping essentially conveys that journalism and political dissent are now equated with 'terror'. How can a constitutional democracy survive if governments do not make an effort to protect freedom of speech and allows surveillance with such impunity?It asked for a
Supreme Court monitored enquiry into the matter, and further demanded that the inquiry committee should include people of impeccable credibility from different walks of life—including journalists and civil society—so that it can independently investigate the facts around the extent and intent of snooping using the services of Pegasus.
Companies Amazon's cloud computing subsidiary
AWS stated they had terminated "relevant infrastructure and accounts" linked to NSO Group, following an investigation by
Amnesty International that discovered
Amazon CloudFront was being used to infect targets with the Pegasus malware. The CEO of
WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, called for a global moratorium on the use of unaccountable surveillance technology and defended the use of
end-to-end encryption following the reports.
National governments Algeria In a statement released,
Algeria's public prosecutor has ordered an investigation into the reports that the country may have been a target of the Pegasus spyware.
France After the revelations of the Pegasus Project investigation, in which it was revealed that the French president
Emmanuel Macron was targeted, In the aftermath of these revelations, Macron changed his telephone number and replaced his phone. Furthermore, he ordered an overhaul in security procedures. Macron reportedly contacted Israel's prime minister
Naftali Bennett to discuss Israel's internal investigation and express concern that his data appeared on the list of potential targets and urged Bennett to conduct an inquiry. French intelligence (
ANSSI) confirmed that Pegasus spyware had been found on the phones of three journalists, including a journalist of
France 24, in what was the first time an independent and official authority corroborated the findings of the investigation.
Hungary A statement from the office of
Viktor Orbán in
Hungary stated that they were not aware of any alleged data collection. On November 4, 2021,
Lajos Kósa, Member of Parliament and Vice President of
Fidesz, member of the Parliamentary Defence and Law Enforcement Committee, admitted that the Ministry of Interior had purchased and used the Pegasus software.
India The government has not denied the usage of Pegasus spyware in their response so far. The government has also denied the request for investigation or an independent
Supreme Court inquiry by the opposition into the matter. The official response of the Government of India to
The Washington Post stated that "[t]he allegations regarding government surveillance on specific people has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever" and that such news reports were an attempt to "malign the Indian democracy and its institutions". They further stated that each case of interception, monitoring and decryption is approved by the
Union Home Secretary and that there exists an oversight mechanism in the form of a review committee headed by the Union Cabinet Secretary and that any such interceptions have been done under the due process of law. The Indian IT Minister
Ashwini Vaishnaw in a statement in parliament stated that the reports were "highly sensational" and that they had "no factual basis". He further stated that NSO themselves had rubbished the claims. He stated that the existence of numbers in a list was not sufficient evidence to indicate that the spyware was used and said that the report itself stated the same and without the physical examination of the phone such claims cannot be corroborated. The
Minister of Home and Internal Security Amit Shah in a statement on his blog insinuated that this was an attempt to disrupt the monsoon session of the parliament and that the opposition parties were "jumping on a bandwagon" and were trying to "derail anything progressive that comes up in Parliament". He stated that the report was an attempt to "derail India's development trajectory through their conspiracies". Replying to allegations from the opposition, Minister of State in
Ministry of Home Affairs Ajay Kumar Mishra said that there is no reason for a probe and the people who made the allegations are "political failures". In the aftermath of the revelations by the investigations of the Pegasus Project, the head of the Israeli parliament's
Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee announced a commission to investigate the allegations of misuse of Pegasus for surveillance and hacking. In December 2021, the Israeli Defense Ministry imposed new restrictions on the export of cyber warfare tools as a result of the scandals involving NSO.
Kazakhstan In the revelations made by the investigation, it came to light that the
Kazakhstan's former Prime Minister,
Bakhytzhan Sagintayev, could have been targeted. However, top officials have claimed that these reports and allegations of the president being spied on were "without evidence". Furthermore, the deputy head of Kazakhstan's presidential administration
Dauren Abaev said the list of targets was "rather intriguing information without any evidence". The then-Moroccan ambassador to France,
Chakib Benmoussa, also denied reports that his country's authorities had spied on French President Emmanuel Macron. Morocco later sued Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories for defamation, with lawyer , acting on behalf of the government, saying that the Moroccan state "wants all possible light cast on these false allegations", and that it "does not intend to let the multiple lies and fake news spread these past few days go unpunished". It also issued defamation citations against
Le Monde, Mediapart and Radio France on 28 July 2021, and filed an injunction request against the German newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung on 2 August.
Pakistan The
Prime Minister of
Pakistan,
Imran Khan, whose name was revealed to be in the list,
Rwanda Rwanda, through a statement by
Vincent Biruta,
Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, denied using Pegasus and claimed that "false accusations" of the country using Pegasus were "part of an ongoing campaign to cause tensions between Rwanda and other countries, and to promote disinformation about Rwanda domestically and internationally."
Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia's official
Saudi Press Agency has denied all allegations of its use of Pegasus spyware on journalists and human rights activists as "baseless". The allegations were dismissed as "untrue".
United Arab Emirates A statement released by the
UAE's foreign minister stated that the allegations of use of the Pegasus spyware by the UAE on journalists and individuals were "categorically false" and that such allegations had no evidentiary basis and they denied all allegations. The Indian IT minister made a statement that similar claims were made in the past regarding Pegasus for
WhatsApp which had no factual basis and was even denied by the
Supreme Court of India. However, many of the statements made by the Indian IT minister were verified by the
Internet Freedom Foundation and were not found to be accurate. West Bengal Chief Minister
Mamata Banerjee alleged that the central government intends to "turn India into a surveillance state" where "democracy is in danger". On July 26, 2021, The West Bengal Chief Minister announced a commission of inquiry into the alleged surveillance of phones using Pegasus. Retired Supreme Court judge
Justice Madan B Lokur, and former Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court, Justice (retd)
Jyotirmay Bhattacharya, have been appointed as members of the commission. In India, some news articles were released making claims that Amnesty never claimed that the leaked phone numbers were of NSO's Pegasus spyware list. However, these reports were later proven to be false, and Amnesty issued a statement stating that it categorically stands by the findings of the investigation and that the data is irrefutably linked to potential targets of Pegasus. The
European Parliament awarded the 2021 Daphne Caruana Galizia journalism prize to the Pegasus Project.
Government investigations On 20 July 2021, it was reported that French prosecutors would investigate allegations that Moroccan intelligence services used Pegasus to spy on French journalists. France's national agency for information systems security (
ANSSI) identified digital traces of Pegasus on three journalists' phones and relayed its findings to the Paris public prosecutor's office, which is overseeing the investigation into possible hacking. == See also ==