According to the information of the “World”, the Israeli company approached the French services in 2019 and 2020. The latter were interested, before a decision is made, at a higher level, not to sign of contract.
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In terms of spyware, France is an exception: unlike many European countries, it has not signed a contract with NSO Group to access the flagship of its arsenal, the spyware for Pegasus smartphones. She even, according to our information, officially refused to sign a contract with the Israeli company at the end of the year 2020.
However, there has been a floating in the state when Le Monde and sixteen international writing, supported by Amnesty International, revealed this summer that this spyware had been used against civil society, not Only in many NSO client countries, but also in France, including journalists and lawyers, and possibly against the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and part of the government. Indeed, in addition to the technical checks carried out by the counter-espionage services to know the extent of contaminations at the highest level of the State, several senior officials affirm to the world having noticed, from 19 July, that never pegasus n ‘had been used by an official service in the hexagon.
This doubt is explained: NSO Group’s emissaries had led several months before, an assiduous court with French intelligence services. In vain, according to our information. The timed public response of the authorities to the revelations of the “Pegasus project” – France was limited to shy condemnations – has also fed suspicions. The latter were briefly revived, on 23 November, by the publication of an article by the MIT Technology Review, claiming that the French authorities were about to order Pegasus with NSO Group; Contract that the revelations of the Pegasus project would have. Solicited by Le Monde In the stride, the Elysee officially denied this information.
It is true that several state services were strongly interested in Pegasus’s capabilities. Israeli society had everything to please many magistrates and police officers, working on drug trafficking cases in particular, faced with the massive use of state-of-the-art smartphones and applications escaping conventional telephone plays. In many cases, non-noise penetration on suspect phones is, in their view, the only solution to advance their investigations. And the technical reputation of NSO in this respect is without equivalent: it is almost the only one in the world to be able to aspire at a distance, without the knowledge of the victim and without even having to click on a malicious link, the contents of Any phone.
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