Open letter calling for exclusion of NSO Croup from London security fair in light of Pegasus hacking revelations
Mr. Peter Ronald Luckham Jones
Chief Executive Officer
Nineteen Group Limited
Central House
1 Alwyne Road
Wimbledon, SW19 7AB
United Kingdom
info@internationalsecurityexpo.com
27/09/2021
Dear Sirs,
Re: International Security Expo – 28-29 September 2021 – Olympia, London
We, the undersigned are writing to you, the organisers of the International Security Expo 2021 (ISE), to register our disappointment and shock at the inclusion of the NSO Group (NSO) in your expo1, and to urge you to withdraw your invitation to NSO to take part in the expo.
As you will be aware, NSO is responsible for producing the Pegasus spyware product (Pegasus), indeed we understand that this very product will be “on sale” at the expo. Pegasus, was this week “totally condemned” by the EU commission as “a crime in the whole of the European Union” and on 16 September 2021 the European Parliament passed a resolution finding that
Pegasus had been used to target human rights defenders and to quash voices of dissent. 1 https://www.internationalsecurityexpo.com/exhibitors/nso-group
According to NSO, Pegasus is sold only to Governments to combat Terrorism and serious crime, instead it has been sold to countless authoritarian regimes around the world – and which, in turn, have used Pegasus against journalists, human-rights defenders and opposition politicians.
NSO’s Pegasus spyware has been used to facilitate human rights violations around the world on an unprecedented scale, according to a major investigation into the leak of 50,000 phone numbers of potential surveillance targets. These include heads of state, politicians, human rights defenders, lawyers and journalists. Revelations earlier this year showed just how extensive the use of Pegasus software has been against such targets, and how important a tool it is in the repression of dissent and democracy. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Morocco have all been proven to use the spyware against their own citizens, and indeed citizens of second countries.
The Pegasus Project, a ground-breaking collaboration by more than 80 journalists from 17 media organizations in 10 countries coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media non-profit, with the technical support of Amnesty International, who conducted cutting- edge forensic tests on mobile phones to identify traces of the spyware revealed hacking and targeting on an unprecedented scale.2 Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International has said “The Pegasus Project lays bare how NSO’s spyware is a weapon of choice for repressive governments seeking to silence journalists, attack activists and crush dissent, placing countless lives in peril,”
Last week the EU commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders told MEPs that the European Commission “totally condemned” attempts by national security services to illegally access information political opponents’ phones using the NSO software. Reynders added: “Various 2 https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/doc10/4487/2021/en/
reports have shown that certain national security services used Pegasus spyware, to have direct access to citizens, equipment, including political opponents and journalists. “Let me say right at the start that the commission totally condemns any illegal access to systems or any kind of illegal trapping or interception of community users communications. It’s a crime in the whole of the European Union.”3
On 16 September 2021, the European Parliament adopted a ground-breaking resolution on the United Arab Emirates (UAE), condemning the Emirati authorities’ widespread and systematic human rights abuses. 4 The resolution stated, “whereas the UAE uses sophisticated spyware to target activists and other voices of dissent; whereas Ahmed Mansoor was targeted with spyware provided by the Israeli company NSO Group; whereas the Pegasus leak of July 2021 reported the use of the NSO spyware by the Emirati authorities against a range of targets, including human rights defenders both in the UAE and abroad; whereas Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi women’s rights defender, was also subjected to cyberattacks by the UAE authorities, who hacked into her email before arresting and forcibly transferring her to Saudi Arabia”.
One victim of Pegasus is Ahmed Mansoor, an Emirati human rights defender now enduring a politically motivated ten-year prison sentence in the UAE for comments on his social media about human rights in the UAE. Mansoor is believed to have been targeted in 2016 by the spyware, before his arrest in March 2017. Another victim is HRH Princess Haya bint Hussein of Jordan and her close friends and English legal team in her High Court custody battle against the Ruler of Dubai in the English family court. Another is the fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose phone was also hacked in the aftermath of his killing in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, another is the Middle East Eye Turkish bureau chief, journalist Ragip Soylu, another is Baroness Uddin, a British politician sitting in the House Of Lords.
3 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/15/eu-poised-to-tighten-privacy-laws-after-pegasus spyware-scandal
4 https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2021-0434_EN.html
Conclusion
We, therefore, are compelled to urge Nineteen group to withdraw the NSO Group’s invitation to ISE, on account of the egregious and widespread human rights violations that have already been facilitated by Pegasus, in addition to the risk of future abuses of this kind. Not to withdraw the invitation would evidence Nineteen group effectively promoting such grave human rights abuses and we are certain that nineteen group does not wish to do this.
We would like to arrange a meeting, in person or by Zoom call with yourselves, to set out further, in detail and with evidence the abuses we discussed herein. In the meantime, please do contact any of the below signed for more information that we can assist with.
Yours Faithfully,
Arab Organisation for Human Rights
Peter Tatchell Foundation
Gulf Centre for Human Rights
International Campaign for Freedom in the UAE (ICFUAE)
Detained International
Association for Victims of Torture in the UAE (AVTUAE)
Ali Abdulemam
Aisha Ali-Khan – Women’s Rights Campaigner and Activist
Afsana LaChaux – Womens Rights Activist
Tiina Jauhiainen – Pegasus victim
David Haigh – Pegasus Victim
