‘Somebody Has to Do the Dirty Work’: NSO Founders Defend Pegasus Spyware
Hulio and Lavie’s version of the Silicon Valley story starts in a renovated chicken coop on a kibbutz in central Israel. Eleven years later, NSO is a 750-employee company that is valued by investors at over $1.5 billion.
Israeli cyber firm NSO Group's exhibition stand is seen at "ISDEF 2019", an international defence and homeland security expo, in Tel Aviv, Israel June 4, 2019. Photo: Reuters/Keren Manor
Two 20-something Israeli entrepreneurs who had been running a small customer service start-up for mobile phones were at a client meeting in Europe in 2009 when they received a visit from law enforcement officials.
The entrepreneurs’ first instinct was fear. Maybe they had done something wrong that they weren’t aware of, Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie recalled in interviews this week with The Washington Post.
Instead, the officials made an unexpected request. The agents said the Israelis’ technology, which helped carriers troubleshoot their customers’ smartphones by sending them an SMS link that enabled the carrier to access the phone remotely, could be useful for saving people’s lives. Traditional methods of wiretapping calls were becoming obsolete in the age of the smartphone, the officers explained, because early encryption software blocked their ability to read and listen to the conversations of terrorists, pedophiles and other criminals. Would Hulio and Lavie be able to help them, by building a version of their technology that the officials could use?
