The US said it will impose global visa restrictions on individuals who have been involved in the misuse of commercial spyware, in a move that could affect major US allies including Israel, India, Jordan and Hungary.
The new policy, unveiled on Monday, underscores how the Biden administration continues to see the proliferation of weapons-grade commercial spyware – which has been used by governments around the world against hundreds of political dissidents, human rights advocates, journalists and lawyers – as a major threat to US national security and counterintelligence capabilities.
The move comes three years after the administration placed Israel’s NSO Group on a commerce department blacklist and issued an executive order prohibiting the US government’s own use of commercial spyware. Israeli companies lead the world in producing commercial spyware and the Biden administration’s tough stance on those companies has emerged as a diplomatic sore point between the two allies.
When it is successfully used against a target, spyware like NSO’s Pegasus can infiltrate any phone without a user knowing. Intelligence or other government agencies using a spyware like Pegasus can silently gain access to a mobile phone user’s photographs, phone conversations and texts, and messages shared via encrypted apps like WhatsApp and Signal. It can even be used as a remote listening device.
In a statement, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, said the misuse of commercial spyware has been linked to “arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the most egregious of cases”.
It is not entirely clear what specific extrajudicial killing Blinken was referring to, but the Guardian and other media outlets have previously reported that close associates of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi had been targeted and hacked with Pegasus before his murder by Saudi agents inside the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in October 2018.