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A lawyer who was allegedly hacked using government spyware made by notorious surveillance technology company NSO Group has filed a complaint in court against two of the company’s founders and one of its executives. This appears to be the first attempt to hold the people behind a spyware company accountable for hacking crimes, not just the company itself.
On Wednesday, the Barcelona-based human rights non-profit Iridia It announced that it had filed a complaint with a Catalan court earlier this week accusing NSO founders Omri Lavi and Shalev Hulio, as well as Yuval Somekh, CEO of two affiliated companies, of committing hacking crimes.
Iredia is represented by attorney Andrew van den Eynde, an attorney and university professor who specializes in cybersecurity. According to a 2022 Citizen Lab investigationa non-profit organization that has been investigating government spyware for more than a decade, and Van den Eynde was among the victims of a large-scale hacking campaign against at least 65 Catalans linked to the region’s attempts at independence from Spain, which was carried out using NSO’s Pegasus software. . Amnesty International independently confirmed Citizen Lab’s findings.
Van den Eynde Iridia filed a lawsuit against NSO in a Barcelona court in 2022. As of this week, the lawsuit named NSO as well as Osy Technologies and Q Cyber Technologies, two Luxembourg-based subsidiaries of NSO, as defendants. Today, the nonprofit and an attorney asked the judge presiding over the lawsuit to expand it to include Lavie, Hulio, and Somekh.
“The persons responsible for the NSO Group must explain their concrete activities,” a legal representative for Iridia and Van den Eynde wrote in the complaint written in Catalan.
“Van den Eynde was spied on to gain access to his clients and the legal strategy of the cases he was handling, creating a chain of rights violations: by spying on him, all of his communications were indirectly spied on,” Heredia wrote in a letter. press release. “What is more, this surveillance is carried out without any criminal case being filed against him, and therefore without any judicial oversight.”
The complaint alleges that three of the executives were responsible for “selling illegal software,” participating in and cooperating in the illegal use of the software.
Jill Liner, vice president of global communications for NSO, told TechCrunch that the company had no comment.
Shalev did not respond to messages seeking comment. Lavi referred questions to his representative, Hidan Orenstein.
“I understand that prosecutors are asking for Omari to be listed as a defendant. But is there a specific allegation of an act attributed to Omari? They could theoretically ask for your name and my name to be listed as well,” Orenstein told TechCrunch.
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Do you have more information about NSO Group? Or other spy companies and cases of misuse of their technology? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email. You can also contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.
Van den Eynde told TechCrunch that he is not happy to be a victim because he prefers to focus on his work and interests in technology.
“The truth is that with all this Pikachu (I never mention the name of the spyware to make it more difficult when they leak my emails, haha) being a victim of actions I try not to exaggerate this situation,” he said in an email. .
Other victims of the alleged hacking campaign have put pressure on the Spanish government to reveal details of the alleged surveillance against them. In 2020, The motherboard was reported for the first time That the Spanish intelligence agency Centro de Inteligencia Nacional (Centre for National Intelligence, or CNI) had purchased NSO’s spyware. Spanish government At first he denied the accusation She claimed to be responsible for alleged hacking operations against Catalan politicians, arguing that she “does not spy on her political opponents.”
The National Intelligence Committee said its work was supervised by the Spanish Supreme Court and “in full accordance with the legal system, and with absolute respect for applicable laws.” Its former director, Paz Esteban, later testified before the Spanish Congress and said that 18 members of the independence movement had been subjected to spying with judicial approval.
At the time he was hacked, Van den Eynde was representing several politicians Esquerra Republica de Catalunya (Republican Left of Catalonia), who participated in what Catalan politicians referred to as “el procés”, an umbrella phrase to refer to Independence movement As well as the steps it took to try to secede Catalonia from Spain. The most controversial of these steps was the independence referendum called by the Catalan government on October 1, 2017, which the Spanish Constitutional Court later declared illegal.
There are many legal issues against NSO around the world, including lawsuits brought by Apple and WhatsApp in the United States. Both cases are ongoing.
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