French Ex-diplomat Saw 'potential For Misuse' While Working At NSO

Paris, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Jul, 2021 ) :Few outsiders are granted access to the ultra-secretive world of NSO Group, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware at the heart of a global phone hacking scandal. Gerard Araud, a former French ambassador, is one of them.

The recently retired diplomat took a position as a consultant to NSO in 2019, advising on human rights, soon after stepping down as France's ambassador to Washington during the tumultuous years of Donald Trump's presidency.

"I took the position because I found it interesting. It was a new world for me," Araud, who also served as French ambassador to Israel in the early 2000s, told AFP by telephone.

At NSO's offices, he discovered something resembling a classic tech start-up: teams of programmers "all between 25-30 years old, in flip-flops, black t-shirts, all with PhDs in computer science.

.." His one-year mission from September 2019, along with two other external consultants from the United States, was to look at how the company could improve its human rights record after a host of negative news stories.

Earlier that year, the group's technology had been linked publicly to spying or attempted spying on the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabian security forces, which it denied.

The group was acquired in 2019 by a London-based private equity group, Novalpina, which hired Araud to recommend ways to make the company's safeguard procedures "more rigorous and a bit more systematic," he said.