Israeli firm provided phone-hacking services to Saudi Arabia
A controversial Israeli security firm provided phone hacking services to Saudi Arabia, an Israeli newspaper has revealed.
A representative of Cellebrite arrived in Riyadh in November
2019 on a commercial flight from London and was escorted through passport
control without his passport being stamped or his electronic equipment being
checked, The Marker, Haaretz’s sister publication, reported.
Cellebrite claims to serve police and security forces in 150
countries. It has courted controversy in recent months over its work for police
involved in suppressing protests in Hong Kong.
The man, a foreign national, was then taken to an isolated
hotel room to carry out the job of hacking and copying information from a phone
that was in the possession of the Saudi Justice Ministry.
The Marker said a Samsung S10 phone was hacked at the
request of the general prosecutor’s office in Riyadh, but did not know the
identity of the owner. The man returned to London soon afterwards.
Cellebrite was also working in Saudi Arabia at the time of
the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in
Istanbul in October 2018, the report said.
NSO denied the allegations at the time, but reports
indicated that it had offered Saudi intelligence officials software that would
let them hack cellphones, months before Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman began
a purge of dissidents.
When Cellebrite CEO Yossi Carmil was asked by the Israeli
Ynet news in October 2019 about the ethical differences between the services
provided by his company and NSO, he expressed outrage.
Cellebrite worked in the law-enforcement sector, “which is
very limited in its authority, unlike the world of the clients of NSO and
others, where illegal things as well as covert things are done. Cellebrite is
entirely in the good zone, with judicial orders. We don’t create hacking
devices for private entities or espionage agencies.”
Cellebrite says its technology serves 154 countries and that
it has been used to make convictions in five million cases of serious crime.
Its clients include the American FBI.
Its technology makes it possible to hack into smartphones
and transfer all of the information from them and can retrieve deleted data.
Saudi Arabia does not have diplomatic or official ties with
Israel, unlike the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which signed normalisation
agreements on Tuesday with Tel Aviv under US President Donald Trump's
sponsorship.
The kingdom however has allowed the use of its airspace for
flights between the countries.
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