News - Middle East: An investigation published by the American magazine “Foreign Affairs” confirmed that intercontinental espionage scandals are haunting the Emirates, using Israeli technologies.

The report stated that, "the advent of advanced spyware has transformed the world of espionage and surveillance," reviewing several countries that are pioneers in the fields of espionage and piracy, led by the UAE. Bringing together a largely unregulated industry with an invasive-by-design digital ecosystem in which smartphones and other personal devices contain the most intimate details of people’s lives, the new technology can track almost anyone, anywhere in the world.
Governments have taken notice. For Israel, which approves export licenses for NSO Group’s Pegasus, the sale of spyware to foreign governments has brought new diplomatic clout in countries as disparate as India and Panama
a New York Times investigation found that NSO deals helped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seal the Abraham Accords with Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE.

In turn, client states have used Pegasus against not only opposition groups, journalists, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) but also geopolitical rivals. In 2020 and 2021, the Citizen Lab discovered that several devices belonging to officials in the United Kingdom’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office had been hacked with Pegasus, and that a client of NSO Group in the UAE had used the spyware to infiltrate a device located at 10 Downing Street, the residence of the British prime minister.

In November 2021, the tech giant Apple notified 11 staff members of the U.S. embassy in Uganda that their iPhones had been hacked with Pegasus. 
In response to these revelations, spyware firms have generally denied responsibility for their clients’ abuses or have declined to comment. In a statement to The New Yorker in April 2022, NSO Group said, “We have repeatedly cooperated with governmental investigations, where credible allegations merit, and have learned from each of these findings and reports and improved the safeguards in our technologies.”

The Israeli company has also said that its technology is designed to help governments investigate crime and terrorism.
But advanced spyware has now been implicated in human rights violations and interstate espionage in dozens of countries, and spyware companies have few legal obligations or incentives for public transparency or accountability.

Finally, the spyware industry has also been fueled by the growing privatization of national security. Just as governments have turned to private contractors for complicated or controversial military operations, they have discovered that they can outsource surveillance and espionage to better-equipped and less visible private actors.

Source: Foreign Affairs Website