Edward Snowden said the recent NSO Group surveillance revelations are just part of a larger problem.
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The famous whistleblower has a new blog on Substack and, of course, has some opinions on the recent NSO Group controversy: namely, that people who charge companies like this should do time.
Snowden's "Continuing Ed" was released several weeks ago and is about surveillance and privacy. Snowden was one of the first to speak out about spying in 2013.
That makes NSO Group’s current trajectory a perfect subject to cover. Last week, news outlets around the world publicly lambasted the Israeli spyware company for its practice of selling to shady, abusive governments. Critics say the company’s commercial malware, Pegasus, has been used to monitor the phones of journalists, human rights lawyers, politicians, and was even reportedly discovered on devices belonging to family members of murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
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More recently, the focus has shifted to NSO's financial backers, as news broke on Tuesday that Novalpina Capital, the London-based private equity firm that owns most of the company, will be dissolved.
Novalpina helped NSO founders buy the company from its former owner, Francisco Partners, in 2019, following scandals involving the spyware vendor. The announcement of Novalpina’s dissolution on Tuesday comes after escalating allegations against NSO as well as an ongoing internal dispute within Novalpina itself. It is unclear what will happen to the entity — it could be taken over by a third party or its assets could be sold, the Financial Times reports.
Novalpina's plight and NSO's strong political connections have opened a broader debate about the private surveillance sector and the need to protect against its abuses.
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Snowden, for his part, says that NSO is really the tip of the iceberg in an unregulated spyware industry – and that targeting its financial support by going after companies like Novalpina is one way lawmakers could hold the companies accountable.
"An industry like this, whose sole purpose is to produce vulnerabilities, must be dismantled," Snowden writes.
Snowden is basically saying that if financial companies are not willing to stop funding the spyware industry, their owners should go to jail:
«It is important to understand that neither the scale of NSO Group’s activities, nor the consequences it has caused on global society, would be possible without access to global capital from unethical companies such as Novalpina Capital (Europe) and Francisco Partners (USA). The slogan is simple: the owners of the companies should be arrested.»
Information source: gizmodo.com
