Human Rights Watch: Our investigators' phones were hacked using NSO software

WASHINGTON: Human Rights Watch said today, Wednesday, that the phones of a regional director of the organization that investigated Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza and the Beirut port explosion were hacked with spyware produced by the Israeli company NSO.

The organization said that the mobile phones of the investigator, Lama Fakih, who lives in Lebanon and oversees the group's operations to monitor the human rights situation in countries stretching from Syria and Israel to Myanmar and Ethiopia, were targeted five times last year.

The US-based rights group said its work, including exposing human rights abuses in armed conflicts, unrest and humanitarian disasters, "may have attracted the attention of various governments, including those suspected of being among NSO's clients."

During the period during which the breach occurred, Lama said her work included monitoring the fighting between Israel and the Islamist Hamas movement in Gaza and investigating the devastating explosion in the port of Beirut in 2020. She added that there was no way to know if there was a connection between her work on these two files and the infiltration.

Human Rights Watch said that NSO had informed it that the company was not aware of any of its clients using its software against an employee of the organization, and that it would assess whether an investigation was needed.

"The company believes that there is a need for an international regulatory framework to ensure the responsible use of cyber intelligence tools," a spokeswoman for the NSO Group told Reuters.

"However, any call to suspend life-saving technologies until such a framework is in place would be naive and only benefit terrorists, pedophiles and hardened criminals, who would benefit from avoiding means to help monitor and arrest them."

Last year, the US Department of Commerce took steps to limit US companies' ability to do business with NSO after revelations that the company's software had been used in the "malicious targeting" of officials, journalists, activists and businessmen.

In December, a group of US lawmakers asked the Treasury and State Departments to sanction NSO and three other foreign watchdog firms they said had aided authoritarian governments in human rights abuses.

A month earlier, Apple sued NSO, saying it had violated US laws by hacking software installed on iPhones.(Reuters)

Twitter receives 43,000 requests from governments to remove user content

Istanbul: Twitter said that it received more than 43,000 government requests to remove the contents of its platform users during the first half of last year, 95 percent of which came from Japan, Russia, Turkey, India and South Korea.

In its report issued on Tuesday, and circulated by media outlets today, the site stated that it had received 43,387 legal requests to remove the contents of 196,878 accounts during the period from January to June of last year.

The site indicated that this is the largest number of requests it has received during the mentioned period, since it began issuing transparency reports in 2012.

The site said that the number of government removal requests increased by 14 percent compared to the number of requests during the last reporting period (July-December). 2020), which amounted to 38,524 applications, and the number of applications increased by 2.8 percent year on year.

The report stated that the number of accounts specified in legal requests also increased by 50 percent compared to the previous number of 131,933 accounts during the period covered by the last report.

The site stated that most requests to remove content came from Japan with 43 percent, followed by Russia with 25 percent, Turkey with 13 percent, India with 11 percent and South Korea with 5 percent.

The site indicated that the platform is still banned in several countries, including China and North Korea.

The site confirmed that it "blocked or requested account holders to remove some or all of the reported content, with a response rate of 54 percent of these global legal demands."

Twitter, along with companies like Facebook and Google, is facing criticism in the United States and other countries over how it fights issues such as misinformation and violent speech on its platform.

"We face unprecedented challenges as governments around the world increasingly attempt to intervene and remove content," Sinead McSweeney, Twitter's vice president of global public policy and philanthropy, said in a statement.

"This threat to privacy and freedom of expression is a deeply troubling trend and requires our full attention," he added.

Regarding non-governmental requests, the site said that Japan, Brazil and the United States topped the list of countries from which requests to remove content came with 89 percent of all requests, and 87 percent of all accounts identified during the same period.(Anatolia)