ABSTRACT
Israeli company NSO Group is currently facing a number of lawsuits from journalists and activists alleging that their products were used to illegally access private communications (Kirkpatrick & Ahmed, 2018). The company – a commercial provider of surveillance technology to government entities worldwide – has frequently made news headlines in past years. In 2016, it was reported that technology sold by NSO Group was used in attempts to access the phone of Ahmed Mansoor, an activist in the United Arab Emirates (Perlroth, 2016). The case was widely covered as the tools used to target his device utilized (extremely rare) zero-day vulnerabilities in the iPhone operating system, prompting Apple to issue a software update (Menn, 2016). Most recently, Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has tracked the use of NSO software to entities in 45 countries, including those with poor human rights records such as Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (Marczak et al., 2018).
