NSO surveillance rival operating in EU
The European Union has begun to wake up to the threat posed by an out-of-control surveillance industry, with Israel’s notorious NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware in its crosshairs.
As European Parliament hearings into hacking scandals resume this week, an investigation led by collaborative newsroom Lighthouse Reports alongside EUobserver, Der Spiegel, Domani and Irpimedia reveals the unreported scale of operations at a shady European surveillance outfit, whose tools are in use all over the world, including in countries with a recent history of corruption and human rights violations.
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The exterior of the Rome HQ (Photo: Lighthouse Reports)
Tykelab, a little-known company based in Italy, and its owner RCS Lab are quietly selling powerful surveillance tech inside and outside the EU, boasting that it can “track the movements of almost anybody who carries a mobile phone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent”.
The new investigation, based on confidential telecom data and industry sources, found the companies employing a range of tracking and hacking tools — including surreptitious phone network attacks and sophisticated spyware which gives full remote access to a mobile device — against targets in southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as inside Europe.
MEPs, telecom specialists and privacy experts have reacted with dismay to the revelations, describing them as a danger to rights and security, and calling on governments and industry to do more to regulate Europe’s spy firms.
“This is a story of a large spyware vendor abusing the rule of law, this time based within Europe,” MEP Sophie In ‘t Veld said. “It is high time that the entire spyware industry within the EU, which acts in a sort of twilight zone of legality, is regulated and sees the light of day. Limits have to be set, otherwise our democracy is broken.”
Edin Omanovic, advocacy director of the NGO Privacy International, said: “The threat posed by the mercenary spyware industry must now be clear to Brussels and European capitals: they need to take decisive action to protect networks, stop this trade and sanction companies complicit in abuses, as the US has already done.”
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