About F%$#ing Time

The US Commerce department has NSO Group over it's aggressively hawking its spying software to every despot in the world.

What took them so long?

The United States on Wednesday added the Israeli spyware company NSO Group to its “entity list,” a federal blacklist prohibiting the company from receiving American technologies, after determining that its phone-hacking tools had been used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” government officials, activists, journalists, academics and embassy workers around the world.

The move is a significant sanction against a company spotlighted in July in an investigation by the global Pegasus Project consortium, which includes The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations worldwide. The consortium published dozens of articles detailing how NSO customers had misused its powerful spyware, Pegasus.

The move could also raise tensions between the United States and Israel, where NSO is a prized technological powerhouse. Exports of NSO’s software are regulated by Israel’s Ministry of Defense, which must approve them as it would any weapons sale.

………

The Commerce Department said in a statement that the action is part of the Biden administration’s “efforts to put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy, including by working to stem the proliferation of digital tools used for repression.”

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The company has consistently denied the findings of the Pegasus Project, which found that some of NSO’s dozens of law enforcement, military and intelligence customers in more than 40 countries target journalists, politicians and human rights workers on a routine basis with Pegasus, which can hack into cellphones. NSO has acknowledged problems with certain customers in the past.

The entity list designation prohibits export from the United States to NSO of any type of hardware or software, severing the company from a vital source of technology. It could also hinder future business arrangements and challenge the firm’s ability to work as an international company.

“The impact is broader than just the legal prohibition,” said Kevin Wolf, an international trade lawyer at the Akin Gump law firm who previously ran the entity list process. “It’s a huge red flag.”

It should be a huge red flag.

NSO helped the House of Saud assassinate Jamal Kashoggi, and aggressively markets itself to repressive governments throughout the world.

They should have a big scarlet "S" (for sanctioned) on their chest.  (It's a Hawthorne reference, not a Siegel and Shuster reference, you Philistines.)