The Washington Post - USA (2022-01-19)

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 19 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

widely criticized as fraudulent.

The State Department is also

warning of an incursion from

Belarus.

“The timing is notable and, of

course, raises concerns that Rus-

sia could intend to station troops

in Belarus under the guise of

joint military exercises in order,

potentially, to attack Ukraine

from the north,” said a second

State Department official. “Bela-

rus’s complicity in such an attack

would be completely unaccept-

able.”

[email protected]

[email protected]

Isabelle Khurshudyan in Moscow

contributed to this report.

rus on Monday for military drills

called “Allies Resolve” conducted

near Belarus’s western border.

Russian Deputy Defense Min-

ister Alexander Fomin said the

drills were to refine how Russia

and Belarus would respond to

external threats and would in-

volve a dozen Su-35 fighter jets

and several air-defense units. He

said the exercises are expected to

take place Feb. 10 -20.

Ukraine has said Russia could

stage an attack from any direc-

tion, including Belarus, a long-

time ally that the Kremlin recent-

ly reinforced following a wave of

demonstrations against the gov-

ernment of President Alexander

Lukashenko following elections

issues.”

On Tuesday, NATO Secretary

General Jens Stoltenberg rein-

forced messages from the White

House that Russian military ac-

tion could be imminent.

“The risk of conflict is real,” he

said.

He also reiterated the U.S.

insistence that some of Russia’s

demands are nonstarters. “NATO

allies are ready to engage and

listen to concerns Russia may

have,” he said, citing issues in-

cluding arms control, disarma-

ment and nonproliferation. “But

we will not compromise on core

principles.”

Russian troops and military

hardware began arriving in Bela-

“It is crystal clear that Russia

will have to pay a high price

should there be a military inter-

vention against Ukraine or in

Ukraine,” Scholz said.

From Berlin, Blinken will fly to

Geneva to discuss with Lavrov “if

there is a possible diplomatic

off-ramp to this crisis,” said the

State Department official.

It is unclear if the United

States w ill provide a written re-

sponse to Russia on its key de-

mands from last week, some-

thing Moscow continues to insist

on to resolve the standoff.

“[We] are expecting their an-

swers to our proposals, as we

have been promised, in order to

continue the talks,” Lavrov said

during a joint news conference in

Moscow with German Foreign

Minister Annalena Baerbock.

The State Department official

dodged a question on whether

Washington will provide a writ-

ten response, saying only that the

United States remains prepared

to engage Russia on “security

there are opportunities to have

meaningful conversations with

the Russians,” said the State De-

partment official.

From Kyiv, Blinken will fly to

Berlin to meet his French, Ger-

man and British counterparts to

discuss a response to a possible

Russian military incursion.

In Germany, Blinken is expect-

ed to address the controversial

Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will

pump billions of cubic meters of

gas from Russia to Europe each

year — once it’s switched on.

Desp ite U.S. pressure, Ger-

ma ny’s newly formed coalition

government, led by Chancellor

Olaf Scholz, has offered mixed

and contradictory messaging o n

whether the future of the project

should be linked to any potential

Russian aggression.

But when pressed on the mat-

ter during a news conference

Tuesday, Scholz indicated that

the pipeline could be used as

leverage against Russia if it was

to in vade Ukraine.

BY SHIRA RUBIN

tel aviv — Israeli police have
used NSO Group’s Pegasus spy-
ware to remotely access, control
and extract information from
cellp hones belonging to Israeli
citizens, including leaders of a
protest movement against former
prime minister Benjamin Netan-
yahu, according to an investiga-
tion published Tuesday in the
Israeli outlet Calcalist.
The military-grade software
developed by the private Israeli
company NSO was also used to
target a n umber of people who
were not suspected of involve-
ment in a crime, including may-
ors, former government employ-
ees and at least one person close
to a senior politician, according
to the report.
“As a general policy, we do not
comment on current or potential
clients,” the NSO Group said in a
statement published by Israeli
media. “We would like to clarify
that the company does not oper-
ate the systems in its customers’
possession and is not involved in
their operation. The company
sells its products under license
and supervision for the use of
security bodies and state law en-
forcement agencies, to prevent
crime and terrorism legally, and
according to court orders and
local law in each country.”
Israeli police denied the allega-
tions, saying that “all police activ-
ity in this field is done in accor-
dance with the law, on the basis of
court orders and strict work pro-
cedures.”
State Comptroller Matanyahu
Engelman launched an investiga-
tion into the issue as part of a
broader probe into the ethical use
of technology in law enforce-
ment.
“Technology provides evidence
in criminal proceedings and rais-
es questions around the balance
between their usefulness and the
violation of the right to privacy
and other freedoms. These mea-
sures also raise risks of that per-

sonal information getting leaked

or misused in databases,” he said.

Several human rights organi-

zations sent a letter to Attorney

General Avichai Mandelblit re-

questing that the software’s use

be halted immediately, saying

that it was impossible to regulate

and that the damage it caused

outweighed the benefits. The le t-

ter also called on Mandelblit to

reopen legal cases that included

evidence obtained through Pe-

gasus.

Public Security Minister Omer

Bar-Lev said he was looking into

the issue but that an initial check

found “no practice of secretive

wiretapping, or intrusion into de-

vices, by the Israeli police without

the approval of a judge.”

“At the same time, I intend to

ensure that no corners are cut on

the subject of NSO and that every-

thing will be checked thoroughly

and unequivocally by a judge,” he

added.

The Calcalist investigation said

police began using the software

in 2020 to remotely surveil the

phones of prominent activists of

the “Black Flag” protest, which

called for the ouster of Netanya-

hu, who was then prime minister,

amid a surge of coronavirus cases,

an economic crisis and an on-

going corruption trial.

Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-

ser ving prime minister, left office

in June 2021 but remains em-

broiled in a corruption trial.

The report said NSO spyware

was used to collect data on citi-

zens to be used as leverage if they

became subjects of an interroga-

tion at a l ater date.

In July, an investigation by The

Washington Post and a consor-

tium of 16 media partners re-

vealed that Pegasus has been li-

censed by NSO to governments

around the world for the purpose

of tracking terrorists and crimi-

nals. But it found that the pro-

gram was used to hack 37 smart-

phones belonging to journalists,

human rights activists, business

executives and two women close

to the slain Saudi journalist Ja-

mal Khashoggi. The targets’

phones were among more than

50,0 00 numbers compiled by

countries known to engage in

surveillance of their citizens and

to have been NSO clients.

In an interview with The Post

in July, NSO founder Shalev Hulio

said some of NSO’s government

customers had misused its soft-

ware in the past, describing such

misuse as a “violation of trust.” He

said NSO closed five clients’ ac-

cess in the past several years after

conducting a human rights audit

and ended ties with two in the

past year alone.

“There is one thing I want to

say: We built this company to save

life. Period,” he said.

According to those familiar

with the company’s clientele,

NSO had agreements with coun-

tries with which Netanyahu had

sought to forge alliances, includ-

ing the United Arab Emirates,

which signed a normalization

agreement in September 2020,

and Saudi Arabia, which Netan-

yahu for years attempted to court.

In Israel, the police first ac-

quired Pegasus from NSO in 2013

and began operating it in 2015,

under Netanyahu’s term as prime

minister. It cost police tens of

millions of shekels throughout

the years, according to the Calcal-

ist report.

As the protest movement

against Netanyahu intensified, a

diverse group of opposition par-

ties reached an agreement in May

to form a unity government and

remove him from office.

“In a broader sense, this only

underscores how important it

was that hundreds of thousands

of Israeli citizens went out to

defend Israeli democracy,” Shik-

ma Schwartzman, one of the pro-

test movement leaders, told the

Israeli news outlet Ynet. “This is

another example of the previous

regime, headed by a criminal de-

fendant, and where Israeli de-

mocracy has reached.”

[email protected]

Israeli police accused of using NSO’s

spyware on citizens, protest leaders

Russia could at any point launch
an attack on Ukraine,” White
House press secretary Jen Psaki
said in a briefing with reporters
Tuesday. The Biden administra-
tion has accused Moscow of send-
ing operatives into Ukraine to
prepare a “false flag operation” to
use as a pretext for an invasion.
Russia has denied the charge.
Despite the troubling develop-
ments, a senior State Department
official said the meeting between
Blinken and Lavrov in the Swiss
city indicated that “diplomacy is
not dead.”
“We are prepared to continue
to engage with Russia on security
issues in a meaningful, reciprocal
dialogue,” said the official, who
spoke to reporters in a phone
briefing on the condition of ano-
nymity under rules set by the
department. “We will see this
Friday if Russia is prepared to do
the same.”
The of ficial declined to say if
the United States or Russia first
proposed the meeting.
Russia has placed some
100,000 troops along the border
with Ukraine alongside tanks
and heavy weaponry. Russia has
denied that it is preparing a
military invasion but has said the
West must take into account its
security demands, which include
the provision of legally binding
assu rances that Ukraine and
Georgia will not become mem-
bers of the NATO military alli-
ance.
The Biden administration has
refused to consider that demand,
calling NATO’s “open door” pol-
icy sacrosanct despite wide-
spread doubts that Ukraine will
ever meet the military alliance’s
criteria for membership.
U.S. officials are now left
guessing if their decision to reject
what Russia describes as its core
demands will precede what some
military analysts say could be the
largest ground war in Europe in
decades. Despite Washington’s
vast spying apparatus, bolstered
by satellites and surveillance
planes, Russian President Vladi-
mir Putin’s appetite for an inva-
sion remains unknown.
“That’s a question only the
Russians can answer for you, but
their actions show to us that they
are making moves that would
suggest that they have plans to
invade Ukraine,” said the U.S.
ambassador to the United Na-
tions, Linda Thomas-Greenfield,
at a W ashington Post Live event.
Blinken left Tuesday for
Ukraine, where he will meet
Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky and other top officials
and discuss “where we think

UKRAINE FROM A

New Russian deployment in Belarus adds urgency to Friday’s talks with U.S.

BRENDAN HOFFMAN/GETTY IMAGES

A Ukrainian soldier stands in a trench on a front line in Pisky, Ukraine. U.S. officials are warning that a Russian invasion of Ukraine may be imminent.

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