Former UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye highlights need for global effort to develop normative & legal frameworks regarding surveillance technologies beyond NSO & Israel
"David Kaye on the Pegasus Project and why surveillance reform should reach beyond NSO Group and Israel", 2 August 2021.
In a statement attributed to “NSO Group,” the company said... that NSO Group doesn’t see evidence of the use of its technology in the Pegasus Project’s forensic reporting and could not base an investigation on it. “NSO will continue to push for serious international discussions about regulation of the cyber intelligence industry”...
CPJ spoke to Kaye... about NSO Group and the moratorium on the use, sale, or transfer of surveillance tools that he and 150 individuals and rights groups... have called for...
[Kaye said:] "I became interested in the way in which small companies were making spyware available to governments that couldn’t afford to have a mass surveillance operation... when I was first thinking about this area, I thought adherence to the U.N. Guiding Principles [on Business and Human Rights] would be a meaningful step... But I’ve come to think that only government regulation will impose requirements that will be meaningful [enough]..."
"... we need a global effort to identify: What are the rules around export controls of surveillance technologies? To what extent should human rights be part of the assessment of any particular export application?"
"... We’re at the stage of creating the normative framework, and then the legal framework, that limits this trade, and also creates a kind of pressure on those who would be operating... in the shadows. Right now, it’s almost as if there are no shadows, because there are no legal constraints."