The FBI has admitted to having been very close to using the Pegasus spyware as part of its criminal investigations.
The Pegasus spyware never ceases to be talked about. This time it’s the FBI that’s causing controversy. The famous American police and intelligence agency would have considered, according to documents relayed by the New York Times, to use software from the Israeli computer security company NSO Group to solve criminal investigations. The discussions even went quite far between the two parties, for a time at least.
FBI officials were prepared to use Pegasus to support certain criminal investigations
Between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, several FBI officials pushed their desire to integrate Pegasus into their services quite far, as part of the agency’s criminal investigations. These FBI members were prepared to brief Federal Service leadership on their plans and reportedly even drafted guidelines for federal prosecutors.
It is difficult to know precisely how the office wanted to use Pegasus. As a reminder, the software takes the form of a so-called “zero click” hacking tool, capable of taking remote control of a smartphone and extracting all the content from it, without the user having to click on a link and without him realizing it.
Officially, the FBI decided the matter in July 2021, when the Pegasus scandal broke in the media. the washington post learned that the spyware was used to compromise the smartphones of relatives of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
If officially, the FBI does not use spyware, the door is not completely closed
But even after the revelations of Forbidden Stories and the global media consortium, the FBI does not seem to have definitively abandoned the idea of using the NSO Group tool one day. ” Just because the FBI ultimately decided not to deploy the tool in support of criminal investigations doesn’t mean it wouldn’t test, evaluate, and deploy other similar tools to gain access to encrypted communications of criminals “, explains the office in a legal note filed a few weeks ago.
And yet, in December 2021, FBI Director Chris Wray assured the US Congress that he had never used or targeted anyone using Pegasus, although the agency had indeed purchased a license from the Israeli company, now blacklisted across the Atlantic. In his view, this license was acquired for research and development purposes only, ” to be able to figure out how bad guys might use it, for example “, he had declared.
Within the FBI itself, the statements of each other contradict each other and maintain the vagueness around the real use of Pegasus made by the American agency. In any case, the door does not seem to be closed in the office.
Sources: New York Times, legal note
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