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Their response in this post suggests they don't view this targeting as related to them or their responsibility. > "The list is not a list of targets or potenti
by fossuser 5y ago
Their response in this post suggests they don't view this targeting as related to them or their responsibility.
> "The list is not a list of targets or potential targets of Pegasus.
> "The numbers in the list are not related to NSO group.
> "Any claim that a name in the list is necessarily related to a Pegasus target or Pegasus potential target is erroneous and false.
> "NSO is a technology company. We do not operate the system, nor do we have access to the data of our customers, yet they are obligated to provide us with such information under investigations."
My read of this is it's the kind of carefully worded intel-like response, basically saying the people targeted are not Pegasus(tm) targets because Pegasus is the name of the product and it 'technically' doesn't do the targeting on its own, the customers do the targeting - therefore not our fault and not related to us, we just sell software. (Even though the customers used NSO software to do the targeting, sold to them by NSO).
- cbsmith 5y agoI said they don't appear to be abdicating responsibility for the risk their software could be used for bad things to happen. If you look at the report, it's all about weighing that risk against the risks of not licensing their software. They are abdicating responsibility for the list, which doesn't seem unreasonable since the Pegasus Project has been pretty explicit that they don't know where the list came from, who put it together, or why any particular entry was put in to the list. The Pegasus Project guys have already walked back their statement that the list is phones that have been targeted by Pegasus, so... It very much sounds like someone found some HLR logs and then failed to determine whether that list was specific to Pegasus or not. It seems very unlikely that there'd be HLR logs that would be specific to Pegasus somewhere, so I'm not sure how anyone could expect them to take responsibility for such a list.
- fossuser 5y agoThanks for the details - given that, they could have written a real response to the allegations rather than this blog post they posted and it would have come across better. This blog post comes across very defensive somewhat clueless, doesn't inspire confidence. I get why they'd not want to engage with the media (media writers are often useless at best, if not actively/intentionally harmful with regard to this kind of technical nuance), but that's no excuse for the response they have here. If they were going to go direct they should have done it right. For the curious, their report: https://www.nsogroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ReportBooklet.pdf https://www.nsogroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ReportBo...
- cbsmith 5y agoThe tough thing about being attacked in the press with misinformation is it is very difficult to respond in a way that comes across well. As you can see from the Post's publication of the correspondence from NSO (https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/07/18/nso-group-response-pegasus-project/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/07/18/nso...), they did try to inform the media about the technical nuance, but it's hard to get between a journalist and what looks like a great story. I think a skilled and experienced PR professional could have maybe navigated this successfully, but I've seen plenty of them fail in less difficult contexts than this.
- JohnFen 5y agoIt's also tougher when you're an organization that blew its credibility before this latest thing even happened.