Paris: Phone French President Emmanuel Macron and 15 members of the French government may have been among the potential targets in 2019 supervision by spyware made by the NSO Group based in Israel, according to newspaper reports on Tuesday.
The Paris Prosecutor’s Office announced it was investigating alleged use of Pegasus Spyware to target journalists, human rights activists and politicians in various countries.
France Daily Le Monde reported that Macron’s telephone number and then government members were identified among thousands which were allegedly chosen by NSO clients for potential supervision.
In this case, the client is an unknown Moroccan security service, according to Le Monde.
Le Monde is part of a global media consortium that identifies the target of a list of more than 50,000 cellphone numbers obtained by Paris-based journalism, non-profit forbidden stories and amnesty international human rights groups and shared with 16 news organizations.
Consortium members said they could link more than 1,000 numbers in lists with individuals, including more than 600 politicians and government officials and 189 journalists.
Among the number is journalists and politicians in France.
Reporting consortium has said several members of the Arab Royal Family, Head of State and Prime Minister are on the list.
An official at the Macron office said the authorities would investigate the report, and if targeting was proven, it would be “very big”.
Le Monde quoted NSO said the French President was never targeted by his client.
The NSO Group denied that it had maintained “a potential target list, past or existing”.
It is called a forbidden story report “full of the wrong assumptions and unbound theories”.
Leak source – and how it was authenticated – not disclosed.
While the presence of telephone numbers in the data does not mean efforts to be made to hack the device, the consortium said it taught data showed the potential target of the NSO government client.
The Paris Prosecutor’s Office said in a statement on Tuesday that he opened an investigation into the raft of potential accusations, including violations of privacy, illegal data usage and illegally sold spyware.
As always under French law, the investigation did not name the suspected actor but aimed at determining who could eventually be sent to court.
It was asked by legal complaints by two journalists and the French investigation website Mediapart.