Paris: French President Emmanuel Macron has turned his cellphone and his telephone number remembers the Pegasus Spyware case, the Presidential Official said on Thursday, in one of the first concrete actions announced in connection with a scandal.
“He has several telephone numbers.
This does not mean he has spied on.
It was only additional security,” the official said told Reuters.
Gabriel Attal government spokesman said the president’s security protocol was adapted in the light of the incident.
Global outcry was triggered when several international media organizations reported that Pegasus spyware was used in Journalist smartphone hacking, human rights activists and government officials in several countries.
In Israel, the house of the Developer of Pegasus NSO Group, a senior parliamentary member said the parliamentary panel could look into spyware exports.
NSO said that the software was used to fight crime and terrorism and have denied mistakes.
“Obviously we take (this) very seriously,” Attal told reporters after the emergency cabinet meeting was focused on Pegasus’s allegations.
Le Monde newspaper and Radio France Broadcasters reported on Tuesday that Macron phones were on a potential target list for monitoring by Morocco.
Both media said that they did not have access to the macron telephone and could not verify whether the phone was indeed spying.
Morocco has rejected this accusation.
French lawyers for Morocco, Olivier Baratelli, said the government plans to file a demand for defamation in Paris towards non-governmental organizations, Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories, according to France News Outlet on Thursday.
The two groups participated in the Pegasus Probe and the alleged Morocco had targeted French officials to supervise with spyware.
In the midst of the concern of the European Union, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin that spyware must be rejected to countries where there was no judicial supervision.
The Hungarian prosecutor on Thursday launched an investigation into many complaints received after the report.
Israel has appointed an inter-minister team to assess reports based on investigations by 17 media organizations that say Pegasus has been used in a smartphone effort that seeks or successfully uses malware that allows the extraction of messages, records calls and secretly activates the microphone.
NSO has rejected reporting by media partners as “full of the wrong assumptions and the theory that is not corrobored.” Reuters has not yet independently verified reporting.
“We certainly have to see you on all the licensing subjects provided by Deca,” RAM Ben-Barak, Head of Overseas Knesset and the Defense Committee, told the Israeli army radio, referring to the government-managed defense control agency.
The Israeli government team “will carry out the examination, and we will definitely look into the findings and see if we need to fix things here”, said Ben-Barak.
A former deputy head of Mossad, he said the right use of Pegasus had “helped many people”.
DECA is in the Israeli defense ministry and oversee NSO exports.
Both the ministries and companies say that Pegasus is intended to be used to track only terrorists or criminals, and that all foreign clients are trusted governments.
NSO said it did not know the specific identity of people towards who the client uses Pegasus.
If it accepts Pegasus complaints have been misused by the client, NSO can lowly get a list of targets and, should the complaint proved correctly, unilaterally closing the client’s software, the company said.
Other world leaders among them whose telephone numbers said the news organization was in the list of possible targets including Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and King of Morocco Mohammed VI.
France Macron turns cellphones in the light of the Pegasus case
