Paragon Solutions, a startup that sells access to surveillance technologies including phone spyware, has cut ties with the Italian government, according to reports in The Guardian and Haaretz.
On Thursday, citing an anonymous source, The Guardian reported Paragon had first suspended its contract with Italy on Friday after WhatsApp said it had disrupted a hacking campaign leveraging the Israeli startup’s spyware targeting around 90 people. On Wednesday, Paragon terminated the contract once the company determined that the Italian government had broken “the terms of service and ethical framework it had agreed under its Paragon contract,” according to the British newspaper.
Israeli newspaper Haaretz later confirmed The Guardian’s report, adding that Paragon had terminated its deal with two Italian government agencies — a law enforcement agency and an intelligence agency — and disconnected their access to its spyware product called Graphite, according to the paper’s anonymous sources.
The Italian Prime Minister’s office did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Arturo di Corinto, a spokesperson for Italy’s Agenzia per la Cybersicurezza Nazionale (ACN — or National Cybersecurity Agency) confirmed to TechCrunch that ACN is in contact with Meta’s legal representatives, and that “it is analyzing the case that, as you know, is very delicate, given the involvement of a foreign company and the alleged surveillance of a journalist and a human rights activist.”
Di Corinto told TechCrunch ACN did not have any further information.
“I don’t talk about our customers and activity,” Paragon’s CEO and co-founder Idan Nurick told TechCrunch, declining to provide comment about the Italian cases as well as WhatsApp’s allegations.
TechCrunch also reached out to Paragon’s U.S. subsidiary’s executive chairman John Fleming, who did not respond to a request for by press time.
Citizens targeted in a dozen European countries
In a statement on Wednesday, the office of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni denied involvement with the spyware campaign revealed by WhatsApp. The prime minister’s office said that legally protected subjects, including journalists, were not targeted by Italian intelligence services.
After WhatsApp revealed the existence of the spyware campaign, three people have come forward claiming they were targeted. All three of them have been critical of the Italian government.
The first victim was Francesco Cancellato, the director of news website Fanpage.it, which last year published a damning documentary investigation into the youth wing of Meloni’s far-right party, showing members making racist remarks, and chanting Nazi and fascist slogans.
On the same day, a Libyan activist who lives in Sweden, Husam El Gomati, and has been critical of the Italian and Libyan government’s dealings to stop immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean, said he received a notification from WhatsApp informing him that he had been targeted.
On Wednesday, Luca Casarini, the co-founder of Mediterranea Saving Humans, a non-government organization that helps immigrants, also said he was targeted.
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Do you have more information about Paragon Solutions, and this spyware campaign? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.
It’s possible that more victims will be revealed soon, and not just in Italy. The Italian government said it had contacted WhatsApp inquiring about the company’s claims, and that the Meta-owned company said that among the targets there were phone users in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden.
None of these country’s governments, contacted either through their U.S. embassies or other governmental bodies, did not respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.
On Tuesday, Paragon’s Fleming told TechCrunch that the company counted the U.S. government and its unspecified “allies” as customers. Euractiv reported Thursday that the company has a subsidiary in Hamburg, Germany.
Fleming also told TechCrunch that Paragon “requires that all users agree to terms and conditions that explicitly prohibit the illicit targeting of journalists and other civil society figures.”
“We have a zero-tolerance policy against such targeting and will terminate our relationship with any customer that violates our terms of service,” Fleming said.
It appears that in the case of its Italian customers, Paragon followed through with its policy.
