Coronavirus: Israeli spyware firm pitches to be Covid-19 saviour

A controversial Israeli cyber-security company is marketing software that uses mobile phone data to monitor and predict the spread of the coronavirus.

NSO Group says it is in talks with governments around the world, and claims some are already testing it.

The surveillance software-maker is being sued by WhatsApp for allegedly sending malware to the phones of human rights activists and journalists.

It has denied that allegation "in the strongest possible terms".

The company also faces a lawsuit in which it is accused of supplying software to the Saudi government, which the country is said to have used to spy on the journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his murder.

Last year, NSO responded to that claim by saying that its products were "licensed for the sole use of providing governments and law enforcement agencies the ability to lawfully fight terrorism and crime".

But now, it is pitching its tools as a means to help better understand how coronavirus is spreading.

"The software is here to solve a global pandemic," a spokesman told the BBC.

"This is about giving governments the ability to understand the situation they're facing and make informed decisions. It's a really powerful piece of software."

NSO says its employees will not have access to any data, but its software will work best if a government asks local mobile phone operators to provide the records of every subscriber in the country.

Each person known to be infected with Covid-19 could then be tracked, with the people they had met and the places they had visited, even before showing symptoms, plotted on a map.

But John Scott Railton, of the Toronto-based privacy watchdog Citizen Lab, said governments would be foolish to use the system.

"The last thing that we need is a secretive company claiming to solve a pandemic while refusing to say who its clients are," he said.

Cluster forecasts
NSO gave the BBC a demonstration of how its system works, via a video conference link.

A heat map of Israel showed hotspots where there were a high number of cases of the virus.

Zooming in, individual phones of people with the infection were mapped, and represented by an anonymised ID number. Details were also shown of other phones they had encountered and the relevant times and locations.

The engineer demonstrating the system said that it could be used to:

predict where the next cluster of cases was likely to be
when to move ventilators to hospitals most in need
when to allow certain regions of a country to come out of quarantine
NSO said a number of governments around the world were piloting the system, but would not reveal their identity or whether any of them had started using it in the field.