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The Treasury Department on Tuesday banned a notorious creator of software that can hack smartphones and turn them into surveillance devices from doing business in the United States.
The sanctions constitute the most aggressive action taken by the U.S. government against a spyware company.
The company, Intellexa, develops a software called Predator, which can take over a person’s phone and turn it into a surveillance device. Predator and other major spyware programs boast capabilities such as secretly turning on the user’s microphone and camera, downloading their files without their knowledge and tracking their location.
Under the sanctions, Americans and people who do business with the U.S. are forbidden from transacting with Intellexa, its founder and architect Tal Dilian, employee Sara Hamou and four companies affiliated with Intellexa.
In a press call previewing the sanctions, a White House official, who requested to not be identified, said the decision to sanction Intellexa “goes beyond actions we’ve taken.”
“This is the first time that the U.S. government has leveraged any sanctions authority against commercial spyware vendors for enabling misuse of their tools,” he said.
An Amnesty International investigation found that Predator has been used to target journalists, human rights workers and some high-level political figures, including European Parliament President Roberta Metsola and Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-Wen. The report found that Predator was also deployed against at least two sitting members of Congress, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D.
Predator was also central to a scandal that rocked Greece in 2022 in which dozens of politicians and journalists were reportedly targeted with the spyware.
NBC News was unable to reach Intellexa for comment. Its website has been offline since sometime in 2023.
Multiple governments around the world “have deployed this technology to facilitate repression and enable human rights abuses, including to intimidate political opponents and curb dissent, limit freedom of expression, and monitor and target activists and journalists,” a Treasury Department press release on the sanctions said.
The sanctions follow President Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order regulating commercial spyware.
Under that order, the Commerce Department previously placed another spyware developer, the Israeli company NSO Group, on the U.S. entity list, subjecting it to additional regulations. But sanctioning Intellexa is an escalation, said John Scott-Railton, a senior spyware researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
“The U.S. using Treasury sanctions is going to be a thunderclap for the spyware world,” he said. “Suddenly this has big, personal consequences.”
“This is the kind of stuff that causes people to consider changing lines of work and leaving countries,” he said.
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