In March 2020, with the rise of COVID-19, NSO Group launched a contact-tracing technology named ‘Fleming’. The software is designed to track and map the spread of COVID-19 using geolocation data from mobile phones, including through using data collected by external third-party apps. The systems then providers information about contacts and durations of infected people who can individually be tracked, creates “heat” maps to identify hot-spots of the virus spread, and provide a risk analysis of how probable is each person or population group to be infected with the virus.
A report by Forensic Architecture published in December 2020 reported on a database collected by NSO’s Fleming program that was found unprotected online. It contained more than five hundred thousand datapoints for approximately 32,000 distinct mobile phones. This database was used as a marketing tool to market the system to countries around the world. The mobile phones tracked were those of citizens in Israel, UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Rwanda – all countries with ongoing contractual relationships with NSO group.
Israeli minister of defense at the time, Naftali Bennet, was an enthusiastic supporter of the development and use of the software in Israel. The system was used as part of the Israeli security service contact tracking of Israelis throughout 2020.
Unknown at this point
In March 2020, with the rise of COVID-19, NSO Group launched a contact-tracing technology named ‘Fleming’. The software is designed to track and map the spread of COVID-19 using geolocation data from mobile phones, including through using data collected by external third-party apps. The systems then providers information about contacts and durations of infected people who can individually be tracked, creates “heat” maps to identify hot-spots of the virus spread, and provide a risk analysis of how probable is each person or population group to be infected with the virus.
A report by Forensic Architecture published in December 2020 reported on a database collected by NSO’s Fleming program that was found unprotected online. It contained more than five hundred thousand datapoints for approximately 32,000 distinct mobile phones. This database was used as a marketing tool to market the system to countries around the world. The mobile phones tracked were those of citizens in Israel, UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Rwanda – all countries with ongoing contractual relationships with NSO group.
Israeli minister of defense at the time, Naftali Bennet, was an enthusiastic supporter of the development and use of the software in Israel. The system was used as part of the Israeli security service contact tracking of Israelis throughout 2020.