U.S. Lobbyists Accused of Failing to Disclose NSO Ties to Zionist Regime

Date: 23 July 2022 - 21:43

News ID: ۱۰۴۹۹۶

WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – A group of U.S.-based lobbyists representing the Zionist regim’s spyware company NSO have been violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (Fara) by not registering the company as being under the control of the occupying regime, a prominent rights group has said.
In a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Justice, Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn) called on the government to investigate the four agents representing NSO, saying that when the agents registered themselves under Fara, they stated that the company was not “supervised, owned, directed, controlled, financed, or subsidized in part” by a foreign government or regime.
“We believe that the FARA Unit should investigate these four lobbyists and their firms and find that their presentation of false information was intentional and intended to mislead the U.S. government, Congress, and the American public,” the letter said.
Three of the lobbyists - David Tamasi, Steve Rabinowitz, and Timothy Dickinson - had filed to register for the NSO Group after it was placed on a blacklist by the U.S. Department of Commerce last year. Another lobbyist, Brian Finch, registered prior to the listing.
“These four lobbyists are not just representing NSO Group, a company with an egregious record of enabling human rights abuses; they are in fact representing a company controlled by a foreign regime, and they are misrepresenting this relationship to the U.S. government and the American public,” Adam Shapiro, Palestine-Zionist director at Dawn, said in a statement.
Fara requires lobbyists to register with the Department of Justice when taking on foreign principals as clients.
If the client is a company, then the lobbyists must indicate whether a foreign government or regime exerts any form of control over it, which includes “the possession or the exercise of the power, directly or indirectly, to determine the policies or the activities of a person, whether through the ownership of voting rights, by contract, or otherwise”.
In reports from the New York Times, senior Zionist officials have said the occupying regime considered the software a crucial component of its foreign policy.
NSO sparked international outrage after a series of investigations in 2021, under the coordination of Forbidden Stories, showed how Pegasus, the Zionist company’s flagship product, was used by governments to spy on activists, journalists and political dissidents.
Governments such as Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have been accused of using the spyware.