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Indonesian authorities have imported spyware since 2017, says report
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A man walks past a logo of the NSO Group, producer of Pegasus spyware. (Reuters/Amir Cohen)
R
ights watchdog Amnesty International reported that some Indonesian government bodies have been deploying highly invasive surveillance products imported from Israel, Luxembourg and Malaysia to spy on people, stoking concerns about privacy in a country notorious for its shrinking civic space.
In a report released on Thursday and carried out in collaboration with Indonesian magazine Tempo, Israeli newspaper Haaretz and some Western news outlets, Amnesty International’s Security Lab said that it found evidence that the National Police and the National Cyber and Encryption Agency (BSSN), in addition to unnamed companies, had bought and used spyware technology between 2017 and 2023.
Spyware technology, Amnesty went on to say, was imported to Indonesia through “obscured and non-transparent” vendors, brokers and resellers with complex ownership structures, making oversight from civil society organizations as well as national and international authorities close to impossible.
Among the vendors named in the Amnesty report are Israel-based Wintego Systems Ltd, Malaysia-based Raedarius M8 Sdn Bhd and Luxembourg-based Q Cyber Technologies SARL, a corporation tied to Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group. The report also identified brokers and resellers based in Singapore and Indonesia.
Amnesty also discovered evidence that some malicious domains targeted specific individuals in Indonesia, although the report failed to dive deeper into who these individuals were.
The malicious domains target individuals by creating websites that imitate national and regional media outlets in hopes that the target will click on the compromised link, which will cause their device to be exposed to potential malware and viruses.
In a statement to Amnesty as a response to these findings, Israel’s NSO Group said it always conducts due diligence procedures that “assesses the potential human rights impact of a proposed business opportunity” before approving any sales.
