"US welcomes new governments to fight against spyware as it finds more American personnel have been targeted", 17 March 2024

The Biden administration is welcoming six new countries to a US-led pact to crack down on phone-hacking spyware as US officials tell CNN that the administration continues to find new cases of American government personnel being targeted by a technology that is deemed a national security and counterintelligence threat.

“We are aggressively and intensively trying to identity and confirm more” cases of US government personnel whose phones have been targeted with commercially available spyware, a US National Security Council official told CNN.

A key prong of the US strategy to combat spyware has been trying to convince its allies not to do business with spyware companies whose tools might be used against US diplomats or to surveil dissidents and journalists on US soil.

Poland and Ireland — two countries that have allegedly had a role in spyware abuse in the past — are among the new signatories of the anti-spyware pact, a move that US officials are touting as a sign of growing global momentum to curb what has been rampant abuse of the surveillance technology. Poland’s prime minister has claimed the previous government used spyware on a long list of victims.

The other countries joining the pledge to combat spyware are Finland, Germany, Japan, and South Korea, according to the White House. The announcement will come this week in Seoul at the Summit for Democracy, an annual gathering of democratic governments around the world.

Eleven countries, including the US and its “Five Eyes” allies, signed onto the pledge last year, which vows that “any commercial spyware use by our governments is consistent with respect for universal human rights, the rule of law, and civil rights and civil liberties.”