BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association
Your Data Your Rights
An Israeli cyber defence firm led by the former CEO of NSO Group, the company behind the controversial Pegasus spyware, has registered to lobby the premier of Ontario and government departments about getting public contracts.
Dream Group says it “helps governments secure and transform their most sensitive information into decisions and capabilities that turn nations into Super Nations.” Dream Group was co-founded by Shalev Hulio, the former CEO of NSO Group, a company that landed on a U.S. watch list for acting contrary to that country’s national interests.
“It’s very worrisome that anyone who’s been involved with NSO Group or Pegasus spyware could be fishing for government contracts in Ontario,” said Tim McSorley, a national co-ordinator with the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.
While it appears Dream Group focuses on cyber defence rather than spyware, it still “raises a huge red flag” that an individual linked to spyware could “be trusted to sell equipment that would protect the data of people in Ontario or anywhere in Canada,” McSorley said.
NSO Group’s Pegasus has reportedly been used worldwide to potentially target tens of thousands of individuals’ phones. Targets have included academics, lawyers, journalists and government officials, according to reporting by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab has reported on instances of Pegasus being used to track individuals in dozens of countries, including one recent likely case in Serbia, where the target was a professor who supported the progressive student-led group that won an election in the country last month.
The lab’s findings were included in a 2019 UN report calling for stricter regulation of surveillance technology.
NSO Group says its products “are licensed only to legitimate government agencies for the sole purpose of investigating and preventing crime and terror.”
It says it does not operate the spyware on behalf of its clients, nor does it have access to the data collected using the software.’
In 2021, then-president Joe Biden’s administration put NSO Group on a U.S. watch list deeming the company’s activities “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the U.S.”
A press release about the decision said the government designated NSO Group “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”
Career pivot
In August 2022, Hulio stepped down from his role at NSO Group. He co-founded Dream Group alongside former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz a few months later in October, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
Now four years old, Dream Group’s most recent funding round pulled in US260million,takingthecompany’svaluationtoUS3 billion.
AI ethics researcher Ismael Kherroubi García says “following the money is important in the world of AI.” He pointed to surveillancewatch.io, a database that tracks connections within the surveillance industry.
The database cited reporting by European outlet Follow the Money, which found 12 Dream Group employees previously worked for NSO and other Israeli spyware firms based on a review of 118 LinkedIn profiles.
Unlike NSO Group, which licensed its software to foreign governments for fighting crime, Dream Group says it’s focused on protecting data and infrastructure. It says it operates at the “forefront of cyber and artificial intelligence research.”
Eva Galperin is the director of cybersecurity at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights non-profit in San Francisco. In spite of her expertise in this field, she can’t say for certain what Dream does.
“One of the big problems with the use of a term like AI in somebody’s marketing word salad is that it can mean anything,” she said. “As the technical person, their website does not clear anything up.”
It’s not unusual for tech companies’ marketing to be “hyperbolic and extraordinarily vague,” Galperin said, but she is still skeptical of Dream Group.
“When the CEO of a very prominent company that enables human rights abuses goes and starts another company, the chances that it is also based on a lack of respect for human rights are pretty high.”
On its website, Dream promises “total sovereignty” and “end-to-end National Sovereign AI.”
Galperin says this marketing “implies that the data will be stored and processed within Canada — also that [Dream is] happy to prey on other countries’ growing distrust of reliance on American AI technology.”
The company is looking to build a roster of public sector clients and now, according to provincial lobbying filings, it has its sights set on Ontario.
Dream Group’s Nov. 3 filing said the company wants to “meet and educate office holders on our sovereign stack solutions, built to rigorously support prosperous, secure, and resilient digital government.”
Its lobbying is targeting Premier Doug Ford’s office, plus six other cabinet members’ offices, including those responsible for infrastructure, artificial intelligence adoption and procurement.
Christian Medina, the manager of global programs for data governance and AI ethics non-profit Open North, pointed out that Canada’s privacy legislation also hasn’t been updated in years — not since before the recent explosive growth seen in AI and other technologies.
McSorely said it is “crucial that the government not rush into adopting hyperbolic and well-marketed AI tools without making sure the legislation is in place to ensure that our privacy is protected.”
Representatives for the premier’s office and the Ministry of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement did not respond to the IJF’s questions about whether officials had met with Dream Group’s lobbyist, or if they are considering a contract with the company.
Neither Dream Group nor its consultant lobbyist Vince Amodeo responded to the IJF’s questions about the specific product or service it wants to sell to the Ontario government, or if they had met with any provincial officials.
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