The report says Paragon is not cooperating with Italian authorities in investigating the spyware attacks

Last year, WhatsApp and Apple informed several people in Italy, including journalists and activists, that they had been targeted by government spyware. In particular, WhatsApp pointed the finger at the Israeli-American surveillance technology company Paragon Solutions as the company that provided the technology for a hacking campaign that targeted about 90 people around the world with the “Graphite” spyware.

The notifications sparked a scandal in Italy that is still unfolding. After being notified of the attacks, a number of victims filed criminal complaints with Italian authorities, and prosecutors then opened an investigation.

Now it appears that Paragon, despite its previous promises to help Italian authorities investigate the scandal, is said to be uncooperative.

According to Wired Italy, Italian prosecutors sent a formal request for information to Paragon, via the Israeli government, but a year after opening investigations, the company has yet to respond.

Following the outbreak of the spyware scandal in Italy, Paragon publicly criticized the Italian government, claiming that it had rejected the company’s offer to investigate whether a journalist had been hacked and spied on using its Graphite spyware. The company went so far as to cancel its contract with the two Italian spy agencies, AISE and AISI, in part because the Italian government rejected the company’s offer of assistance.

It is unclear why Paragon did not respond to the prosecutor’s request. It is possible that the Israeli government intervened. In 2024, The Guardian reported that the Israeli government confiscated documents from NSO to prevent the company from complying with demands of the lawsuit against WhatsApp.

Israeli human rights lawyer Itay Mack told Wired Italy that the Israeli government could force local companies to cooperate with foreign judicial requests for information, “but this has never happened.”

The Spanish Supreme Court closed its investigations earlier this year into the use of NSO spyware to target Spanish politicians, claiming that the Israeli authorities did not cooperate with the investigation.

Paragon, the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the prosecutors’ offices in Rome and Naples, which are jointly investigating the case, did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

In the history of government spyware, it is very rare for a company to get into a public fight with one of its former clients. Paragon’s move was likely motivated by its long-standing attempts to appear as an ostensibly more righteous alternative to other spyware makers, such as NSO Group or Intellexa, which have been caught up in countless scandals around the world.

Instead, Paragon’s official website, which is no longer loading, said the company provides clients with “ethics-based tools, teams, and insights.”

So far, this is Paragon’s first public scandal, but the company now has an active contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which for a year detained and deported tens of thousands of immigrants across the country. ICE told lawmakers that its law enforcement arm, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is using Paragon’s spyware to combat terrorism and drug trafficking.

The Italian government under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has always denied hacking two journalists, Francesco Cancellato and Ciro Pellegrino, who work for online news site Fanpage and whose phones were targeted by Paragon’s Graphite. Citizen Lab, a research organization that has investigated spyware breaches for more than a decade, confirmed that both journalists were hacked using Graphite.

Other victims in the country include activists working for Mediterranea Saving Humans, an Italian non-profit organization whose mission is to rescue migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean.

Last June, the Italian parliamentary committee that oversees the country’s spy agencies investigated the scandal and concluded that targeting activists was legal. But she also said she could find no evidence that Cancelato was targeted, and the commission did not investigate Pellegrino at all.

Then, in March, the same prosecutors who had requested information from Paragon said in a press release that a forensic investigation into Cancelato’s device confirmed that his phone had indeed been hacked, while it had been unable to conclude the same after analyzing Pellegrino’s phone.

Prosecution investigations are still ongoing.