Military-grade spyware maker, NSO Group, has faced many scandals with product traced to high-profile phone hacks. (Reuters)

Some Democratic lawmakers have called on the Joe Biden administration to impose financial sanctions on controversial Israeli spyware firm NSO Group and other surveillance companies from the UAE and Europe, saying they aided authoritarian regimes in committing human rights abuses.

In a letter on Tuesday, 18 US Senate and House of Representatives members asked the Treasury Department and State Department to sanction NSO, along with the United Arab Emirates’ cybersecurity company DarkMatter and European online bulk surveillance companies Nexa Technologies and Trovicor.

Among others, the letter was signed by Senate Finance Committee chairman Ron Wyden and House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, Reuters said in a report on Wednesday.

The letter contends that the companies facilitated the disappearance, torture and murder of human rights activists and journalists and asks for the application of Global Magnitsky sanctions, which would lead to freeze of bank accounts of company executives and travel ban to the US.

To meaningfully punish them and send a clear signal to the surveillance technology industry, the US government should deploy financial sanctions, reads the letter.

An investigation by 17 media organizations published in July revealed that the Israeli firm’s spyware was used for surveillance of more than 1,000 journalists, government officials and human rights activists in at least 50 countries.

The targeted individuals included several heads of state and prime ministers, Arab royal family members, business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials.

Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, also figured on the list.

The Israeli firm has since come under intense global scrutiny for its Pegasus software, considered one of the most powerful cyber-surveillance tools available on the market.

These surveillance mercenaries sold their services to authoritarian regimes with long records of human rights abuses, giving vast spying powers to tyrants, Reuters quoted Wyden as saying.

He accused those countries of using surveillance tools to lock up, torture and murder reporters and human rights advocates, adding that the Biden administration has the chance to turn off the spigot of American dollars and help put them out of business for good.

Last month, American tech company Apple filed a lawsuit against the Israeli spyware developer over surveillance of its users without effective accountability.

The lawsuit filed in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals federal court in San Francisco, California, sought to permanently prevent NSO Group from using Apple software, services or devices.

State-sponsored actors like the NSO Group spend millions of dollars on sophisticated surveillance technologies without effective accountability, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said in a statement. That needs to change.

The spyware was officially identified by the Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto.

Mercenary spyware firms like NSO Group have facilitated some of the world’s worst human rights abuses and acts of transnational repression, while enriching themselves and their investors, said Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, was quoted as saying last month.