Three former US intelligence agents who acted as cyber spies in the UAE, on Tuesday, confessed to violating US hacking laws and banning the sale of sensitive military technology.
The agents – Mark Bayer, Ryan Adams and Daniel Greek – were part of a secret unit called Project Raven that was first reported by Reuters and helped spy on the UAE from enemies.
According to Reuters, the Project Raven team hacked the accounts of human rights activists, journalists and rival governments at the behest of the UAE Kingdom.
The three confessed to hacking into computer networks in the United States and exporting sophisticated cyber-hacking devices without permission from the US government, according to court documents released Tuesday in US federal court in Washington, DC.
The 2019 Raven Project revelations by Reuters show a growing trend in which former intelligence agents are selling their spies overseas.
Laurie Stroud, a former US National Security Agency analyst who worked on the Raven project and later acted as a whistleblower, said she was pleased to see the allegations.
A Reuters investigation revealed that the Raven project had spied on a number of human rights activists, some of whom had later been tortured by UAE security forces.
Former members of the program said they believed they were following the law because senior officials told them the US government had approved it.
According to the court newspaper, Bayer, Adams and Grick admitted that they used a sophisticated cyber weapon called “Karma” that allows the UAE to hack Apple iPhones without having to click on a specific link. Slowly
Karma allows users to access tens of millions of devices and is known as a data collection system under federal export control laws. Officials said the company did not obtain permission from the US government to sell the device to the UAE.
According to Reuters, the Raven project used karma to hack thousands of targets, including a Nobel Prize-winning Yemeni human rights activist and BBC presenter.
