Inside NSO, Israel’s billion-dollar spyware giant

Inside NSO, Israel’s billion-dollar spyware giant

NSO has long faced such accusations with silence. Claiming that much of its business is an Israeli state secret, it has offered precious little public detail about its operations, customers, or safeguards. 


Now, though, the company suggests things are changing. In 2019, NSO, which was owned by a private equity firm, was sold back to its founders and another private equity firm, Novalpina, for $1 billion. The new owners decided on a fresh strategy: emerge from the shadows. The company hired elite public relations firms, crafted new human rights policies, and developed new self-­governance documents. It even began showing off some of its other products, such as a covid-19 tracking system called Fleming, and Eclipse, which can hack drones deemed a security threat.


Over several months, I’ve spoken with NSO leadership to understand how the company works and what it says it is doing to prevent human rights abuses carried out using its tools. I have spoken to its critics, who see it as a danger to democratic values; to those who urge more regulation of the hacking business; and to the Israeli regulators responsible for governing it today. The company’s leaders talked about NSO’s future and its policies and procedures for dealing with problems, and it shared documents that detail its relationship with the agencies to which it sells Pegasus and other tools. What I found was a thriving arms dealer—inside the company, employees acknowledge that Pegasus is a genuine weapon—struggling with new levels of scrutiny that threaten the foundations of its entire industry.


“A difficult task”


From the first day Shmuel Sunray joined NSO as its general counsel, he faced one international incident after another. Hired just days after WhatsApp’s lawsuit was filed, he found other legal ..

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