The FBI says a contractor misled the agency and used NSO's Landmark to track people in Mexico without consent; the FBI terminated the contract in April 2023
After a Times report, the bureau canceled its contract with a government contractor that used the tool on its behalf. But questions remain.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop the Times has been pulling on for two years. The bureau's earlier push to deploy Pegasus in criminal investigations was dropped in July 2021, and reporting showed the FBI had bought but never used the tool while CIA, UAE, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia ran it widely. Then came the stranger twist: five days after Biden put NSO on the Commerce Department blocklist in November 2021, a US government front company licensed NSO's geolocation tool Landmark.
Today's disclosure is what that licensing turned into: a contractor using Landmark to track people in Mexico without their consent, terminated only in April 2023 after the Times asked questions. The pattern matters because NSO's earlier lobbying push had already been rebuffed by US law enforcement over cost — yet its tools kept entering the US government through intermediaries rather than the front door.
First-order effects
- The unnamed contractor loses its FBI contract outright, and the FBI now has to answer why an agency tool licensed days after the blocklist was used abroad without consent on its behalf.
Second-order effects
- Every US agency that touched NSO tools through intermediaries faces renewed scrutiny of who actually validated those customers, reviving the question the lobbying fight raised about whether rebuffing NSO directly just pushed demand into side channels.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US procurement of commercial spyware shifts from case-by-case embarrassment to structural controls — front companies and contractors becoming the audited chokepoint for export-control enforcement, with consent requirements attached to geolocation tracking as a baseline.
The trend: The US government's relationship with commercial spyware vendors is collapsing from quiet evaluation to prohibition, with intermediaries and front companies emerging as the unpoliced gap between policy and practice.