In lawsuits against Israeli hacking tools maker NSO Group, which claims to not spy with its tools, court docs allegedly show it snooping on calls to close sales
The rulers of the United Arab Emirates had been using Israeli spyware for more than a year, secretly turning the smartphones …
Context & Ripple Effects
NSO Group has built its business on a clean-hands pitch: it sells Pegasus to governments like the UAE but insists it never operates the tools itself. That firewall is now under legal attack — court documents in lawsuits against the company allegedly show staff listening in on phone calls to help close sales, which would make the vendor a direct participant in the surveillance it disclaims.
The allegation lands on a company already under multi-front pressure: the FBI has probed NSO's possible role in hacks of US residents and companies since 2017 (FBI probe), sources have detailed hundreds of millions of dollars in Gulf-state sales, and an Israeli court only weeks earlier let NSO keep exporting after Amnesty International failed to prove customer-side spying (export ruling). If the vendor itself spies, both the legal defense and the export case change shape.
First-order effects
- Plaintiffs in the lawsuits gain documentary ammunition against NSO's core claim that it does not use its own tools, shifting the litigation from customer conduct to the company's own behavior.
- Government clients such as the UAE face renewed scrutiny over how long they have been running Israeli spyware — reports allege more than a year of secret smartphone targeting.
Second-order effects
- The Israeli export approval that followed the Amnesty ruling becomes harder to defend if the vendor itself is alleged to snoop, putting NSO's licensing — the gatekeeper mechanism for its entire Gulf revenue base — at risk.
- US investigators probing NSO's role in hacks of American targets get a new thread to pull, raising the odds the FBI inquiry escalates from intelligence-gathering review to formal action.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the 'toolmaker is not the spy' distinction that shields commercial surveillance vendors collapses, pushing governments toward treating offensive spyware firms as operators subject to the same oversight as their state clients.
- Buyers in the Gulf and beyond may face tighter conditions on spyware procurement, restructuring a market where NSO's deals are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars.
The trend: Commercial spyware vendors are being pulled from the shadows of plausible deniability toward direct accountability for the surveillance their products enable.