A look at the battle between hacking tool vendors such as NSO Group and UAE-based DarkMatter as they compete for business from authoritarian governments
the world's new mercenaries Insightful read by my friend @ronenbergman New Age of Warfare: How Internet Mercenaries Do Battle for Authoritarian Governments http://www.nytimes.com/... @nytimes : A new age of warfare: Sophisticated surveillance, once the domain of world powers, is increasingly available on the private market. Smaller countries are seizing on the tools — sometimes for darker purposes. http://www.nytimes.com/... Edward Snowden / @snowden : This is not an industry, it is a criminal conspiracy. http://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 piece maps the moment state-grade hacking stopped being a superpower monopoly: Israel's NSO Group and the UAE-linked DarkMatter were both selling intrusion tools to governments that could never have built them. The Intercept had already reported in 2016 on DarkMatter helping the UAE track, locate, and hack its own citizens, and Edward Snowden's response — calling it not an industry but a criminal conspiracy — framed the debate that has run ever since.
What followed validated the framing rather than curbing it: NSO went on to book hundreds of millions of dollars in Gulf-state deals for Pegasus, and by 2022 an investigation found spyware use booming even after US sanctions on NSO, with the DEA secretly deploying its Graphite tool.
First-order effects
- Smaller authoritarian governments immediately gain surveillance capabilities once limited to world powers, with NSO and DarkMatter competing directly for their budgets in the Gulf and beyond.
- Snowden's 'criminal conspiracy' charge puts the vendors themselves — not just their government clients — at the center of public scrutiny.
Second-order effects
- The vendor market feeds a broader cyberweapons arms race: as the New Yorker reported, agencies like the NSA prioritize offensive capability over defense, sustaining a lucrative 0-day market that suppliers like NSO both draw from and sell into.
- Commercialized tools leak and proliferate — the Shadow Brokers episode showed what happens when state-developed malware escapes control, and a privatized supply chain multiplies those failure points.
Third-order effects
- Sanctions and lawsuits have not shrunk the market — NSO kept selling after being blacklisted, and Russian contractors linked to oligarch-owned Citadel Group now build FSB surveillance tools — pointing toward a durable global industry of private cyber-mercenaries serving state clients.
- If the pattern holds, export controls and platform litigation become the main brakes on an industry whose customers are sovereign buyers, forcing democracies to decide whether offensive spyware is a trade good or a controlled weapon.
The trend: State-grade surveillance is commoditizing into a private mercenary market where vendors like NSO Group and DarkMatter outpace the sanctions and norms meant to contain them.