NSO Group spent millions on lobbyists and consultants in the US but seems to have been rebuffed by US law enforcement agencies, which balked at its tools' cost
even *after* their involvement in the death and detention of journalists and rights defenders around the world! https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Zack Whittaker / @zackwhittaker : Amazon has known NSO used its infrastructure for at least a year. (It also hasn't been a secret among researchers.) Remember when tons of location data for its contact tracing tech “Fleming” was exposed? Yep, that was all AWS, too. Curious to see if Amazon will act more broadly. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
NSO Group's business has been built abroad: sources detailed hundreds of millions of dollars in Pegasus sales across Gulf states over recent years. Its US entry ran through two doors — a lobbying-and-consultants blitz in Washington, and a COVID-era pitch of its Fleming contact-tracing system, which researchers found had been exposed online and had drawn on location data from thousands of unsuspecting people.
This report closes the US door explicitly: law enforcement agencies rebuffed the company, balking at the tools' cost. That squares with what came later in the corpus — internal records show an FBI push in late 2020 and H1 2021 to deploy Pegasus before plans were dropped in July 2021, the same month as this story.
First-order effects
- NSO's millions in US lobbying and consulting spend fails to convert into a domestic customer: US law enforcement agencies reject Pegasus outright on price, leaving the FBI as the closest it got — a buyer that never deployed.
- Amazon faces immediate pressure over reporter Zack Whittaker's allegation that AWS hosted NSO infrastructure for at least a year while the company was already implicated in the death and detention of journalists and rights defenders.
Second-order effects
- With the US market closed, NSO's revenue concentration in Gulf buyers deepens — the same autocratic client base driving the reputational risk that now follows its cloud provider, pushing Amazon toward a broader hosting decision.
- Western spyware rivals watching NSO learn that lobbying cannot overcome procurement objections on cost and human-rights baggage; the viable path into democratic markets narrows to cheaper, more defensible tooling.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, commercial spyware splits structurally: democracies build or buy domestically scrutinized capabilities while vendors like NSO consolidate around customers without oversight — making cloud infrastructure providers the de facto gatekeepers of who can operate at all.
- Surveillance tool access becomes a matter of statecraft rather than salesmanship: procurement decisions by agencies like the FBI, not vendor marketing budgets, determine which governments hold offensive capability.
The trend: Commercial spyware markets are sorting along governance lines, with democratic procurement rejections and cloud-provider decisions — not vendor spending — determining which regimes get offensive capability.