NSO Group says “all the finger-pointing should be at the customer” not the company as it compares itself to a car manufacturer and its clients to drunk drivers
The maker of powerful spy software allegedly used to hack the phones of innocent people says blaming the company is like …
Context & Ripple Effects
NSO Group had already faced allegations over Pegasus and a court challenge to its export activity, while a contemporaneous profile of the company’s founders framed its spyware business as an Israeli technology success story. Its position here places responsibility for alleged abuse with government customers rather than the vendor.
The customer-only defense soon met sharper scrutiny: Israeli officials opened an investigation into Pegasus abuse allegations, and Apple later sought to bar NSO from its products in a federal lawsuit over alleged targeting of Apple users.
First-order effects
- NSO Group’s public defense rejects vendor responsibility for alleged Pegasus misuse, making customer conduct the company’s central answer to critics and investigators.
Second-order effects
- Apple’s suit shifts the dispute from NSO’s stated customer safeguards to whether a platform provider can use product-access restrictions to constrain a surveillance vendor.
Third-order effects
- The sequence pressures commercial spyware suppliers to show that customer controls are meaningful in practice, not merely a contractual division of responsibility—a core test of NSO’s later acknowledgement that clients sometimes misused Pegasus.
The trend: Commercial surveillance vendors are being judged increasingly on accountability for customer misuse, alongside the stated purpose of their tools.