Sources: French officials were in the final stages of buying NSO's Pegasus spyware in July, but opted not to after claims that French politicians were targeted
Patrick Howell O'Neill / MIT Technology Review :
Context & Ripple Effects
France was not just investigating Pegasus — it was weeks from buying it. Sources say officials were in the final stages of a purchase in July 2021, then walked away after claims emerged that French politicians had been targeted. Weeks later, the government confirmed Pegasus malware on three French journalists' phones and referred the findings to the Paris prosecutor, turning a prospective customer into a forensic investigator.
The reversal lands on a vendor already under pressure: Israel had opened an investigation and visited NSO's Tel Aviv offices over abuse allegations that same week, and later reporting traced how a 2019 sale to Uganda — followed by an attempt to hack US diplomats there — set off NSO's decline.
First-order effects
- NSO loses a major Western democratic state as a near-final customer at the exact moment its home government is auditing it for abuse, compounding the reputational damage from the journalists' findings.
- French intelligence must source surveillance capability elsewhere, having publicly positioned itself as a Pegasus victim rather than a client.
Second-order effects
- Other European governments face the same procurement dilemma — especially with reporting that senior EU officials, including Belgium's Didier Reynders, were themselves targeted by Israeli spyware.
- With democratic buyers retreating, NSO's remaining revenue skews toward the riskier clients its own executives were reportedly weighing as financial troubles deepened.
Third-order effects
- If revelations keep disqualifying democratic-state purchases, the commercial spyware market bifurcates: vendors like NSO are pushed toward autocratic clients and eventual collapse, while democracies either build in-house or ban procurement outright.
- Targeting of officials inside buyer countries becomes the tripwire that converts spyware from a quiet intelligence tool into a diplomatic liability, inviting EU-level regulation of the sector.
The trend: Commercial spyware vendors are losing their democratic-state customer base as each new targeting revelation makes government procurement politically untenable.