An investigation into the rise of NSO's Pegasus shows its widespread use by the CIA, UAE, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and others; the FBI bought but didn't use it
A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO's Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.
New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
The Times investigation closes the loop on a story years in the making: NSO had already booked hundreds of millions in Gulf-state deals by 2020, and its own court filings showed it snooping on calls to close sales even while claiming it never spied with its tools. What is new here is the customer list — the CIA among them — and the revelation that the FBI bought Pegasus without deploying it.
American intelligence agencies are exposed as customers of a tool Washington is simultaneously trying to ban, forcing the CIA and FBI to reconcile procurement with export-control policy.
Israel's diplomatic leverage — Pegasus sales as foreign-policy currency with states like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Mexico — now carries the cost of friction with its key ally over the same exports.
Second-order effects
NSO's client base shifts toward the riskiest buyers as reputable governments retreat, accelerating the financial decline already documented after the Uganda incident.
Allied governments facing domestic exposure — the UK among them, per Citizen Lab's No. 10 finding — face pressure to regulate or restrict commercial spyware purchases rather than quietly acquire them.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, offensive cyber capabilities consolidate into a licensed, state-supervised industry where export approval becomes an instrument of diplomacy — and unlicensed vendors are squeezed out.
The buyer list itself becomes the scandal: surveillance tooling sold as sovereign capability ends up surveilling the sellers' allies, pushing toward binding international norms on commercial spyware.
The trend: Commercial spyware is moving from a shadow export business into a regulated arena of model-access geopolitics, where who may buy intrusion tools is negotiated between states.
Fascinating to learn about Israel's conspiracy theories about NSO Group's blacklisting. They see it as an effort to “neuter” Israel's cyber advantage and warned Jake Sullivan Russia and China might fill the vacuum.
NSO is effectively a tool of the Israeli government, one Israel uses to gain diplomatic leverage. Netanyahu used Pegasus to knit together a new generation of global far-right leaders from Israel, Poland, Hungary, India and elsewhere
The United States blacklisted NSO in November after countless stories of Pegasus being used against dissidents, journalists etc. What you didn't know was that, beginning in 2019, the FBI paid millions to NSO as the bureau considered deploying Pegasus in the U.S.
EXCLUSIVE: The CIA bought a Pegasus, the world's most powerful and notorious cyberweapon, for the intelligence service of Djibouti, a country with a horrible record of human rights abuses. W\ the great @MarkMazzettiNYT via @NYTmag https://www.nytimes.com/...
Must-read bombshell. FBI paid NSO Group $5m for its Pegasus spyware, tested it, but purportedly decided not to use it. CIA put Pegasus in the hands of at least one country, Djibouti, with a record of human rights abuses. Then the U.S. sanctioned NSO. https://www.nytimes.com/...
“But the tech giant didn't have the entire picture. What Facebook didn't appear to know was that the attack on a U.S. phone number, far from being an assault by a foreign power, was part of the NSO demonstrations to the F.B.I. of Phantom” https://www.nytimes.com/... Don't miss.
Several American firms are getting into this action. One firm, funded by Peter Thiel, boasted in a presentation obtained by The Times that, at one point, it had the capability to hack WhatsApp. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, and Thiel is on the Facebooks's board. Happy Reading!
Must-read @nytimes investigation into the rise of NSO's Pegasus tool, the go-to hacking device with which repressive regimes around the world surveil journalists. https://www.nytimes.com/...
NEW: A deep investigation into NSO, the notorious hacking firm, w/@ronenbergman for @NYTmag. Short thread on some revelations 1/ https://www.nytimes.com/...