NSO Group, one of the crucial well-known and controversial makers of presidency adware, launched a brand new transparency report on Wednesday, as the corporate enters what it described as “a brand new part of accountability.”
However the report, in contrast to NSO’s earlier annual disclosures, lacks particulars about what number of prospects the corporate rejected, investigated, suspended, or terminated as a result of human rights abuses involving its surveillance instruments. Whereas the report incorporates guarantees to respect human rights and have controls to demand its prospects do the identical, the report gives no concrete proof supporting both.
Consultants and critics who’ve adopted NSO and the adware marketplace for years consider the report is a part of an effort and marketing campaign by the corporate to get the U.S. authorities to take away the corporate from a blocklist — technically referred to as the Entity Listing — because it hopes to enter the U.S. market with new monetary backers and executives on the helm.
Final 12 months, a gaggle of U.S. traders acquired the corporate, and since then, NSO has been present process a transition that included high-profile personnel modifications: former Trump official David Friedman was appointed the brand new govt chairman; CEO Yaron Shohat stepped down; and Omri Lavie, the final remaining founder who was nonetheless concerned within the firm, additionally left, as Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
“When NSO’s merchandise are in the precise palms inside the precise nations, the world is a far safer place. That can all the time be our overriding mission,” Friedman wrote within the report, which doesn’t point out any nation the place NSO operates.
Natalia Krapiva, the senior tech-legal counsel at Entry Now, a digital rights group that investigates adware abuses, informed information.killnetswitch: “NSO is clearly on a marketing campaign to get faraway from the U.S. Entity Listing and one of many key issues they should present is that they’ve dramatically modified as an organization since they have been listed.”
“Altering the management is one half and this transparency report is one other,” stated Krapiva.
“Nevertheless, now we have seen this earlier than with NSO and different adware corporations through the years the place they alter names and management and publish empty transparency or ethics studies however the abuses proceed.”
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“That is nothing however one other try at window dressing and the U.S. authorities shouldn’t be taken for a idiot,” stated Krapiva.
Ever because the Biden administration added NSO to the Entity Listing, the corporate has lobbied to have its restrictions lifted. After President Donald Trump took workplace once more final 12 months, NSO intensified these efforts. However, as of Could final 12 months, NSO had did not sway the brand new administration.
In late December, the Trump administration lifted sanctions in opposition to three executives tied to the Intellexa adware consortium, in what some noticed as an indication of a shift within the administration’s angle towards adware makers.
A scarcity of particulars
This 12 months’s transparency report, which covers 2025, has fewer particulars than studies from earlier years.
In an earlier transparency report masking 2024, for instance, NSO stated it opened three investigations of potential misuse. With out naming the shoppers, the corporate stated it minimize ties with one, and imposed on one other buyer “different remediation measures,” together with mandating human rights coaching, monitoring the client actions, and requesting extra details about how the client makes use of the system. NSO didn’t present any details about the third investigation.
NSO additionally stated that in 2024, the corporate rejected greater than $20 million “in new enterprise alternatives as a result of human rights issues.”
Within the transparency report printed the prior 12 months, masking 2022 and 2023, NSO stated it suspended or terminated six authorities prospects, with out naming them, and claiming these actions resulted in a income lack of $57 million.
In 2021, NSO stated it had “disconnected” the techniques of 5 prospects since 2016 following an investigation of misuse, leading to greater than $100 million in “estimated lack of income,” and it additionally stated that it “discontinued engagements” with 5 prospects as a result of “issues concerning human rights.”
NSO’s latest transparency report doesn’t embody the whole variety of prospects NSO has, statistics have been constantly current in earlier studies.
information.killnetswitch requested NSO spokesperson Gil Lanier to offer related statistics and figures, however didn’t obtain solutions by press time.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, a human rights group that has investigated adware abuses for greater than a decade, criticized NSO.
“I used to be anticipating data, numbers,” Scott-Railton informed information.killnetswitch. “Nothing on this doc permits outsiders to confirm NSO’s claims, which is enterprise as typical from an organization that has a decade lengthy historical past of constructing claims that later turned out to be misrepresentation.”
