NSO groupone of the most notorious and controversial makers of government spyware, released a new transparency report on Wednesday, as the company enters what it describes as a “new phase of accountability.”
But the report, unlike previous NSO annual disclosures, does not have details on how many customers have been denied, investigated, suspended, or terminated for human rights violations involving surveillance tools. While the report contains a promise to respect human rights and have controls to demand that customers do the same, the report does not provide concrete evidence to support it.
Experts and critics who have followed NSO and the spyware market for years believe that the report is part of the company’s efforts and campaign to get the US government to remove the company. block list – technically called List of Entities – as it hopes to enter the US market with new sponsors and financial executives at the helm.
last year, a group of US investors acquired the companyand since then, the NSO has undergone a transition that includes a high-profile personnel change: former Trump official David Friedman appointed new chief executive; CEO Yaron Shohat resigns; and Omri Lavie, the last remaining founder of the company, also left, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
“When NSO products are in the right hands in the right countries, the world is a far safer place. That will always be our overriding mission,” Friedman wrote in the report, which did not mention the countries where NSO operates.
Natalia Krapiva, senior technology legal counsel at Access Now, a digital rights organization that investigates spyware abusetold TechCrunch: “NSO is clearly in the campaign to get removed from the List of US Entities and one of the key things they have to show is that they have changed dramatically as a company since they were listed.”
“Changing leadership is one part and this transparency report is another part,” Krapiva said.
“However, we have seen this before with NSO and other spyware companies over the years when they changed names and leaders and published transparency or ethics reports, but the abuse continued.”
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“This is nothing but an attempt to close the window and the US government should not be considered stupid,” Krapiva said.
Since the Biden administration added NSO to the Entity List, the company has lobbied to have the ban lifted. After President Donald Trump took office last year, the NSO expanded its efforts. However, since May last year, The NSO failed to shock the new administration.
In late December, the Trump administration sanctions are lifted against three executives connected to the Intellexa spyware consortium, in what some see as a sign of a change in the administration’s attitude towards spyware manufacturers.
A lack of details
This year’s transparency report, which covers 2025, has fewer details than reports from previous years.
In the past transparency report covering 2024, for example, NSO said to open three investigations of potential misuse. Without naming the customers, the company said it had severed ties with one, and implemented “alternative remediation measures” for the other customers, including mandating human rights training, monitoring customer activity, and requesting more information about how customers use the system. The NSO did not provide information on the third investigation.
NSO also said that by 2024, the company had turned away more than $20 million “in new business opportunities due to human rights concerns.”
At transparency report publishing the previous year, covering 2022 and 2023, NSO said it suspended or terminated six government customers, without naming them, and claimed that the action resulted in a loss of revenue of $57 million.
In 2021, NSO said has “disconnected” the system from five customers since 2016 after an investigation of misuse, resulting in more than $100 million in “estimated loss of revenue,” and also said that it “stopped engagements” with five customers because of “concerns about human rights.”
NSO’s latest transparency report does not include the total number of NSO subscribers, a statistic it has consistently contained in previous reports.
TechCrunch asked NSO spokesman Gil Lanier to provide similar statistics and figures, but did not receive an answer by press time.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, a human rights organization that has been investigating spyware abuse for more than a decade, criticized the NSO.
“I expect information, numbers,” Scott-Railton told TechCrunch. “Nothing in this document allows outsiders to verify NSO’s claims, which is business as usual from a company with a decade-long history of making claims that later turned out to be false.”