How Washington power brokers gained from NSO's spyware ambitions
The Israeli surveillance giant NSO Group and companies linked to it or its founders have spent millions of dollars in hopes of wooing their way into the U.S. market, hosting demonstrations for government intelligence officials and hiring Washington’s most prominent names despite pledges that its phone-hacking tool can’t be used inside the United States.
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Between 2015 and 2017, NSO’s parent company, OSY Technologies, and a previous owner, Francisco Partners, paid roughly $100,000 to Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and future national security adviser to Donald Trump, for what Flynn said was “consulting” work in financial disclosure forms he filed with the Office of Government Ethics in 2017. The filings offered no other details of the work, and NSO did not respond to a question about Flynn’s work. Flynn did not respond to requests for comment.
In late 2018, Lavie paid $170,000 to another member of Trump’s orbit, Jeff Miller, to lobby members of Congress on “immigration and naturalization” issues, a federal disclosure filing shows. The Republican operative was paid by Lavie Management Co., which is also named on the deed for Lavie’s $4 million New Jersey mansion. NSO did not respond to a question about the payment, and Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2019, after a Saudi dissident filed a lawsuit in Israel accusing NSO of helping surveil Khashoggi before his death, the company embarked on a VIP spending spree in hopes of cleaning up its reputation, announcing it had hired three senior advisers to help the company “continue its work to assist governments in fighting serious crime and terrorism”: Tom Ridge, the United States’ first homeland security secretary; Gérard Araud, France’s former ambassador to the United States; and Juliette Kayyem, a Department of Homeland Security official under President Barack Obama.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/19/nso-business-us/