"Spyware Maker NSO Group Is Paving a Path Back Into Trump’s America", 9 April 2025

...

The Israeli spyware vendor has been on the US Commerce Department’s “blacklist” for more than three years, meaning it cannot do business with US companies without specific government approval. NSO Group poured at least $1.8 million into an aggressive pre-election lobbying effort, focusing primarily on Republican senators and representatives, with some meetings occurring as often as eight times. Yet the company remains on the Entity List.

Now, with a new occupant in the White House, NSO Group appears to be shifting its political strategy.

The company seems to have either terminated or altered its engagement with several of its previous lobbying consultancies in Washington—some of which were closely aligned with the Democrats—and has started working with a key new lobbying partner: the Vogel Group.

...

The Vogel Group’s connection to the Trump administration includes areas of key interest to NSO Group.

...

“Lobbyists and advisers who have passed through the revolving door, having worked in the previous Trump White House or for the campaign, as well as those who are big campaign donors have a unique ability to bend the ear of the new administration,” says Dan Auble, a senior researcher at the nonprofit OpenSecrets, which tracks US political spending. “That access is very valuable.”

NSO Group spokesperson Gil Lainer declined to comment on the scope of the contract with the Vogel Group when asked by WIRED. The Vogel Group did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Closing the Circle

NSO Group’s recent lobbying efforts appear to have mainly focused on Republican lawmakers, more than executive branch power players, particularly as the Biden administration had been engaged in a crackdown on commercial spyware. The company previously worked with several lobbying contractors, with whom it appears to have either terminated or altered its registrations.

...

Lobbyists representing foreign commercial interests—if their work is not intended to benefit a foreign government or political party—can be exempt from FARA and instead register under the LDA, which has no requirement to report specific meetings and is, overall, far less transparent than FARA.

Much of the public knowledge about NSO Group’s lobbying efforts came from FARA filings. Since both the Vogel Group and Chartwell Strategy Group are now registered under the LDA, it will now be more difficult to monitor their lobbying efforts.

...

What Counts as a Win

As of early March—before Vogel Group’s registration as a lobbyist for NSO Group—there had been no indication that the Trump administration intended to remove the company from the Entity List, according to a source familiar with the administration’s moves regarding spyware, who asked not to be named in order to discuss confidential matters. However, recent comments by NSO Group’s Lavie soft-peddled the impact of the Entity List on the company’s ability to operate in the US.

“[The Americans], when they say ‘blacklist,’ it sounds much more dramatic to me than it actually is,” Lavie claimed during an interview in Hebrew on an Israeli podcast following Trump’s election. He added: “You can still do business in the United States; it is definitely not a barrier for us to sell in the US.”

“In practice, we are on the list of Commerce, and what this does for us from a regulatory perspective, it simply forces American companies—if we want to buy technology from them—to ask for permission to sell us the technology. That's all,” Lavie said.

...

Watching for Signs

...

The access and influence NSO Group could attain through lobbying efforts by companies like the Vogel Group and Chartwell Strategy Group could lead to a more favorable political environment and, in turn, potentially increase business opportunities under a second Trump administration—something very hard for outsiders to measure, given the opaque nature of government procurement of surveillance technologies.

In the coming weeks and months, NSO Group’s interactions with US government officials, facilitated by its lobbying, will be critical in achieving such a favorable political environment. Caroline Glick, an adviser to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has also been recently lobbying the Trump White House—among others—on the matter of “request[ing] to check for options for lifting sanctions on Israeli technology companies,” according to reports in the Israeli media.

Experts closely monitoring the commercial spyware industry are raising the alarm about the prospect of NSO Group regaining business under Trump—further exacerbated by new reports that the company has been simultaneously pushing its interests on the international stage through the so-called Pall Mall Process, a UK- and France-led initiative to regulate such technologies.

“NSO has become a toxic brand that is widely associated not just with human rights abuses but also with national security threats to US, UK, France, and other countries,” says Natalia Krapiva, senior tech-legal counsel at civil-liberties-focused nonprofit Access Now.

Lainer, the NSO Group spokesperson, tells WIRED that the company “complies with all laws and regulations and sells only to vetted intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which use these technologies daily to prevent crime and terror attacks.” Lainer adds that NSO “has initiated and implemented the industry’s leading compliance and human rights program, which protects against misuse by government entities and investigates all credible claims of misuse”

Ultimately, the current administration will have the final say on how the US regulates NSO Group.

...