NSO Group, the surveillance vendor best known for selling hacking technology to authoritarian governments, including Saudi Arabia, also tried to sell its products to local U.S. police, according to documents obtained by Motherboard... "Turn your target's smartphone into an intelligence gold mine," a brochure for the hacking product, called Phantom, reads. The brochure was made by Westbridge Technologies, "the North American branch of NSO Group," it says.

... John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher from University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab... [said] "Local police wielding secret hacking technology is the nightmare scenario that we all worry about. The local laws and oversight mechanisms are not there. Abuse wouldn’t be a risk, it would be certainty."... "In retrospect we know that while pitching our law enforcement, NSO may have been breaking American laws. It is doubly ironic that the company is now in court claiming that it cannot be held accountable under American law," Scott-Railton added... [A] NSO spokesperson wrote, "We stand by previous statements that NSO Group products sold to foreign sovereigns cannot be used to conduct cybersurveillance within the United States, and no customer has ever been granted technology which enables targeting phones with US numbers."