Of course the Israelis denied all of this. In one of the stranger conference calls I have ever had, ten NSO executives, who refused to give me their names or titles, insisted they were not cold-blooded mercenaries. They only sold Pegasus to democratic governments, they said, for the express use in criminal and terrorism investigations. Like Hacking Team before them, they told me that NSO had a strict internal vetting process to determine which governments it would and would not sell to.
