Washington’s Pegasus Spyware Problem

I grew up on Long Island in the years after September 11, 2001, when being Muslim meant living under quiet scrutiny. The New York Police Department’s “Demographics Unit,” built with help from the CIA, reportedly sent plain-clothes officers and informants to mosques, cafés, student groups and grocery stores across the region. They mapped Muslim communities, tracking daily life without evidence of crime. Years later, internal reviews showed that the program produced no terrorism leads. What it did produce was fear and the notion that proximity to faith was enough to justify surveillance.

That era taught many of us that once technology and suspicion are linked, they rarely separate. Two decades later, the same logic has been exported globally through tools like Pegasus, the zero-click spyware developed by Israel’s NSO Group. Pegasus has been used by governments across the globe to monitor activists, journalists and political dissidents. This fall, in a quiet transaction worth tens of millions of dollars, a private group of American investors acquired NSO.

At first glance, the sale appears to be just another niche transaction in the cybersecurity sector. But NSO does not sell ordinary software; it sells extreme access. The group develops spyware capable of remotely infiltrating a phone and installing software that grants complete access to the target’s messages, camera and microphone.