They directly sell proprietary tools and services to governments, including cruel and oppressive totalitarian governments who use those products and services to spy on, imprison, torture, and kill journalists, dissidents, activists, and political rivals. There's no justifying it whatsoever. It's not like these are consumer products which some governments happen to use; leaks show they work very closely with governments to provide support. They take feature requests and bug reports from those governments. They sit on calls with them.
If they had announced they were blacklisting those governments as customers, maybe they could've partly repaired their reputation, but that would destroy their entire business model, so they don't and won't. Their total addressable market is strictly capped. They need every government in the world as a prospective customer, else their business probably isn't financially sustainable. Ethics stop where sales start. In response to all of the reporting, they actually do claim to now be factoring ethics into their sales decisions, but the rigor behind it seems extremely questionable, to say the least. [1]
There is absolutely no other employer someone could work for (besides those in the same niche, like Hacking Team, or military contractors that work with such governments) which is anywhere near as unethical as companies like NSO. Not Facebook, not Google, not even CIA/NSA/FBI, probably.
Also, you can't liken living in a country with a government who you know does unethical things to working for an employer who you know does unethical things.
>The company has established an ethics committee, which decides whether it can sell its spyware to countries based on their human rights records as reported by global organizations like the World Bank’s human capital index, and other indicators. NSO would not sell to Turkey, for example, because of its poor record on human rights, current and former employees said.
>But on the World Bank index, Turkey ranks higher than Mexico and Saudi Arabia, both NSO clients. A spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, which needs to authorize any contract that NSO wins from a foreign government, declined to answer questions about the company.
It depends. The CIA/NSA probably do contribute to the torture of people, or they did in the recent past, which is abhorrent. But the people they tortured were believed to be violent terrorists, whereas these countries torture and kill people just for speaking out about their government. Both are unjustifiable and unforgivable crimes against humanity, but the latter is still worse.
I didn't say the CIA/NSA weren't unethical; just that they're probably not as unethical as NSO. But I could also be unaware of awful things CIA/NSA have done which are worse than what is publicly known, in which case I cede the point.
If they had announced they were blacklisting those governments as customers, maybe they could've partly repaired their reputation, but that would destroy their entire business model, so they don't and won't. Their total addressable market is strictly capped. They need every government in the world as a prospective customer, else their business probably isn't financially sustainable. Ethics stop where sales start. In response to all of the reporting, they actually do claim to now be factoring ethics into their sales decisions, but the rigor behind it seems extremely questionable, to say the least. [1]
There is absolutely no other employer someone could work for (besides those in the same niche, like Hacking Team, or military contractors that work with such governments) which is anywhere near as unethical as companies like NSO. Not Facebook, not Google, not even CIA/NSA/FBI, probably.
Also, you can't liken living in a country with a government who you know does unethical things to working for an employer who you know does unethical things.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/politics/government-ha...
>The company has established an ethics committee, which decides whether it can sell its spyware to countries based on their human rights records as reported by global organizations like the World Bank’s human capital index, and other indicators. NSO would not sell to Turkey, for example, because of its poor record on human rights, current and former employees said.
>But on the World Bank index, Turkey ranks higher than Mexico and Saudi Arabia, both NSO clients. A spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Defense, which needs to authorize any contract that NSO wins from a foreign government, declined to answer questions about the company.