But the report, unlike NSO’s previous annual disclosures, lacks details about how many customers the company rejected, investigated, suspended, or terminated due to human rights abuses involving its surveillance tools. While the report contains promises to respect human rights and have controls to demand its customers do the same, the report provides no concrete evidence supporting either.
“When NSO’s products are in the right hands within the right countries, the world is a far safer place. That will always be our overriding mission,” Friedman wrote in the report, which does not mention any country where NSO operates.
“Changing the leadership is one part and this transparency report is another,” said Krapiva.
“However, we have seen this before with NSO and other spyware companies over the years where they change names and leadership and publish empty transparency or ethics reports but the abuses continue.”
“This is nothing but another attempt at window dressing and the U.S. government should not be taken for a fool,” said Krapiva.
This year’s transparency report, which covers 2025, has fewer details than reports from previous years.
NSO also said that during 2024, the company rejected more than $20 million “in new business opportunities due to human rights concerns.”
NSO’s newest transparency report does not include the total number of customers NSO has, statistics that have been consistently present in previous reports.
TechCrunch asked NSO spokesperson Gil Lanier to provide similar statistics and figures, but did not receive answers by press time.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, a human rights organization that has investigated spyware abuses for more than a decade, criticized NSO.
“I was expecting information, numbers,” Scott-Railton told TechCrunch. “Nothing in this document allows outsiders to verify NSO’s claims, which is business as usual from a company that has a decade-long history of making claims that later turned out to be misrepresentation.”
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