From USA Today
Spyware firm tied to iPhone hack has U.S. ties
By Elizabeth Weise
SAN FRANCISCO — The spyware firm tied to an iPhone hack that prompted an emergency patch this week by Apple keeps a very low profile. But the NSO Group has strong ties here as well as in Israel, where it's staffed by specialists from Israel's military cyber division....
The tech company's background, pieced together from industry reports, reflects the growing boom in cybersecurity firms that operate in a nebulous area: creating software and processes that break into encrypted devices for government entities....
Some suggest the availability of software such as that produced by the NSO Group is at least partly due to technology firms’ reluctance to provide a backdoor to law enforcement to increasingly sophisticated encryption.
"We are at this place because of law enforcement frustration with access to data in investigations. And so we are going to continue to see law enforcement agencies, even from legitimate democratic states, buying 'hacking tools' so that crimes that occur within their own borders can be investigated," said Chris Hoofnagle, a professor of cyber crime law at the University of California, Berkeley....
Chris Hoofnagle is an adjunct professor in the School of Information and a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.