In November 2021 the U.S. Commerce Department added an Israeli company to the same Entity List it uses for weapons proliferators. The company was NSO Group, maker of Pegasus — spyware that turns a phone into a silent informant. The stated reason was blunt: NSO's tools had been sold to governments that used them to target "journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers," and to reach across borders to silence dissent. [1][U.S. Department of Commerce · CNN]
Pegasus was always sold as a lawful-intercept tool for terrorists and serious criminals. The documented use was wider: it surfaced on the phones of a Moroccan journalist, the widow of a murdered Mexican reporter, and associates of the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi. [2][Axios · CNN]
Trouble did not end the business; it reorganized it. In 2019 a new Israeli firm, Paragon Solutions, was founded by Ehud Barak — a former Israeli prime minister — and Ehud Schneorson, a former commander of the signals-intelligence Unit 8200. [The Citizen Lab · The Jerusalem Post]
Then the capability changed passports. In December 2024 a Florida private-equity firm, AE Industrial Partners, acquired Paragon for a reported $500 million — figures up to roughly $900 million have been cited — and folded it into REDLattice, a U.S. cyber company already in its portfolio. [The Jerusalem Post · Times of Israel]
The customer, increasingly, is the U.S. government itself. A roughly $2 million contract between Paragon and Immigration and Customs Enforcement was paused in 2024 for review under the executive order restricting commercial spyware; in 2025 the Trump administration lifted the pause, clearing ICE to use Paragon's tools. [Infosecurity Magazine]
The most domesticated member of the trade is Cellebrite — the Israeli digital-forensics firm whose phone-unlocking kits are a fixture of law-enforcement work. Unlike NSO, Cellebrite is a public company: Cellebrite DI Ltd. trades on Nasdaq and files with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which makes it the rare surveillance-for-hire vendor whose ownership is a matter of record rather than inference. [SEC EDGAR]
