We know about Pegasus/NSO and its a fun subject to follow, but in all honesty, every engineer privy to the 0-day bank that powers it could build one of their own, or sell it to another group, and no one would know
This isn’t a business model you bootstrap by publishing to an appstore and paying influencer to promote - this isn’t “Raid of Warduty Call of Legends”. You need high level government contacts that can open doors as these deals don’t usually come up on public tenders, and you need people that can manage a relationship with both your host government and client governments especially if either or both are unstable and falling out of favor with a specific regime would result in high legal risk or even actual risk to the safety of you or your employees.
A couple of engineers taking a bag of goodies are more likely than not to end up in prison like the former NSA folks that took up freelancing for Saudi Arabia.
Or is that what Pegasus/NSO basically already provide, as a feature?
considering shell are mainly used for deeply corrupt ends, this isn't a far stretch. similarly, things that seem like duopolies today might well be revealed to be monopolies in reality if actual ownership records became public. i imagine the false public perception of a market that has fair competition is very valuable as it maintains the illusion of choice. similarly, regarding spying by USA; i imagine Crypto AG was/isn't the only CIA front.
They sold this to .gov and supposedly it was in use in the early '00s - and it provided ostensibly access to tracking financial and human trafficking data..
Think of it as a precurser to palantir and such - and there was a bunch of shady shit around this.
Here is just one sketchy story about it:
https://oye.news/news/world-news/epstein-the-maxwell-sisters...
but apparently they made counter-terrorism software and that this software was in use in the US intel comm and that it was also compromised...
Regardless of the truth of how it was used - the fact that the most notorious human trafficking/blackmailing operation yet exposed was directly related to providing counter-terrorism software to the USG is.... interesting.
Google the maxwell twins.
Got about halfway through before realising wrong twins.. lol
:-)