Nicole Pearl Roth is a reporter for the New York Times who covers cybersecurity.

She's been on the beat for about a decade. And a few years ago, she started reporting on commercial spyware,

digital tools that enable a company or a government to track a person without their knowledge.

Then one day, she got a phone call.

It was a source, asking if he could come over to her house and show her something.

It was something about a spyware company called the NSO group.

And he showed up at my house and he actually halfway through the interview,

opened up his laptop and said, take some pictures of my screen,

print them out and delete these pictures off your phone. And then he left. Whoa. Yeah.

And what he had shared with me was an internal marketing pitch by NSO that basically detailed just how invasive their spyware was, how much it cost, what it could do.

What it could do was basically use someone's phone to monitor all their activity.

Calls, texts, keystrokes, everything.

The stuff you're telling me sounds like it's from an espionage thriller.

The like source coming to your house with the list on their computer.

What was your reaction at the moment?

Were you thinking like this is bananas?

When you're covering cybersecurity for as long as I have,

nothing is bananas anymore.

But after he left, I did walk out of my home office,

walk into the kitchen,

and just made eye contact with my husband and just said something like,

you won't believe what just happened.

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