From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tevernici, and this is The Daily.

A little over a decade ago, a small Israeli company created what would become the world's

most powerful and notorious hacking tool.

Today, my colleague Mark Mazzetti on the surprising story of NSO and why, despite banning its technology,

the US kept trying to use it.

It's Monday, May 15th.

So Mark, where does this investigation start for you?

I've been covering national security and intelligence issues for a number of years, and several years

ago, became interested in this group of companies that were offering this new weapon, a kind of

hacking tool that could crack the iPhones that all of us carry around every day.

And what I thought was particularly interesting was that we're as sort of hacking tools were once

the purview of a small group of very powerful and wealthy countries.

What these new companies offered was to kind of democratize this in a way, right?

To give every nation on earth access to powerful hacking tools that they could just sort of buy

off the shelf.

And so the landscape of surveillance fundamentally changed.

Any country can buy this for the right price.

And pretty soon, it became apparent that there was one company that stood out from the

rest.

And that was a company called NSO.

NSO was founded in Israel by three men who had done their military service, which is mandatory

in Israel, came out of the military, and they realized that they could recruit from the ranks

...