therecord.media
Suzanne Smalley
January 12th, 2026
Hungary has granted political asylum to Poland's former justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, who is being prosecuted for his role in a spyware scandal that has rocked the country.
Hungary has granted political asylum to Poland's former justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, who is being prosecuted for his role in a spyware scandal that has rocked the country.
Ziobro is facing dozens of charges for allegedly embezzling money meant for crime victims to pay for spyware used to snoop on the devices of political opponents.
One of the highest profile people implicated in Poland’s sprawling spyware scandal, Ziobro said on X that he intends to accept Hungary’s asylum offer “due to the political persecution in Poland.”
“I have decided to remain abroad until genuine guarantees of the rule of law are restored in Poland,” Ziobro posted. “I believe that instead of acquiescing to being silenced and subjected to a torrent of lies—which I would have no opportunity to refute—I can do more by fighting the mounting lawlessness in Poland.”
Ziobro served as justice minister from 2015 until 2023 and stands accused of helping facilitate a massive spyware operation that current Police Prime Minister Donald Tusk has alleged involved snooping on nearly 600 people.
In September 2024, a Senate commission investigating the scandal said it had found "gross violations of constitutional standards.”
It is unusual for a country within the European Union to offer asylum to a criminal defendant facing prosecution elsewhere in the bloc. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban is politically aligned with Ziobro, a member of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, and has his own history with spyware, however.
In December 2024, another former Justice Ministry official, Marcin Romanowski, claimed asylum in Hungary after facing charges for his alleged role in the spyware operation.
techcrunch.com
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
11:15 AM PST · January 8, 2026
The infamous spyware maker released a new transparency report claiming to be a responsible spyware maker, without providing insight into how the company dealt with problematic customers in the past.
NSO Group, one of the most well-known and controversial makers of government spyware, released a new transparency report on Wednesday, as the company enters what it described as “a new phase of accountability.”
But the report, unlike NSO’s previous annual disclosures, lacks details about how many customers the company rejected, investigated, suspended, or terminated due to human rights abuses involving its surveillance tools. While the report contains promises to respect human rights and have controls to demand its customers do the same, the report provides no concrete evidence supporting either.
Experts and critics who have followed NSO and the spyware market for years believe the report is part of an effort and campaign by the company to get the U.S. government to remove the company from a blocklist — technically called the Entity List — as it hopes to enter the U.S. market with new financial backers and executives at the helm.
Last year, a group of U.S. investors acquired the company, and since then, NSO has been undergoing a transition that included high-profile personnel changes: former Trump official David Friedman was appointed the new executive chairman; CEO Yaron Shohat stepped down; and Omri Lavie, the last remaining founder who was still involved in the company, also left, as Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
“When NSO’s products are in the right hands within the right countries, the world is a far safer place. That will always be our overriding mission,” Friedman wrote in the report, which does not mention any country where NSO operates.
Natalia Krapiva, the senior tech-legal counsel at Access Now, a digital rights organization that investigates spyware abuses, told TechCrunch: “NSO is clearly on a campaign to get removed from the U.S. Entity List and one of the key things they need to show is that they have dramatically changed as a company since they were listed.”
“Changing the leadership is one part and this transparency report is another,” said Krapiva.
“However, we have seen this before with NSO and other spyware companies over the years where they change names and leadership and publish empty transparency or ethics reports but the abuses continue.”
“This is nothing but another attempt at window dressing and the U.S. government should not be taken for a fool,” said Krapiva.
Ever since the Biden administration added NSO to the Entity List, the company has lobbied to have its restrictions lifted. After President Donald Trump took office again last year, NSO intensified these efforts. But, as of May last year, NSO had failed to sway the new administration.
In late December, the Trump administration lifted sanctions against three executives tied to the Intellexa spyware consortium, in what some saw as a sign of a shift in the administration’s attitude toward spyware makers.
A lack of details
This year’s transparency report, which covers 2025, has fewer details than reports from previous years.
In an earlier transparency report covering 2024, for example, NSO said it opened three investigations of potential misuse. Without naming the customers, the company said it cut ties with one, and imposed on another customer “alternative remediation measures,” including mandating human rights training, monitoring the customer activities, and requesting more information about how the customer uses the system. NSO did not provide any information about the third investigation.
NSO also said that during 2024, the company rejected more than $20 million “in new business opportunities due to human rights concerns.”
In the transparency report published the prior year, covering 2022 and 2023, NSO said it suspended or terminated six government customers, without naming them, claiming these actions resulted in a revenue loss of $57 million.
In 2021, NSO said it had “disconnected” the systems of five customers since 2016 following an investigation of misuse, resulting in more than $100 million in “estimated loss of revenue,” and it also said that it “discontinued engagements” with five customers due to “concerns regarding human rights.”
NSO’s newest transparency report does not include the total number of customers NSO has, statistics that have been consistently present in previous reports.
TechCrunch asked NSO spokesperson Gil Lanier to provide similar statistics and figures, but did not receive answers by press time.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, a human rights organization that has investigated spyware abuses for more than a decade, criticized NSO.
“I was expecting information, numbers,” Scott-Railton told TechCrunch. “Nothing in this document allows outsiders to verify NSO’s claims, which is business as usual from a company that has a decade-long history of making claims that later turned out to be misrepresentation.”
