Haha, but it's crazy to go ahead and publish despite being told not to, by a company that can hack you with almost 100% certainty.

But hacking TechCrunch would be a major PR disaster for NSO (again), so maybe they would abstain.

More like a failure on TechCrunch. There is an implied agreement and violating it will result in a flat refusal to talk outside of prepared press releases.

This isn't good journalism and should not be celebrated.

That's not how that works. You don't get to decide statements are off the record after you realize you said something that would look bad. Every interview would be a puff piece if that was how things worked.

Well, that's how it works with the "Muckrakin's woke!1!!" crowd.

This will just stop people from talking to journos, like many have done. This whole rhetoric of the journalist being an "adversary" that is "outing" things is extremely problematic. You should be able to retract statements. If it's live, it's practically not possible so it's fine, but for articles I think that journos should respect retractions, regardless of whether it is post-hoc or pre-decided.

Now, the "victim" here is NSO, so not expecting any sympathy, but journos do this to everyone, even normal people.

> Puff pieces

But with the aforementioned rhetoric in vogue these days, every piece of journo is a forced "scoop", leading to most of modern media(social and mainstream, the incentives are the same) being misconstrued non-factual brain damage. Even press conferences, most questions are just loaded and very bad-faith, basically trying to get you to say something they can quote out of context, or use for a misconstrued "non-truth", or a false equivalence. Or sometimes they just make things up! Retarded scoop-bait headlines as well.

The root cause for all this is that adversarial rhetoric.

Before you say "but the press is an adversary against the government", they do this to sportspersons, and a variety of other normal people too. If they only did this to the designated government spokesperson, it would be OK.

Now, this rhetoric itself is a result of "news"[1] companies competing for audiences. A fairly obvious incentive there. On socials too. Engagement is rewarded, leading to the same thing.

Furthermore, LLMs if used for content generation, will compete for audience, and even inference-time feedback driven optimisation leads to it giving the same reality-bending outputs. It's been simulated and shown in this stanford paper already: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06105

[1] they really deserve the quotes these days

> This whole rhetoric of the journalist being an "adversary" that is "outing" things is extremely problematic. You should be able to retract statements.

It's quite the opposite, actually. As Katherine Graham, the former publisher of the Washington Post, used to say: News is what someone wants suppressed. Everything else is just advertising.

TechCrunch is not obligated to let NSO's mouthpiece advertise on their pages.

> It's quite the opposite actually

Why are you simply repeating what GP said followed by a call to authority (a biased one at that)?

I explained why it is problematic in the 2nd part of my post.

> There is an implied agreement

The implied agreement is that everything is on the record unless explicitly agreed otherwise beforehand.

Oh, did the poor spyware maker get their expectation of privacy violated?

Retroactively accepting comments to be off-the-record as a favor to a subject would be considered very bad journalism.

This is not a new or unique circumstance.

fitting, considering his job is to spy without consent