"Meet Paragon: An American-Funded, Super-Secretive Israeli Surveillance Startup That ‘Hacks WhatsApp And Signal" 29 July 2021

Paragon Solutions doesn’t have a website. There’s very little information at all about them online, even if the Tel Aviv-based smartphone surveillance startup’s employees are all over LinkedIn, more than 50 of them. That’s not a bad headcount for a company that’s still in stealth mode...

Paragon’s product will also likely get spyware critics and surveillance experts alike rubbernecking: It claims to give police the power to remotely break into encrypted instant messaging communications, whether that’s WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger or Gmail...

A senior executive at Paragon, who declined to comment on the record, told Forbes that he did not want to talk about its products. He said the company does not yet have customers. But, in an attempt to avoid the trouble NSO has had with some of its clients who were barred over misuse, the executive added that Paragon would only sell to countries that abide by international norms and respect fundamental rights and freedoms. Authoritarian or non-democratic regimes would never be customers, he added...

The company’s staff...have strong backgrounds in surveillance, with its VP of operations and HR lead being ex-NSO, and many of its developers coming from Israel Defense Forces intelligence units...