From being in MI, collateral damage is a thing... decisions like "if we act on this information, 100 people will be saved but they'll know we know and 1,000s could die. If we let 100 people die, we can save 1,000s" are more common than we'd like.
1. There's no compelling reason to think that this applies in NSO's case, since a lot of the bad actors are geopolitically aligned with "good" governments.
2. One needs only study the cold war briefly to see how the group-think in these unaccountable environments can become completely detached from reality.
Pardon me if I'm skeptical of unaccountable officials making those decisions, and orders of magnitude more skeptical of random people on the internet alluding to such actions as if we can all just assume abuses are justified by unspecified good ends.
