During what was meant to be a mandatory ethics compliance presentation at NSO Group's headquarters, the company's PowerPoint on responsible surveillance practices was repeatedly interrupted by pop-up notifications displaying private messages from the company's own employees.
The incident occurred as Chief Ethics Officer Michael Rothstein attempted to outline new guidelines for "responsible digital surveillance solutions" using slides that metadata later revealed were pirated from Palantir's internal servers. Witnesses report that halfway through a slide titled "Respecting Personal Privacy," the screen was overtaken by a series of messages from the company's internal Slack channels.
Calendar notifications kept appearing throughout the presentation, revealing meetings scheduled for "Rebranding Surveillance as Freedom™," "UN Testimony Rehearsal," and "Operation: Delete Everything - URGENT - Day After Court Date."
"First it was just personal lunch plans," said one anonymous attendee. "But then we saw screenshots from VP David Kaplan's dating app conversations, and someone's embarrassing WebMD searches about toe fungus."
The presentation deteriorated further when the system displayed several employees' private complaints about management, including one message that read: "lol these ethics guidelines are about as real as my ex-wife's commitment to our marriage."
Rothstein attempted to continue the presentation while IT staff frantically tried to regain control of the system. However, the situation reached its peak when the projector displayed a recent email thread between senior executives discussing ways to rebrand their surveillance tools as "privacy enhancement solutions."
"The worst part was when someone's phone camera activated and we all watched the CFO rehearsing his congressional testimony in his office, practicing different ways to say 'I do not recall' and 'I cannot speak to those specific allegations,'" another employee noted.
NSO Group's PR team quickly issued a statement calling the incident "a planned demonstration of our software's capabilities." However, this was immediately undermined by their own private Slack messages appearing on screen, including "OH GOD OH GOD WHO APPROVED THIS PRESENTATION" and "Does anyone know a good crisis management firm?"
The presentation's final slide, "Our Commitment to User Privacy," was reportedly never shown, as it was obscured by the company's customer service chatbot repeatedly asking itself "Are we the baddies?"
