WASHINGTON — During a closed-door session with lawmakers last December, Christopher A. Wray, the director of the F.B.I., was asked whether the bureau had ever purchased and used Pegasus, the hacking tool that penetrates mobile phones and extracts their contents.eventually decided not to deploy Pegasus in criminal investigations in July 2021, amid a flurry of stories about how the hacking tool had been abused by governments across the globe.It has been used by police and intelligence services to hack the phones of drug kingpins and terrorists, but gained notoriety when it was revealed that governments, like Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Hungary and India had deployed it against political dissidents, journalists and human rights workers.Mr. Wray’s closed-door testimony came just weeks after the Biden administration last November placed NSO and another Israeli hacking firm on a Commerce Department blacklist, preventing American companies from selling technology to the firms without permission from the U.S. government.They acknowledged that the bureau did consider deploying Pegasus, though they still emphasized that the F.B.I.’s main goal was to test and evaluate it to assess how adversaries might use it."