Tech giants including Microsoft and Google on Monday joined Facebook's legal battle against hacking company NSO, filing an amicus brief in federal court that warned that the Israeli firm's tools were "powerful, and dangerous."
The brief, filed before the US Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit, opens up a new front in Facebook's lawsuit against NSO, which it
filed last year after it was revealed that the cyber surveillance firm had
exploited a bug in Facebook-owned instant messaging programme WhatsApp to help
surveil more than 1,400 people worldwide.
NSO has argued that, because it sells digital break-in tools
to police and spy agencies, it should benefit from "sovereign
immunity" - a legal doctrine that generally insulates foreign governments
from lawsuits. NSO lost that argument in the Northern District of California in
July and has since appealed to the Ninth Circuit to have the ruling overturned.
Microsoft, Alphabet-owned Google, Cisco, Dell-owned VMWare,
and the Washington-based Internet Association joined forces with Facebook to
argue against that, saying that awarding sovereign immunity to NSO would lead
to a proliferation of hacking technology and "more foreign governments
with powerful and dangerous cyber surveillance tools."
That in turn "means dramatically more opportunities for
those tools to fall into the wrong hands and be used nefariously," the
brief argues.
NSO - which did not immediately return a message seeking
comment - argues that its products are used to fight crime. But human rights
defenders and technologists at places such as Toronto-based Citizen Lab and
London-based Amnesty International have documented cases in which NSO
technology has been used to target reporters, lawyers and even nutritionists
lobbying for soda taxes.
Citizen Lab published a report on Sunday alleging that NSO's
phone-hacking technology had been deployed to hack three dozen phones belonging
to journalists, producers, anchors, and executives at Qatar-based broadcaster
Al Jazeera as well as a device belonging to a reporter at London-based Al Araby
TV.
NSO's spyware was also been linked to the slaying of
Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered and dismembered in
the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Khashoggi's friend, dissident video
blogger Omar Abdulaziz, has long argued that it was the Saudi government's
ability to see their WhatsApp messages that led to his death.
NSO has denied hacking Khashoggi, but has so far declined to
comment on whether its technology was used to spy on others in his circle.
© Reuters
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