(Reuters) – Tech giants, including Microsoft and Google, joined Facebook’s legal battle against hacking company NSO Monday, filing an amicus letter in federal court warning that the Israeli company’s tools were “powerful and dangerous.”
The letter, filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, opens a new front in Facebook’s lawsuit against NSO, which it filed last year after it was revealed that the cyber-surveillance company had exploited a bug in Facebook’s instant messaging. WhatsApp program to help monitor more than 1,400 people worldwide.
The NSO has argued that because it sells digital intrusion tools to police and espionage services, it should take advantage of “sovereign immunity” – a legal doctrine that generally protects 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’s Google, VMWare, Dell Technologies, VMWare, and the Washington-based Internet Association joined forces with Facebook to protest, saying granting 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 in a disgraceful way,” the letter states.
NSO – which did not immediately return a message to comment – claims its products are used to fight crime. But human rights defenders and technologists in places like the Toronto-based Citizen Lab and London-based Amnesty International have documented instances where NSO technology has been used to attack reporters, lawyers, and even nutrionists lobbying for soda tax.
Citizen Lab released a report on Sunday claiming that NSO’s phone hacking technology had been used to hack three dozen phones belonging to journalists, producers, anchors and executives from Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera, as well as a reporter’s device in London-based Al Araby TV.
NSO’s spyware has also been linked to the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. see their WhatsApp messages that led to his death.
NSO has denied hacking into Khashoggi, but has so far declined to comment on whether the technology was used to spy on others in its vicinity.
Reporting by Raphael Satter; Edited by Sonya Hepinstall and Stephen Coates