• Home
  • Internet
  • Internet News
  • Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Dell Join Facebook’s Legal Battle Against Israeli Hacking Company NSO After WhatsApp Hack

Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Dell Join Facebook’s Legal Battle Against Israeli Hacking Company NSO After WhatsApp Hack

Facebook has said that NSO exploited a bug in WhatsApp to help surveil more than 1,400 people worldwide.

Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Dell Join Facebook’s Legal Battle Against Israeli Hacking Company NSO After WhatsApp Hack

Microsoft, Google, Cisco, VMWare, and the Internet Association joined forces with Facebook

Highlights
  • NSO argues that its products are used to fight crime
  • NSO's spyware was also been linked to the slaying of journalist Khashoggi
  • NSO has denied hacking Khashoggi
Advertisement

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.

© Thomson Reuters 2020


Is MacBook Air M1 the portable beast of a laptop that you always wanted? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.

Affiliate links may be automatically generated - see our ethics statement for details.
Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.

Further reading: Facebook, Microsoft, Alphabet, Google, NSO, WhatsApp
Apple Project Titan Said to Target Self-Driving Cars Production by 2024 With 'Next Level' Battery Technology
Mi 11 Launch Date Set for December 28, Geekbench Listing Suggests 12GB RAM
Share on Facebook Gadgets360 Twitter Share Tweet Snapchat Share Reddit Comment google-newsGoogle News
 
 

Advertisement

Follow Us

Advertisement

© Copyright Red Pixels Ventures Limited 2024. All rights reserved.
Trending Products »
Latest Tech News »