Tech giants including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. asked for permission to join Facebook Inc.’s legal battle against NSO, an Israeli technology firm, that the social media pioneer accuses of exploiting a bug and installing malware in WhatsApp to help collect data from more than 1,400 people worldwide. The companies filed an amicus brief in a federal appeals court in San Francisco that described the Israeli firm’s tools as “powerful, and dangerous.”
Facebook’s Whatsapp malware lawsuit against NSO, which was filed last year has been given a new front after the brief was filed before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The Israeli firm has since argued that as it sells digital break-in tools to police and spy agencies so it should benefit from “sovereign immunity” (legality that generally protects foreign governments from lawsuits). That argument was lost by the NSO in the Northern District of California in July when U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled against their request. NSO has since appealed to the Ninth Circuit to have the ruling overturned.
Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Dell-owned VMWare, and the lobbying group from Washington, Internet Association, joined forces with Facebook to argue against providing sovereign immunity to NSO, saying that it would lead to an increase 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. It said that the stolen data could be “exploited by malicious actors other than the initial customer to cripple infrastructure, commit large-scale financial crime, or cause other catastrophic damage.”
NSO’ arguments that its products are used to fight crime have been rued by human rights defenders and technologists including Toronto-based Citizen Lab and London-based Amnesty International who have documented cases in which NSO technology has been used to target reporters and lawyers.
According to a report from Citizen Lab published on Sunday, NSO’s phone-hacking technology allegedly had been deployed to hack three dozen phones of employees of Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera. While the company’s spyware has also been linked to the slaying of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
