Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Dell join legal battle against hacking company NSO

Tech giants including Microsoft and Google on Monday (Dec 21) 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 prior to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, opens up a fresh front in Facebook's lawsuit against NSO, which it filed this past year after it had been revealed that the cyber surveillance firm had exploited a bug in Facebook-owned instant messaging programme WhatsApp to greatly help surveil a lot more than 1,400 persons worldwide.

NSO has argued that, because it sells digital break-in tools to police and spy agencies, it will 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 really have the ruling overturned.

Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Dell Technologies-owned VMWare and the Washington-based Internet Association joined forces with Facebook to argue against that, saying that awarding sovereign immunity to NSO would result in a proliferation of hacking technology and "more foreign governments with powerful and dangerous cyber surveillance tools".

That subsequently "means significantly more opportunities for those tools to fall into the wrong hands and become used nefariously," the brief argues.

NSO - which didn't immediately return a note seeking comment - argues that its products are being 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, legal representatives and even nutritionists lobbying for soda taxes.

Citizen Lab published a written 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 in addition to 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 simply murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Khashoggi's friend, dissident video blogger Omar Abdulaziz, has long argued that it had been the Saudi government's ability to see their WhatsApp messages that resulted in his death.

NSO has denied hacking Khashoggi, but has up to now declined to touch upon whether its technology was used to spy on others in his circle.