Tech giants including Microsoft Corp and Google on Monday joined Facebook Inc’s legal battle against hacking company NSO Group, filing an amicus brief in US 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 cybersurveillance firm had exploited a bug in Facebook-owned instant messaging program 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 Inc-owned Google, Cisco Systems Inc, Dell Technologies Inc-owned VMWare Inc 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 cybersurveillance tools.”
That in turn “means dramatically more opportunities for those tools to fall into the wrong hands and be used nefariously,” the brief says.
NSO — which did not immediately return a message seeking comment — says that its products are used to fight crime.
However, 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 on Sunday published a report alleging that NSO’s phone-hacking technology had been deployed against personnel at Qatar-based broadcaster al-Jazeera.
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