NEW YORK: 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”.
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.
That in turn “means dramatically more opportunities for those tools to fall into the wrong hands and be used nefariously”, the brief argues. 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 nutrionists lobbying for soda taxes.