- 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. 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 beloning to a reporter at London-based Al Araby TV.