The tech giants - including Microsoft and Google - have joined the legal battle being waged by Facebook against the Israeli piracy company, NSO, and filed a supporting memorandum in federal court in which they warned that The company's tools are "strong and dangerous".
The memo filed on Monday to the US Court of Appeals - the Ninth Circuit opens a new front in Facebook's lawsuit against NSO, which it filed last year after it was revealed that the electronic surveillance company had exploited a bug in the instant messaging app, WhatsApp. Owned by Facebook, Inc. to help monitor more than 1,400 people around the world.
Google is one of the companies that joined the legal battle against the Israeli piracy company (Reuters)
The Israeli company has defended itself that it sells tools for digital penetration to police and spy agencies, and should benefit from "sovereign immunity", a legal doctrine that generally shields foreign governments from lawsuits against them, but it lost this argument in the northern region of California last July, Since then, the Ninth Circuit has appealed to the ruling to be overturned.
Microsoft, Alphabet-owned Google, Cisco, VMWare, Dell Technologies, and the Washington-based Internet Association joined Facebook to oppose this, saying that granting immunity to a company SO will "lead to the spread of piracy technology and" more foreign governments with powerful and dangerous electronic surveillance tools. "
This, in turn, "means dramatically more opportunities for these tools to fall into the wrong hands and be used disingenuously," the note states.
NSO - which did not immediately respond with a letter seeking comment - argues that its products are being used to fight crime, but human rights defenders and technologists such as Toronto-based Citizen Lab and London-based Amnesty International have documented cases that have been used. It has NSO technology to target reporters, lawyers, and even nutritionists lobbying to tax soft drinks.
The "Citizen Lab" published a first report on Sunday indicating that the "NSO" phone hacking technology had been deployed to penetrate dozens of phones of journalists, producers, reporters and executives at the Qatari Al-Jazeera channel, in addition to a messaging device that works with the London-based Al-Arabi channel.
NSO's spyware has also been linked to the assassination of the Saudi journalist for The Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed and dismembered at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
Khashoggi's friend, blogger and friend of Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, had long argued that the Saudi government had the ability to see their WhatsApp messages, which led to Khashoggi's murder.
NSO has denied hacking Khashoggi, but has so far refused to comment on whether its technology has been used to spy on others in his circle.
The latest episode of the "What is Hidden Greatest" program, which was broadcast on Al-Jazeera the day before yesterday, featured an investigation revealing the phones of journalists and activists were hacked, and leaks about a large Emirati investment in Israeli companies producing espionage technologies.
The program revealed that 36 Al Jazeera journalists had their phones compromised by the "Pegasus" program developed by the Israeli company "NSO".
Over a period of months of investigation, the "greatest hidden" of espionage and penetration was tracked, as one of the phones used by the program team was subjected to surveillance and monitoring, in cooperation with the international laboratory, "Citizen Lab" specialized in monitoring hacking operations, to track any potential penetration, after it received a team The program on this phone has several threatening messages.
The program was able to obtain information about an agreement for a large Emirati investment in Israeli companies that produce espionage technologies, as a model for countries involved in the spying market, and the program - in cooperation with the Canadian laboratory - was able to come up with exclusive details of hacks that were exposed to phones whose users were spied on.