US Court Bars NSO Group from Targeting WhatsApp Users
New Delhi: In a significant victory for Meta which owns WhatsApp, a US District Court in California has granted an injunction against the NSO group which operates spyware Pegasus, from targeting WhatsApp users.
Last year, judge Hamilton had found the NSO group liable in a 2019 lawsuit brought by WhatsApp citing breaches in 1,400 devices.
The US court granted permanent injunction order accepting the argument of Meta that “Whatsapp has over 3 billion users to whom privacy and security were promised in the form of end-to-end encryption… and unlawful access does indeed constitute an irreparable injury to WhatsApp.”
Though district judge Phyllis Hamilton has allowed the plea for permanent injunction against NSO Group, the court has also slashed the damages award from $168 million to $4 million.
“For the foregoing reasons, plaintiffs’ (Meta) motion for permanent injunction is GRANTED, and defendants’ (NDO Group) motion for remittitur is GRANTED. The punitive damages award is remitted to the amount of $4,002,471…” the court said.
WhatsApp is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which also owns Facebook, Threads and Instagram.
The court has reduced the damages observing, “at this time, there have simply not yet been enough cases involving unlawful electronic surveillance in the smartphone era for the court to be able to conclude that defendants’ conduct was “particularly egregious.””.
In her ruling, judge Hamilton further recorded, “As time goes on, more of a shared societal consensus may emerge about the acceptability of defendants’ conduct.“
The court has also rejected the plea of Meta to extend the injunction to its other platforms like Facebook and Instagram for want of evidence as Meta’s present case was solely on WhatsApp.
Holding that NSO Group’s foreign sovereign clients are not before the US Court, the court ruled “Because defendants’ foreign sovereign customers are not before the court and have not been named as defendants, and because the court expressly ruled that they are not necessary parties, of course an injunction in this case cannot apply to them. To the extent that defendants believe that an injunction would indeed cover their foreign sovereign customers, the injunction will be revised to specifically exclude them.”
The court has further observed, “Specifically, investigative information has shown that the Israeli companies NSO Group and Candiru developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used this tool to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”
Meta submitted before the US court that NSO Group continues to target WhatsApp users’ through its invasive Pegasus spyware even after filing of this lawsuit and argued NSO Group reverse engineered WhatsApp’s code “to evade detection and to defeat encryption, and infected the target users’ devices with spyware that no one wanted or expected… WhatsApp nor the users invited or wanted NSO’s software on their devices.”
Six years after WhatsApp told the Indian government that 121 Indian users were targeted by Pegasus, new documents exhibited in this lawsuit also said that 100 Indians were impacted.
In 2021, The Wire was among an international consortium of news outlets which had unveiled the use of Pegasus with the help of a leaked list of potential surveillance.
The NSO Group, as this consortium had reported then, claims that it only offers its spyware to “vetted governments”. In the course of a Supreme Court hearing and inquiry committee probe, the Indian government had, when asked, refused to confirm or deny that it had acquired and used Pegasus.
This article went live on October eighteenth, two thousand twenty five, at twenty minutes past two in the afternoon.The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.
