New Delhi: In a landmark ruling Friday, a US district court held Israeli firm NSO Group liable for hacking WhatsApp, the messaging giant owned by Meta, through its surveillance software “Pegasus”.
The court found NSO Group in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), and also to have breached a contract with WhatsApp over the use of its software to target nearly 1,400 users of the popular messaging application.
“Thus the court grants summary judgment in the plaintiffs’ [WhatsApp] favour on the CFAA claim under both section (a)(2) and (a)(4), on the theory that the defendants [NSO] exceeded their authorisation,” wrote Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton in the ruling Friday.
For the same reasons as the CFAA claim, the order found the Israeli group in violation of the CDAFA, and by reverse-engineering or decompiling WhatsApp, NSO Group was also found liable for breaching of contract through the violation of the terms of service of the messaging application.
The case, which was launched in October 2019 by WhatsApp, will now move on to the issue of damages in 2025.
“This ruling is a huge win for privacy. We spent five years presenting our case because we firmly believe that spyware companies could not hide behind immunity or avoid accountability for their unlawful actions. Surveillance companies should be on notice that illegal spying will not be tolerated,” said Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, in a post on social media platform X.
This ruling is a huge win for privacy.
We spent five years presenting our case because we firmly believe that spyware companies could not hide behind immunity or avoid accountability for their unlawful actions.
Surveillance companies should be on notice that illegal spying will…
— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) December 21, 2024
No court has held the NSO Group liable for hacking till date. A number of other cases filed against it have been dismissed or dropped by plaintiffs on grounds of personal jurisdiction. US tech giant Apple was the most recent company to drop its case against NSO Group.
The Israeli firm has always maintained that it sells its surveillance products solely to government agencies, in aid of catching criminals, terrorists and paedophiles. However, the summary judgment disagreed. Furthermore, earlier this year Judge Hamilton had sought for the group’s source code to be shared with WhatsApp, a direction it did not follow.
Instead, the NSO Group indicated that WhatsApp would need to access a single server in Israel through an Israeli citizen, a caveat the Judge declared as “impracticable” for a case in California.
The Israeli technology firm is yet to comment on the summary judgment. The roughly 1,400 devices targeted with the Pegasus software included those of journalists, dissidents, politicians and diplomats, according to Meta.
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