EFF to Ninth Circuit: Don’t Shield Foreign Spyware Company from Human Rights Accountability in U.S. Court

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Legal intern Danya Hajjaji was the lead author of this post.

EFF filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit supporting a group of journalists in their lawsuit against Israeli spyware company NSO Group. In our amicus brief backing the plaintiffs’ appeal, we argued that victims of human rights abuses enabled by powerful surveillance technologies must be able to seek redress through U.S. courts against both foreign and domestic corporations. 

NSO Group notoriously manufactures “Pegasus” spyware, which enables full remote control of a target’s smartphone. Pegasus attacks are stealthy and sophisticated: the spyware embeds itself into phones without an owner having to click anything (such as an email or text message). A Pegasus-infected phone allows government operatives to intercept personal data on a device as well as cloud-based data connected to the device.

Our brief highlights multiple examples of Pegasus spyware having been used by governmental bodies around the world to spy on targets such as journalists, human rights defenders, dissidents, and their families. For example, the Saudi Arabian government was found to have deployed Pegasus against Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

In the present case, Dada v. NSO Group, the plaintiffs are affiliated with El Faro, a prominent independent news outlet based in El Salvador, and were targeted with Pegasus through their iPhones. The attacks on El Faro journalists coincided with their investigative reporting into the Salvadorian government.

The plaintiffs sued NSO Group in California because NSO Group, in deploying Pegasus against iPhones, abused the services of Apple, a California-based company. However, the district court dismissed the case on a forum non conveniens theory, holding that California is an inconvenient forum for NSO Group. The court thus concluded that exercising jurisdiction over th

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