news/AAPL/2023.01.09/U.S. Supreme Court lets Meta's WhatsApp pursue 'Pegasus' spyware suit.txt

WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on
Monday let Meta Platforms Inc's WhatsApp pursue a
lawsuit accusing Israel's NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the
WhatsApp messaging app to install spy software allowing the
surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human
rights activists and dissidents.The justices turned away NSO's appeal of a lower court's
decision that the lawsuit could move forward. NSO had argued
that it is immune from being sued because it was acting as an
agent for unidentified foreign governments when it installed the
"Pegasus" spyware.President Joe Biden's administration had urged the justices
to reject NSO's appeal, noting that the U.S. State Department
had never before recognized a private entity acting as an agent
of a foreign state as being entitled to immunity.Meta, the parent company of both WhatsApp and Facebook, in a
statement welcomed the court's move to turn away NSO's
"baseless" appeal."NSO's spyware has enabled cyberattacks targeting human
rights activists, journalists and government officials," Meta
said. "We firmly believe that their operations violate U.S. law
and they must be held to account for their unlawful operations."A lawyer for NSO did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.WhatsApp in 2019 sued NSO seeking an injunction and damages,
accusing it of accessing WhatsApp servers without permission six
months earlier to install the Pegasus software on victims'
mobile devices.NSO has argued that Pegasus helps law enforcement and
intelligence agencies fight crime and protect national security
and that its technology is intended to help catch terrorists,
pedophiles and hardened criminals.In court papers, NSO said that WhatsApp's notification to
users scuttled a foreign government's investigation into an
Islamic State militant who was using the app to plan an attack.In one notorious case, NSO spyware was used - allegedly by
the Saudi government - to target the inner circle of Washington
Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi shortly before he was murdered
at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.NSO appealed a trial judge's 2020 refusal to award it
"conduct-based immunity," a common law doctrine protecting
foreign officials acting in their official capacity.Upholding that ruling in 2021, the San Francisco-based 9th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called it an "easy case" because
NSO's mere licensing of Pegasus and offering technical support
did not shield it from liability under a federal law called the
Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which took precedence over
common law.WhatsApp's lawyers said that private entities like NSO are
"categorically ineligible" for foreign sovereign immunity.The Biden administration in a filing in November said the
9th Circuit reached the right result, even though the government
was not ready to endorse the circuit court's conclusion that
FSIA entirely forecloses any form of immunity under common law.According to court papers, the accounts of 1,400 WhatsApp
users were accessed using the Pegasus tracking software,
secretly using their smartphones as surveillance devices.An investigation published in 2021 by 17 media
organizations, led by the Paris-based non-profit journalism
group Forbidden Stories, found that the spyware had been used in
attempted and successful hacks of smartphones belonging to
journalists, government officials and human rights activists on
a global scale.The U.S. government in November 2021 blacklisted NSO and
Israel's Candiru, accusing them of providing spyware to
governments that used it to "maliciously target" journalists,
activists and others.NSO also is being sued by iPhone maker Apple Inc,
accused of violating its user terms and services agreement.(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)