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| Microsoft and Google join the fight against NSO |
Big tech companies, including Microsoft and Google, have joined Facebook's legal battle with the hacking organization NSO.
These companies filed a voluntary warrant in federal court warning them that the tools used by Israeli society are powerful and dangerous.
The warrant went to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and opened a new front in Facebook's lawsuit against NSO.
Last year, Facebook filed a public complaint after it became known that the cyber monitoring company used an unexpected hack of Facebook's WhatsApp to infiltrate the devices of more than 1,400 people around the world.
NSO stated that it was selling digital hacking tools to law enforcement and espionage devices and should be granted sovereign immunity. Sovereign immunity is a legal argument that generally protects foreign governments from litigation.
NSO lost the lawsuit in Northern California in July and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, demanding the ruling be overturned.
Microsoft, Google, Cisco, VMWare, and the Washington-based Internet Society have joined Facebook, which speaks out against cyber surveillance companies.
The two companies said: Granting sovereign immunity to national statistical offices will lead to the spread of piracy techniques and the provision of powerful and dangerous electronic monitoring tools to more foreign governments.
This, in turn, means that the chance of these tools falling into the wrong hands and being used roughly increases dramatically.
The Israeli company said its products are being used to fight crime, so they should be exempt from the law on behalf of the government.
Human rights activists and technicians at places such as Amnesty International and Citizen Laboratories have documented some cases in which the National Bureau of Statistics technology has been used to target journalists, lawyers, and even nutritionists who tax soft drinks. Target.
NSO sold government access to Pegasus spyware so nation-state agents could identify and infiltrate target devices.
Spyware programs like Pegasus can track a victim's location, read their messages, intercept their calls, steal their photos and files, and extract private information from their devices.
"The National Bureau of Statistics is responsible for the tools it creates and the vulnerabilities it uses," Tom Burt (Tom Burt), Microsoft's head of customer security and trust, said in a blog post.