Meta’s contempt-of-court filing was not yet available today. We contacted NSO Group and will update this article if it provides a comment.

Meta: NSO is malicious, “continues to defy US courts”

WhatsApp filed its case against NSO in 2019, alleging that NSO used WhatsApp to send malware to about 1,400 mobile phones and devices for the purpose of surveilling the devices’ users.

“The evidence showed that defendants reverse-engineered WhatsApp’s code to create a modified version of the WhatsApp client application, which they then used to install their software on target users’ devices via WhatsApp’s servers,” US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton wrote in the permanent injunction order. “The evidence further showed that defendants repeatedly re-designed their software to avoid detection and circumvent plaintiffs’ security fixes.”

Meta said today that its “case has shown that NSO continues to build spyware tools to target people’s devices… When a malicious company on the US government’s Entity List continues to defy US courts, existing restrictions must remain firmly in place.”

NSO’s appeal to the 9th Circuit was opposed in an amicus brief filed last month by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“The proliferation of commercial spyware across the globe is a profound threat to free expression and freedom of the press, with serious implications for the United States,” the Knight Institute said. “The technology at issue in this case, NSO Group’s Pegasus, allows for near-perfect surveillance of the victims targeted by NSO Group’s customers. Pegasus enables operators to take full control of a target’s smartphone, providing access to GPS locations, contact details, text messages, phone calls, notes, web-browsing history, messaging-application activity, files, and passwords—even if the target used security measures like encryption to protect their data.”