Facebook can pursue malware lawsuit against Israel's NSO Group -US appeals court | Hacker News Reader

Facebook can pursue malware lawsuit against Israel's NSO Group -US appeals court

reuters.com

136 pointsnceqs318 comments

OK I mean what's stopping NSO from dissolving and coming back as...NS0. Freeze their assets and Israel just injects more money. Put travel restrictions on their employees and Israel will issue new passports/identities. I see no reason or Israel to stop unless the US government gets involved. Even then they'll continue what they're doing, except VPN into Russia.

Can someone help me understand the downvotes? This is completely true.

It is not. Israel does not fund NSO in any way. They have clients.

Could they go after the ownership group? Novalpina Capital is UK-based.

Here's the actual ruling from the court: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21100675/ninth-circui...

Also relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29320986 (Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware)

What was even the endgame here? If you successfully claim you were acting as an agent of a foreign government (many of them, in fact!), surely that's the kinda line of thought that ends with your employees arrested at every airport and border?

Why is this even in civil court. How can the CEO of this company be in the US at the same time as his company is put on the sanctions list and still board an airplane out of the country after? Why are banks discussing with the sanctioned entity how to best unroll their debts?

it's fairly common, as far as I've seen - at least in Portland when Saudi citizens are released on bail they seem to disappear.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/erry-2018/12/9b5b1eff724150/...

There's nothing done against being the agent of a foreign allied government. If they were doing this for the Chinese or the Russians they'd be arrested.

The law against foreign government agents is applied incredibly arbitrarily.

Am I the only one surprised these FB & Apple NSO lawsuits are just now happening?

Perhaps it just takes times to build a case for court?

ProPublica should probably get credit. Even if the companies knew before their reporting, the publicity surely spurred them to act.

The Facebook lawsuit is older, hence why you are reading the judgement on an appeal of an appeal or something in that order. The timing on the Apple lawsuit is probably no accident; now that this "foreign state actor immunity" fig leaf is out of the way, the original lawsuit can proceed full speed ahead and is likely going to be fatal to NSO. I wouldn't be surprised if any victims of theirs similarly sue them.

It seems to me that this is the sort of thing that is sorted out between governments first - diplomatically. I am certain the lines between the NSO Group and the Israeli govt are pretty blurry considering they came out of the Israeli Intelligence Corps. If it weren’t an ally this would almost certainly be considered nation state actor activity eg Internet Research Agency.

Tails should be able to sue Facebook then, right? https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/facebook_help...

No, because FB, presumably, developed the tails exploit locally and never needed to interact with an external server to do so. FB passed the exploit to law enforcement. In the NSO case, they used FB’s servers as part of their exploit development and exploit distribution.

Oh, fair enough. Still though, they should be able to sue them if Apple can sue NSO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29320986

Surprised NSO Group hasn't already rolled over like Cambridge Analytica

Maybe some protection based on venue? I don't know how much of NSO Group's assets/customers/etc are exposed to US courts. Maybe Isreal is more willing to protect NSO Group than the UK was willing to protect Cambridge Analytica.

NSO group actually produced something that seems to work. In retrospect, Cambridge Analytica was overhyped and largely ineffective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Assessment...

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