Access Now 23 December 2020 | 12:00 pm
Today, December 23, Access Now, along with Amnesty International, Committee to Protect Journalists, Internet Freedom Foundation, Paradigm Initiative, Privacy International, Reporters Without Borders, and Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D) are calling upon the U.S. Federal 9th Circuit Court to hold notorious cybersurveillance company, NSO Group, whose Pegasus spyware has been used to target civil society around the world, accountable.
In the lawsuit, originally filed in the Northern California District Court in October 2019, WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook are suing NSO for using WhatsApp’s servers to deliver Pegasus spyware to the devices of 1,400 users in violation of U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), California Comprehensive Data Access and Fraud Act, as well as contract and trespass law. Research by The Citizen Lab revealed that more than 100 of these attacks targeted members of civil society, incl