Carly Nairn, Courthouse News Service:

U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton said in a 25-page ruling that there was evidence NSO Group’s flagship spyware could still infiltrate WhatApp users’ devices and granted Meta’s request for a permanent injunction.

However, Hamilton, a Bill Clinton appointee, also determined that any damages would need to follow a ratioed amount of compensation based on a legal framework designed to proportion damages. She ordered that the jury-based award of $167 million should be reduced to a little over $4 million.

Once again, I am mystified by Apple’s decision to drop its suit against NSO Group. What Meta won is protection from WhatsApp being used as an installation vector for NSO’s spyware; importantly, high-value WhatsApp users won a modicum of protection from NSO’s customers. And, as John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab points out, NSO has “an absolute TON of their business splashed all over the court records”. There are several depositions from which an enterprising journalist could develop a better understanding of this creepy spyware company.

Last week, NSO Group confirmed it had been acquired by U.S. investors. However, according to its spokesperson, its “headquarters and core operations remain in Israel [and] continues to be fully supervised and regulated by the relevant Israeli authorities”.

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, TechCrunch:

NSO has long claimed that its spyware is designed to not target U.S. phone numbers, likely to avoid hurting its chances to enter the U.S. market. But the company was caught in 2021 targeting about a dozen U.S. government officials abroad.

Soon after, the U.S. Commerce Department banned American companies from trading with NSO by putting the spyware maker on the U.S. Entities List. Since then, NSO has tried to get off the U.S. government’s blocklist, as recently as May 2025, with the help of a lobbying firm tied to the Trump administration.

I have as many questions about what this change in ownership could mean for its U.S. relationship as I do about how it affects possible targets.

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Ronan Farrow, the New Yorker:

Decisions by the White House and by Republican lawmakers about spyware will have implications across a variety of policy areas that Trump and his associates are upending and that reach far beyond Washington. In recent years, an array of states, including Texas, Florida, and California have reportedly purchased spyware and other surveillance technologies; legislators and regulators will dictate whether that trend continues. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, at least two states have already used private personal data to prosecute people for getting abortions. That practice could expand with more widespread and affordable access to this technology.

This article appears to have been timed to coincide with the release of a new documentary on HBO, showing Farrow reporting out stories on NSO Group and other commercial spyware makers. It is not the most substantive piece and I think that plus the headline — “The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone” — is more distracting than it is illuminating. U.S. administrations have, since George W. Bush, used terrorism as a means of hand-waving away civil liberties protections, including domestic spying. Barack Obama’s administration famously killed U.S. citizens without trial, an action which remains shocking to me to this day regardless of who carried it out. In his first administration, Donald Trump compromised the legitimacy of all manner of domestic and foreign politics.

So, to the question of whether the U.S. would begin using fancy spyware on citizens’ phones under any administration, the answer seems more like a question of when and not if. It is just one more tool of a long series of violations. The next Trump administration seems unlikely to be more restrained than the first but, when this happens, I bet it becomes part of the churn-and-burn media cycle. It will barely register except to those who already find this sort of stuff disturbing.

By the way, the documentary itself is fine. It is only about an hour long and is mostly a behind-the-scenes look at the reporting. I am not sure that there is anything new-for-2024 within. Farrow’s New Yorker articles about the subject are far more illuminating.

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