The Week in Tech: WhatsApp’s Spyware Fight Is at Least Good P.R.

Along the way, Oracle sued the Defense Department, claiming a conflict of interest that helped AEach week, we review the week’s news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry.

Hi, I’m Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here’s a look at the week’s tech news:

WhatsApp sued the Israeli cybersurveillance firm NSO Group this week over the way spying technology had been used on its messaging service. NSO Group’s tools were used to spy on more than 1,400 people, including journalists and human-rights activists, from 20 countries, the lawsuit claims.

The privacy intrusions used a WhatsApp call to embed spyware on phones that provided access to their contents, my colleague Nicole Perlroth explained. The target didn’t even need to answer the call.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, now seeks to block NSO Group from its service and has called on lawmakers to ban the use of such cyberweapons, which are largely unregulated. NSO Group disputed the claims and said it would “vigorously fight them.”

Whether the lawsuit, which accuses NSO Group of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as state-level violations, works for WhatsApp remains to be seen. Legal experts I spoke with this week said that with WhatsApp as the plaintiff, and not its users, the company’s lawyers will have to find interesting ways of arguing that it was the victim. And so far, it hasn’t detailed how it might do that convincingly.

“It’s a little muddled,” said Tor Ekeland, a hacker defense attorney. “It’s not that strong of a case based on this version of the complaint.”

But not all court cases are just about getting a jury verdict. “I think it’s a sincere attempt to use the C.F.A.A. in a novel way,” said Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. “But I think it’s partially a P.R. exercise, in that they’re calling out NSO and saying they won’t let them use vulnerabilities to attack users.”

WhatsApp has, after all, marketed itself as a secure form of communication, an image it would no doubt like to keep. And a skeptic might go further and point out that this all happens against a backdrop of WhatsApp’s owner, Facebook, dealing with huge P.R. challenges of its own.

“It’s odd to see this suit now,” said Susan Landau, a professor in cyber security and policy at Tufts University. “One has to wonder why exactly Facebook found a lawsuit worth its while.”

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