Law360: Meta Tells High Court To Deny Spyware Co.’s Immunity Bid

Meta and its subsidiary WhatsApp argued that the US Supreme Court should reject NSO Technologies’ petition to appeal a Ninth Circuit decision requiring the Israeli spyware firm to face WhatsApp’s hacking claims. Meta said that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act does not protect NSO and that granting it immunity would breach American national security and foreign policy interests. “Even if private entities were eligible for common-law foreign sovereign immunity, a company on the Entity List would have no plausible claim to such immunity,” Meta said. “The purported factual basis for NSO’s immunity claim has never been tested in discovery because of NSO’s threshold immunity assertion, which two courts below rejected. No foreign government has ever stepped forward to support NSO’s immunity claim.” WhatsApp and Meta are represented by Michael R. Dreeben of O’Melveny & Myers LLP.

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