NSO Employees Take Legal Action Against Facebook For Banning Their Accounts

On Tuesday, lawyers representing current and former employees of Israeli surveillance contractor NSO Group took legal action against Facebook to try and get their accounts reinstated after being banned by the social media giant. Motherboard reports: Last month, Facebook itself sued NSO in California for leveraging a vulnerability in the WhatsApp chat program that NSO Group clients used to hack targets. As part of that, Facebook also banned the personal Facebook and Instagram accounts of multiple current and former NSO employees. The new lawsuit argues that Facebook violated its own terms of service by blocking the NSO employees, and it used personal information they shared with Facebook in order to identify them, in violation of an Israeli privacy law. As relief, the lawyers ask the court to make Facebook lift the ban on the accounts. The lawsuit was first reported in Israeli media.

"It appears that Facebook used the [NSO employees'] personal data...in order to identify them as NSO employees (or former employees), in service of imposing 'collective punishment' on them, in the form of blocking their personal accounts," the lawsuit reads in Hebrew. The lawsuit argues that the personal data used to identify them as NSO employees belonged to the individuals, and not Facebook. The legal action says that the NSO employees were banned without warning even though they are "private people, who make private use of the social networks, whose only 'sin' was any association with NSO, as employees or former employees." The lawsuit includes a screenshot of an email Facebook allegedly sent to someone who had their account suspended. Facebook told Motherboard in a statement on Tuesday, "In October we filed a legal complaint which attributed a sophisticated cyber attack to the NSO Group and its employees that was directed at WhatsApp and its users in violation of our terms of service and U.S. law. Such actions warranted disabling relevant accounts and continue to be necessary for security reasons, including preventing additional attacks."