Saudi activist sues 3 former U.S. officials over hacking
RICHMOND, Va. — Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi
political activist who pushed to end a ban on women driving in her country, is
suing three former U.S. intelligence and military officials she says helped
hack her cellphone so a foreign government could spy on her before she was
imprisoned and tortured.
The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation announced
Thursday that it had filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court on al-Hathloul’s
behalf against former U.S. officials Marc Baier, Ryan Adams and Daniel Gericke,
as well as a cybersecurity company called DarkMatter that has contracted with
the United Arab Emirates.
In the lawsuit, al-Hathloul alleges that the trio oversaw a
project for DarkMatter that hacked into her iPhone to track her location and
steal information as part of broader surveillance efforts targeted at
dissidents within the UAE and its close ally Saudi Arabia. She said the hacking
of her phone led to her “arbitrary arrest by the UAE’s security services and
rendition to Saudi Arabia, where she was detained, imprisoned, and tortured.”
“Companies that peddle their surveillance software and
services to oppressive governments must be held accountable for the resulting
human rights abuses,” said EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene.
DarkMatter assigned her the codename of “Purple Sword,” the
lawsuit says, citing a 2019 investigation by Reuters that first detailed the
hacking of al-Hathloul.
The lawsuit is the latest legal challenge to the secretive
private cyber-surveillance industry, which often sells pricey hacking services
to authoritarian governments that are used to secretly break into phones and
other devices of activists, journalists, political opponents and others. Tech
giant Apple filed a lawsuit last month against Israel’s NSO Group seeking to
block the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire company from breaking into
Apple’s products, like the iPhone.
Baier, Adams and Gericke admitted in September to providing
sophisticated computer hacking technology to the UAE and agreed to pay nearly
$1.7 million to resolve criminal charges in a deferred prosecution agreement
the Justice Department described as the first of its kind. The Justice
Department described each of them as former U.S. intelligence or military
personnel. Baier previously worked at the National Security Agency, the AP
previously reported.
The trio are part of a trend of U.S. officials with
backgrounds in spying and hacking going to work for foreign governments with
questionable human rights records, which has led to calls in Congress for greater
oversight.
Attorneys for Baier, Adams and Gericke did not immediately
return requests for comment. Questions sent by email to officials at Abu
Dhabi-based DarkMatter could not be delivered.
Arrested in 2018, al-Hathloul was sentenced to almost six
years in prison last year under a broad counterterrorism law. Held for 1001
days, with time in pre-trial detention and solitary confinement, she was
accused of crimes such as agitating for change, using the internet to cause
disorder and pursuing a foreign agenda.
From behind bars, al-Hathloul went on hunger strikes to
protest her prison conditions and joined other female activists in testifying
to judges that she was tortured and sexually assaulted by masked men during
interrogations. The women reported that they were caned, electrocuted and
waterboarded. Some said they were groped and threatened with rape. Saudi Arabia
denies that any were mistreated.
Her case sparked an an international uproar over the Saudi
kingdom’s human rights record and President Joe Biden called her a “powerful
activist for women’s rights” when she was released in February.
Since details of DarkMatter’s hacking campaign have become
public, the company’s profile has dropped over the last few years, with some
staff moving on to a new Abu Dhabi-based firm called G42. That firm has been
linked to a mobile app suspected of being a spying tool as well as to Chinese
coronavirus tests that American officials warned against using over concerns
about patient privacy, test accuracy and Chinese government involvement.
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