Meta filed a contempt motion in federal court accusing NSO Group of flouting a permanent injunction and continuing to target WhatsApp users with its Pegasus spyware.
The case goes back to 2019, when Meta sued NSO after discovering its software had been used to attack roughly 1,400 WhatsApp accounts belonging to journalists, human rights workers, and government officials. NSO spent years trying, and failing, to claim sovereign immunity on behalf of its government clients. The litigation ultimately produced a permanent injunction forbidding the Israeli firm from accessing WhatsApp or its infrastructure ever again. Meta now says NSO ignored it entirely.
The contempt filing matters because it reveals the limits of what court orders can actually do to a surveillance-for-hire company. NSO is already on the US Commerce Department's entity list, which bars American firms from selling it components or software without a special license. If a trade blacklist did not change its behavior, a contempt ruling faces longer odds still, especially when NSO's clients are sovereign governments and its operations are engineered to be deniable.
Meta has compiled an unusually strong legal record against NSO. The contempt motion is the quiet admission that winning in court and winning in practice are different problems.