The efforts to hold the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its Istanbul consulate in October 2018 continue. In his complex connubial life, the slain scribbler can now count, not only on efforts made by fiancée Hatice Cengiz in 2020 but his widow Hanan Elatr Khashoggi in seeking curial scrutiny on why he was so remorselessly dispatched by a death squad authorised by the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Unfortunately, whether focusing on the culpability of the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, or that of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, their efforts have yielded lean returns.
The October 2020 lawsuit filed by Hatice Cengiz and Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) was dismissed in December 2022 by US District Judge John Bates for reasons of head of state immunity. The judge nonetheless registered his “uneasiness” at the decision by the Kingdom to make the crown prince prime minister, along with “credible allegations of his involvement in Khashoggi’s murder.” The move had the stench of convenient expediency. “A contextualized look at the Royal Order thus suggests that it was not motivated by a desire for bin Salman to be the head of government, but instead to shield him from potential liability in this case.”
Prior to the decision, the Biden administration had also intervened on its own accord in the case, suggesting the court heed arguments of sovereign immunity. The State Department also affirmed the position that the US had “consistently, and across administrations, applied these principles to heads of state, heads of government and foreign ministers while they are in office.”
In 2023, Hanan Elatr filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of Virginia against the NSO Group alleging the intentional targeting of her devices, thereby causing “immense harm, both through the tragic loss of her husband and through her own loss of safety, privacy, and autonomy.” At the time, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert explained that his outfit had learned that the spyware Pegasus had been installed on her phone as she was being interrogated in Dubai “and the phone communicated several times with a server that is part of the NSO infrastructure.”
In May this year, the US District Court of Appeals of the Fourth Circuit upheld the lower court ruling that there was no “personal jurisdiction” in the matter for Hanan to assert. The reason here was that NSO had not appeared “to have directed electronic activity into Virginia.” If there had been “any express aiming of conduct towards Virginia, it was at the direction of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, not NSO.” This was to be contrasted with the 2019 targeting by the same company of WhatsApp’s California-based servers with the Pegasus spyware “through those servers to facilitate the sort of surveillance Pegasus offers to its clients.” (1,400 users had fallen victim to the exercise.) This was the sort of quibbling that gives the law a bad name, leading Hanan to make the chilling point that the NSO Group had irrefutably infiltrated her devices, spied on her and her husband and “tracked him down to his death.”
Hanan is now seeking redress in France for the data stolen from the two phones that were infected by Pegasus in April 2018 while being interrogated in the UAE. “It would be unthinkable not to establish a link between this interception (of information) and the actions that led to the murder” of Khashoggi, attorneys William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth said in a joint statement.
Her case has also piqued the interest of Virginian Congressman Eugene Vindman who, in November, urged President Donald Trump via letter to release the transcript of a 2019 call to Prince Mohammed. In this, he was not alone, keeping company with other 37 lawmakers. “The US Intelligence Community,” the letter states, “concluded that the Saudi Crown Prince personally ordered Khashoggi’s murder. In a direct rebuke of our dedicated national security civil servants, your recent statements suggest that you place greater trust in the Crown Prince’s claims than in the assessments of our intelligence agencies.”
The jurisprudence on holding spyware producers to account is burgeoning, if slowly. Meta’s victory in December 2024 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against the NSO Group’s targeting of WhatsApp was significant enough to lead spokesperson Emily Westcott to praise the ruling as placing such companies “on notice that their illegal actions will not be tolerated.” In May 2025, a jury in California found that $167.3 million in punitive damages and $414,719 in compensatory damages should be awarded to Meta.
NSO had resoundingly failed to exempt its activities from legal accountability in asserting sovereign immunity, their argument being that they had acted as an agent of a foreign power. This was conclusively rejected by the US Supreme Court in January 2023.
While those linked to Khashoggi may not have been successful securing remedies for his murder from governments using Pegasus to target those it deems undesirable, they can at least be given some cold comfort that the NSO Group’s reputation has fallen into an investment purgatory. The nature of such an industry, however, is that murky reputations are no guarantee to the extinction of these companies. Even now, a group of US investors led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds have acquired the company, effectively taking it out of Israeli hands. Those in the dream factory are not above producing nightmares on occasion.
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Israel’s surveillance industry is actively hawking its deeply intrusive and illegal wares throughout the world, including targeting repressive regimes for sales. It hasn’t been fussy to who it sells its spyware, including deeply antisemitic regimes. Why wouldn’t they, antisemitism actually suits Israel’s narrative of Jews worldwide needing a safe haven they can go to, which it has been using to justify dispossessing and displacing Palestinians from their homelands for over a century.
The spyware Israeli companies are spewing out are a dictator’s wet dream. The Albanese government seems to be taking up products for spying on Australian citizens at an alarming pace, but it is difficult to say as the Albanese government is one of the world’s most secretive governments. Labor’s use of Palantir products needs to be explained, justified and put to a vote in an election.
Just how well has all this collection of our data been in keeping Australians safe?
The biggest bust of criminals I can recall was achieved by US authorities slipping criminal networks an encrypting app that unbeknown to the criminals the authorities controlled, not by spying on the population at large.