Hanan Elatr, the widow of Jamal Khashoggi, sues the NSO Group in Virginia, claiming Saudi Arabia used the Israeli company's Pegasus tool to track them both
In the lawsuit, Hanan Elatr says Saudi Arabia used NSO's Pegasus spyware to track her and her husband's whereabouts before he was murdered
Context & Ripple Effects
This lawsuit extends a litigation arc that began in 2018, when a Canadian activist sued NSO Group claiming its spyware enabled Saudi officials to access his WhatsApp messages with Jamal Khashoggi. Since then, Citizen Lab's finding of Pegasus on Loujain al-Hathloul's iPhone triggered public scrutiny, and UN experts linked Pegasus to the hacking of Jeff Bezos' phone.
The new wrinkle is jurisdiction and target: Hanan Elatr brings the case into a Virginia courtroom, and the related coverage shows courts increasingly willing to host these claims — a UK court has since ruled that dissident Yahya Assiri can sue Saudi Arabia itself in London over Pegasus targeting. NSO's Gulf business, built on sales deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars with regional governments, is the revenue base all of this litigation presses against.
First-order effects
- NSO Group now faces a US-based claim from Khashoggi's widow alleging Saudi Arabia used Pegasus to track both spouses before his murder — direct legal and reputational exposure in the American market where it has already drawn official criticism.
- Saudi Arabia is named as the operating party, not just a customer, putting its use of the tool on record in an open Western-court proceeding alongside the Assiri case.
Second-order effects
- NSO's other Gulf clients — the same buyers behind the hundreds of millions in regional sales — face growing odds that their deployments surface in court, raising the effective cost of buying the toolkit beyond its sticker price.
- The accumulating lawsuits push scrutiny up the chain from the vendor to state purchasers, echoing how the Bezos hack attribution moved blame from NSO's technology to its Saudi operator.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — activist suits in 2018, UN attribution in 2020, a UK court green-lighting claims against Riyadh — accountability for commercial spyware shifts structurally from the Israeli seller to the government end-users, threatening the export market that sustains the surveillance-for-hire industry.
The trend: Victims of Pegasus spying are using Western courts to shift accountability from NSO Group as vendor to its state clients as operators, making litigation a standing cost of the Gulf spyware trade.