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A California federal judge has once again dismissed a lawsuit brought by journalists from Salvadoran investigative outlet El Faro against NSO Group, the Israeli company behind the Pegasus spyware allegedly used to surveil their phones for nearly two years. The ruling, issued Wednesday, marks the second time the case has been thrown out on jurisdictional grounds, though the journalists' legal team at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University has said it intends to appeal.
The case, Dada v. NSO Group, was the first lawsuit against NSO filed in any U.S. court when the Knight Institute took it on in November 2022 on behalf of 18 current and former El Faro journalists and staff. Between June 2020 and November 2021, Pegasus spyware was deployed against the outlet's employees at least 226 times, according to the Institute. Digital forensic analysis eventually confirmed that 22 members of El Faro's staff had their phones infected. The attacks were not random. Surveillance peaked during significant political moments and in the run-up to major investigations, including reporting on the Bukele administration's secret negotiations with criminal gangs, the theft of pandemic food relief, back-channel Bitcoin dealings, and the financial holdings of government officials.
The lead plaintiff, Carlos Dada, is the co-founder and director of El Faro, one of Central America's most prominent independent news organizations. El Faro was founded in El Salvador in 1998 and has built a reputation for independent investigative reporting. The outlet has paid a steep price for that journalism. Beyond the spyware attacks, El Faro says it has faced physical surveillance, advertiser harassment, and public defamation from government officials and ruling-party legislators. In 2023, the newsroom relocated its administrative and legal operations out of El Salvador entirely.
The core question before the court was whether Northern California was the right place to try this dispute. Dada and the plaintiffs argued it was, pointing to compromised U.S.-based infrastructure that was used as part of the attack chain. The judge was not persuaded. The court noted that there was no allegation Apple's California servers were actually exploited in delivering the Pegasus infections, even where the plaintiffs alleged the attacks moved through Apple's iMessage or iCloud systems. The same argument had failed once before: in March 2024, a California federal judge threw out the same lawsuit, saying the case was "entirely foreign" and that the journalists had no standing to sue in the U.S.
That first dismissal did not hold. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the March 2024 ruling in July 2025 and sent the case back to the Northern District of California, finding that the lower court erred in its analysis. The Ninth Circuit had concluded that the district judge failed to properly account for allegations that NSO created Apple ID accounts and engaged with California-based servers as part of the attack infrastructure. One factor that also came into play was a recent acquisition of NSO Group by a group of American investors, which El Faro's lawyers cited as further reason for trying the case on U.S. soil. After the Ninth Circuit's reversal, Dada called the outcome "good news." That window has now closed again.
The journalists had wanted specific remedies from the court. They asked the court to require NSO Group to identify, return, and delete all information obtained through the attacks, to prohibit the company from deploying Pegasus against them again, and to name the government client that commissioned the surveillance. That last demand was perhaps the most politically charged. NSO has never publicly identified its clients. The company maintains it sells Pegasus exclusively to government agencies for use against criminals and terrorists, subject to Israeli government authorization. El Salvador's government has repeatedly denied being an NSO client or playing any role in the surveillance.
With Apple having dropped its own case against NSO in September 2024, and WhatsApp having won a $167 million judgment against the company earlier in 2025, the El Faro lawsuit had become the last active case against NSO Group in U.S. courts. That distinction is now moot, at least temporarily.
The Knight First Amendment Institute plans to appeal. El Faro's director Carlos Dada said when the original lawsuit was filed that the outlet turned to the U.S. court system because justice in El Salvador was not possible. With the case now dismissed a second time and the appeal road still open, that search for accountability continues.
NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
