Bahrain Mirror: Loujain Al-Hathloul, a prominent Saudi political activist is suing three former U.S. intelligence and military officials she says helped hack her cell phone so a foreign government, the Associated Press agency reported. 

The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation announced Thursday that it had filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court on Al-Hathloul's behalf against former U.S. officials Marc Baier, Ryan Adams and Daniel Gericke, as well as a cybersecurity company called DarkMatter that has contracted with the United Arab Emirates.

In the lawsuit, Al-Hathloul alleges that the trio oversaw a project for DarkMatter that hacked into her iPhone to track her location and steal information as part of broader surveillance efforts targeted at dissidents within the UAE and its close ally Saudi Arabia.

She said the hacking of her phone led to her "arbitrary arrest by the UAE's security services and rendition to Saudi Arabia, where she was detained, imprisoned, and tortured."

Baier, Adams and Gericke admitted in September to providing sophisticated computer hacking technology to the UAE.

Arrested in 2018, Al-Hathloul was sentenced to almost six years in prison last year under a broad counterterrorism law.

Held for 1001 days, with time in pre-trial detention and solitary confinement, she was accused of crimes such as agitating for change, using the internet to cause disorder and pursuing a foreign agenda.

Arabic Version