US court again dismisses Salvadoran journalists' Pegasus suit against NSO Group

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has dismissed the lawsuit brought by journalists at the Salvadoran outlet El Faro over Pegasus infections of their phones, according to an announcement by the plaintiffs' counsel, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which stated that the court “today dismissed a lawsuit brought by journalists and other members of El Faro.” The ruling followed a renewed motion to dismiss filed by NSO after the Ninth Circuit vacated the first dismissal in July 2025 and remanded the case. Two legal trade wires carried it within the window: mlex, under the headline “NSO Group wins dismissal of journalists' US spyware case,” and Law360, “Judge Axes Salvadoran Journalists' NSO Spying Suit.” Search indexing places the ruling at roughly 1 October and the trade coverage through 3 October; The Files has not independently confirmed the docket date.

The underlying allegations remain untested. Knight’s own framing is that the spyware “was allegedly used against them,” and the court did not rule on whether the hacking occurred. Knight puts the deployment count at a minimum of 226 instances against El Faro devices between June 2020 and November 2021, an eighteen-month span, and names 22 staff — Carlos Dada and 21 colleagues. The forensic diagnosis was attributed in earlier reporting by The Record to “digital forensic researchers”; the laboratory is not named in the material available here. Carrie DeCell, the senior staff attorney who argued the case before the Ninth Circuit, said: “The court’s decision is disappointing, but we intend to appeal,” adding that the institute “will continue to seek justice on behalf of El Faro journalists in U.S. court, where the case belongs.”

Assessment: Read the procedural clock, not the verdict. Filed 2022, dismissed March 2024, revived July 2025, dismissed again in October 2026 — four years without reaching the question of whether the phones were infected. For a vendor, that is not a loss deferred; that is the product. The legal ground matters enormously and is not yet public in anything we have read: a second forum ruling is a durable shield, a merits ruling is something else. Treat the 226 figure as a party’s count, not a forensic finding — Knight is plaintiffs' counsel. And hold the widely repeated claim that NSO passed to U.S. investor control last year: it is reported as alleged, a year old, and it is doing analytical work no one has verified.