Expressly Aimed

I. The Quiet Window

Loujain al-Hathloul spent five days in the United States in late 2017, carrying the iPhone that would later become central to her lawsuit.

The surveillance operation extracted data from Hathloul’s phone while she was physically present in the United States and communicating with family, friends, and fellow human-rights advocates. The Oregon federal court later relied on that domestic conduct in exercising personal jurisdiction over the defendants.

The zero-click exploit required no action from her and gave no obvious sign that the phone had been compromised.

The tool turned on her was called Karma, a system built around a zero-click exploit: no link to tap, no attachment to open, no mistake required of the target. The court record describes an iMessage vulnerability that placed malware on an iPhone and drew out data without any act by the person holding it. The system copied messages, contacts, location data, and content from applications including iMessage, WhatsApp, and Facebook, then sent the information to a server controlled by DarkMatter.

The operators referred to al-Hathloul as “Purple Sword.”

Al-Hathloul was already among the best-known advocates for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. She had campaigned against the prohibition on women driving and against the male guardianship system, under her own name, where a pseudonym might have offered a margin of safety. She would twice be publicly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2019 and 2020.

Years before the operation reached her phone, she described the deeper obstacle confronting Saudi women: “They’re imprisoned in their old ways and their old mindset, or they just fear freedom.”

A federal court dismissed her first complaint in 2023. The later discovery that data had been taken while her phone was in the United States changed the jurisdictional analysis.

II. The Return

Less than three months after the U.S. visit, on March 13, 2018, Emirati authorities arrested al-Hathloul—then living and studying in Abu Dhabi—and transported her to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi custody, she was imprisoned and tortured. In a secret prison, interrogators invoked details taken from her communications; her charging document described the arrest as following the discovery of information about her contacts.

Saudi authorities detained her during the 2018 crackdown on the kingdom’s leading women’s-rights campaigners. Weeks later, the kingdom lifted the driving ban she had spent years opposing. She learned of the change from custody. She was released on February 10, 2021, after 1,001 days, but freedom came back narrowed, fenced by restrictions on her speech and movement.

The travel ban outlived its original term. When al-Hathloul tried to travel again in March 2025, passport authorities told her that she remained under an indefinite ban; Saudi authorities maintained that the restriction remained in force under the court’s judgment.

The travel ban prevented her from appearing in the Portland court that was deciding whether the defendants could be required to answer her claims.

III. The Americans

The men al-Hathloul sued came out of the American national-security establishment.

Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke are former members of the U.S. intelligence community or military. Baier and Adams are U.S. citizens; Gericke is a former U.S. citizen. They first worked for CyberPoint International, a Maryland-based contractor providing cyber services to the United Arab Emirates under a State Department–licensed export agreement that barred the targeting of U.S. persons. They later took senior roles connected to the Emirati company DarkMatter Group.

The operation became known as Project Raven: a clandestine team of former U.S. operatives working for the Emirates against its perceived adversaries—activists, journalists, dissidents, rival officials. Its migration from CyberPoint to DarkMatter carried the program into an organization no longer directly bound in the same way by the American export-control regime that had governed the U.S. contractor.

DarkMatter’s system ran through zero-click iMessage exploits bought from U.S. companies, fused with other technology, and routed through U.S.-based anonymization services and proxy servers. The operation depended on American training, exploits, infrastructure, and management.

She learned she had been a target the way the public learned Project Raven existed—through the reporting.

IV. The Government’s Bargain

In September 2021, the Justice Department filed a criminal information against Baier, Adams, and Gericke—charges brought without a grand jury—and, alongside it, a deferred prosecution agreement. In the deal, the men acknowledged that they had knowingly and willfully conspired to violate, among other laws, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal anti-hacking statute. They stipulated to a factual statement describing the conduct beneath the charges.

The agreement imposed substantial penalties but avoided a completed prosecution. The three agreed to pay $1.685 million in combined penalties, to cooperate with the government, to relinquish their security clearances, to accept a lifetime bar on holding them again, and to submit to restrictions on certain employment. The charges were filed, and prosecution was deferred on negotiated terms that did not require custodial sentences. The department called the resolution the first of its kind, describing a commercial operation built to reach into computers around the world—including in the United States.

The deferred-prosecution agreement shows what prosecutors chose to charge and disclose. It contains a charging document, an agreed statement of facts, and a public resolution, but it follows only the questions the government chose to ask and the case it chose to bring.

That same month, elsewhere in American public life, the National Constitution Center awarded al-Hathloul its Liberty Medal, honoring her courage in the exercise of speech, dissent, and nonviolent resistance. One American institution was celebrating her. Another had just finished pricing the conduct of the men she was about to sue.

The agreement left four questions unanswered: what the operation knew about al-Hathloul, what left her phone, who received it, and whether the surveillance connected to the officers who came for her in Abu Dhabi.

Al-Hathloul brought a civil lawsuit to seek discovery and damages that the deferred prosecution agreement did not provide.

On December 9, 2021, three months after the Justice Department’s announcement, al-Hathloul filed a civil suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. She named DarkMatter, Baier, Adams, and Gericke. Her legal team, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, would grow to include the Center for Justice and Accountability, Foley Hoag, and Oregon trial counsel. She brought claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, including conspiracy to violate it, and under the Alien Tort Statute, placing the hacking inside a wider campaign of persecution against human-rights defenders.

V. Whether Oregon Could Hear the Case

For the next several years, the case turned less on what had happened to al-Hathloul than on a colder question: whether an American court was allowed to ask.

The defendants moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. The legal issue was whether the defendants themselves had created contacts with the forum, whether the claims arose from those contacts, and whether summoning them before it would be fair.

In March 2023, U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut dismissed the complaint. She concluded that al-Hathloul had not shown that the defendants purposefully directed their conduct at the United States, or that the harms described in the complaint were sufficiently tied to the forum. The dismissal was without prejudice. Al-Hathloul was allowed to amend, and she did.

The case involved former members of the American security establishment, U.S.-made exploits, American infrastructure, and the same federal anti-hacking statute used by the Justice Department. Even so, the first complaint did not show enough conduct directed at the United States to establish personal jurisdiction.

Mercenary surveillance is built to exploit distance. The client, command room, target, and operators may be spread across countries, allowing the operation to cross borders without appearing to occupy any one of them long enough for law to take hold.

After the amended complaint, the court authorized limited jurisdictional discovery in two narrow areas: the extraction of al-Hathloul’s data during her five-day U.S. visit, and the defendants’ contracts with U.S.-based third parties. The discovery included remote depositions of Baier, Adams, and Gericke in November 2024.

Before the court reached the merits, jurisdictional discovery produced sworn testimony from Baier, Adams, and Gericke about their work inside the surveillance operation.

VI. The Cookie Case

A separate lawsuit about online tracking changed the governing jurisdictional rule.

In Briskin v. Shopify, a California consumer sued the e-commerce platform for installing tracking cookies on his iPhone during a purchase, harvesting personal and location data, and using that information to build a consumer profile without his knowledge or consent. Shopify argued that it had not singled out California; it operated everywhere. A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel initially agreed that the connection was too thin.

Then the court reheard the case en banc.

On April 21, 2025, the Ninth Circuit reversed. Shopify’s own geolocation technology placed the device in California when the cookies were installed. The en banc court held that a company can expressly aim conduct at a person in a state when its technology knows the device is there, even if it uses the same tracking system nationwide. That ruling discarded the earlier demand for additional, differential targeting of the forum state.

While the renewed DarkMatter motions were under consideration, Judge Immergut ordered supplemental briefing on what Briskin meant for al-Hathloul’s case. The amended complaint had already traced the American components of the operation: the U.S. visit; the U.S.-created exploits; the U.S. companies; the U.S. proxy and anonymization infrastructure.

The court soon applied the rule to al-Hathloul’s case. A decision about shopping-cart data helped determine whether claims involving foreign intelligence work, torture, and rendition could proceed.

No one in the Shopify litigation needed to be thinking about Karma. The jurisdictional rule did not require it.

VII. Expressly Aimed

On August 12, 2025, Judge Immergut issued a 56-page opinion holding that the Oregon court could hear the case.

The court found that al-Hathloul had made the required prima facie showing of specific personal jurisdiction.

The jurisdictional hinge was simple: the defendants surveilled and extracted data from her iPhone while the device was in the United States, and they knew where it was. But the court did not rest on location alone. It also counted the purchase and use of U.S.-created exploits, and the deliberate use of U.S.-based anonymization services and proxy servers to carry out the hacking and cloak its origin. Those contacts, the opinion said, were not “random, fortuitous, or attenuated.” They were choices.

Judge Immergut compared the defendants’ deposition testimony with the facts they had stipulated to in 2021. In depositions, the individual defendants denied key connections. Their stipulation admitted targeting devices in the United States; the Reuters investigation identified al-Hathloul as Purple Sword. The court called the denials self-serving and declined to credit them.

Judge Immergut dismissed the Alien Tort Statute claim, declining to recognize the proposed tort—discriminatory persecution—and holding that the claim fell outside the court’s subject-matter jurisdiction. What survived were the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim and the claim for conspiracy to violate it. The court also rejected the argument that the CFAA could not reach the conduct abroad, along with the defendants’ remaining challenges to the sufficiency of the claim.

Judge Karin J. Immergut allowed al-Hathloul to pursue a CFAA claim farther than any earlier human-rights plaintiff. The individual defendants had already acknowledged conspiring to violate the same statute in their 2021 agreement with the Justice Department. Al-Hathloul now seeks civil discovery and judgment under that law.

The August opinion allowed the case to proceed beyond jurisdiction and into the disputed facts: who hacked al-Hathloul’s phone, what was taken, and whether the intrusion enabled her arrest. The defendants answered in October 2025, setting those questions for the next phase.

The ruling did not decide who hacked the phone, what was taken, or whether the surveillance contributed to al-Hathloul’s arrest. It allowed those questions to be tested through civil discovery and later proceedings.

VIII. The Civil Conspiracy Claim

After the court found personal jurisdiction, the defendants challenged whether the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act permits a civil conspiracy claim.

The defendants sought permission to take an immediate interlocutory appeal from the August 2025 ruling; al-Hathloul opposed the request. Then the individual defendants, joined by DarkMatter, moved for judgment on the pleadings against the civil conspiracy claim. Their argument was textual: whatever criminal conspiracy provision the CFAA contained, they said, the statute created no civil cause of action for conspiracy.

On February 13, 2026, Judge Immergut rejected that argument. The statute’s text, she wrote, unambiguously allowed a civil conspiracy claim. The motion was denied.

The threshold question had once been whether a foreign surveillance operation could be seen from an American courtroom at all. Now the parties were litigating what could be proved there.

Commercial surveillance operations often divide responsibility among several actors: one finds a vulnerability, another packages the exploit, another supplies infrastructure, another operates the system, and a government client chooses the target. That division can make it difficult to identify who performed each act and where it occurred.

The Oregon case allows al-Hathloul to seek evidence about those separate roles and how they fit together.

The litigation now stands in a stark position. Loujain al-Hathloul cannot come to Portland. In the courtroom she reached from half a world away, she is present as a caption, a declaration, a claim. The people named in her suit spent years insisting they were beyond the court’s reach.

The court examined where the defendants directed the surveillance, why they used American infrastructure, and where al-Hathloul’s phone was when the data was taken.

The civil action now places those questions before a federal court.

The defendants named the exploit Karma. The Oregon court has now allowed al-Hathloul to use the civil process to investigate the people and companies she says deployed it against her.