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Have said before that the economics for companies like NSO are favorable because countries and regimes with resource wealth, who do not need to maintain a sophi

Have said before that the economics for companies like NSO are favorable because countries and regimes with resource wealth, who do not need to maintain a sophisticated civil service to stay in power, need the technical capability that such a platform provides. Companies like this provide that. It's a domestic spy agency as a service. Awful? Absolutely, but I'd argue these objections reduce to "interception capabilities for me and not for thee," as western domestic spy agencies can just send a fax to your telco and get the same access. That is, the U.S. doesn't need NSO because it has the FISA stamp pad. I'm very much a privacy advocate who has in one way or another worked closely to the key surveillance issues of the day for years, and so to defend NSO at all feels absurd, but the devil must be given his due. Sure, NSO and the former HackingTeam and even Stratfor were great activist targets, but from the perspective of a state or a regime who buys an NSO-like service, N-GO's are just another foreign funded operator fighting a proxy war for policy leverege on behalf of their home governments and companies. They aren't secular colonial missionaries, (or perhaps, that's precisely what they are) they're running a playbook[1]. It's hard to separate NSO from Israeli policy because of how close their industry and military are linked, but I also think the objections to Israel's involvement itself reduce to how it is the last new free and independent nation state in a time where the nation state as thing itself is being wound up by the very class of academics/NGO's who militate against Israel's sovereignty. The academic/NGO anti-Israel thing has a lot of old entrenched anti-semitism, but the most reliable filter to identify what bothers them about Israel's involvement in this platform is NGOs are motivated by academic anti-sovereignty. These spy agencies as a service like NSO provide sovereignty to unfavorable countries, and Israel benefits strategically from preserving the sovereignty of nation states, no matter how repugnant. That's a painful steelman argument to make on behalf of the very abusive surveillance I have worked personally in my career to prevent, but when I see what amounts to selective privacy astroturfing using artists I like as propaganda mascots, the whole thing leaves a bad taste. The skepticism I had with the university affiliated project that first uncovered Pegasus was they seemed really interested in foreign abuses but had not done anything on domestic surveillance issues, or even investigated those countries' influence on their own, which made them a para-governmental org using the cover of a loosely academic NGO to play spy games. To me the whole enterprise is seedy. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Dictatorship-Democracy-Gene-Sharp/dp/1846688396 https://www.amazon.com/Dictatorship-Democracy-Gene-Sharp/dp/...

visualradio 5y ago
The concern is likely over whether supply creates its own demand. In other words will the commodification of state surveillance technology encourage suppliers to manipulate the environment to create more purchasers in a manner that transcends the original limited desire of host republics to defend residents from domination. In other words will the actions taken in pursuit of a mission lead to outcomes in conflict with the original mission.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  It's a fair view, as we bring these things into being. "What was once thought cannot be unthought," sort of thing, and having a tech at all means the economics of using it for evil itself becomes viable. The argument back is, "if it wasn't us, it would be someone else who did it," which is a self justifying slippery slope, and then we get into the conflict between the ideal of not doing evil vs. doing it first so nobody can do it to you, and being good is meaningless if you are dead or don't prevail to preserve it. I genuinely believe (perhaps naively) that there are good people, and we do crafty things to pursue our interests, but we punch the clock out at some point and respect that the battle of our conflicting interests must cease so we can return to being people. This is predicated on the idea that we are just humans recognizing we are dealing with other humans, and we will find an equillibrium of interests at some point. Where that breaks down is when we lose sight of that and just start to exterminate each other for its own sake by all deceptive and mendacious means necessary. For that you have to give up your own humanity first. Maybe that view is as quaint as the famously naive "gentlemen do not read each others' mail," statement, but without some guiding humanity, we might as well just use biological warfare because the only thing stopping using that is polite convention. Some rulers have been content to rule over slaves and disposable subjugated automatons reduced to living like animals, but their ambition is meaningless and unsatisfying because without some assent, they do not rule over people. When you have subjugated a people, the only solution is to find more people to subjugate. It's on everyone else to engage in total war to prevent that from happening, imo. That's a big philosophical hope statement, but in terms of the ethics of building these tools, the truly evil empires have their own infrastructure, and don't need tools like those made by the NSO's of the world. Globally, and species wise, NSO's clients aren't the problem.

visualradio 5y ago

The concern is likely over whether supply creates its own demand. In other words will the commodification of state surveillance technology encourage suppliers to manipulate the environment to create more purchasers in a manner that transcends the original limited desire of host republics to defend residents from domination. In other words will the actions taken in pursuit of a mission lead to outcomes in conflict with the original mission.

motohagiography 5y ago
It's a fair view, as we bring these things into being. "What was once thought cannot be unthought," sort of thing, and having a tech at all means the economics of using it for evil itself becomes viable. The argument back is, "if it wasn't us, it would be someone else who did it," which is a self justifying slippery slope, and then we get into the conflict between the ideal of not doing evil vs. doing it first so nobody can do it to you, and being good is meaningless if you are dead or don't prevail to preserve it. I genuinely believe (perhaps naively) that there are good people, and we do crafty things to pursue our interests, but we punch the clock out at some point and respect that the battle of our conflicting interests must cease so we can return to being people. This is predicated on the idea that we are just humans recognizing we are dealing with other humans, and we will find an equillibrium of interests at some point. Where that breaks down is when we lose sight of that and just start to exterminate each other for its own sake by all deceptive and mendacious means necessary. For that you have to give up your own humanity first. Maybe that view is as quaint as the famously naive "gentlemen do not read each others' mail," statement, but without some guiding humanity, we might as well just use biological warfare because the only thing stopping using that is polite convention. Some rulers have been content to rule over slaves and disposable subjugated automatons reduced to living like animals, but their ambition is meaningless and unsatisfying because without some assent, they do not rule over people. When you have subjugated a people, the only solution is to find more people to subjugate. It's on everyone else to engage in total war to prevent that from happening, imo. That's a big philosophical hope statement, but in terms of the ethics of building these tools, the truly evil empires have their own infrastructure, and don't need tools like those made by the NSO's of the world. Globally, and species wise, NSO's clients aren't the problem.