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NSO Group CEO says law-abiding citizens have 'nothing to be afraid of'

128 points by mbroncano 5y ago

xedrac 5y ago
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Without commenting are the article itself: 1. This quote is frequently taken out of context to mean something very different from its original intent. 2. More importantly, we give up a little "Liberty" for a little "Safety" all the time, it's basically a primary purpose for any government. I mean, should I be able to cruise down the highway at 120 MPH as I'm snorting a line of coke? Liberty-vs-safety tradeoffs are nearly all the tough calls in government.
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    The phrase says "essential liberty" not "a little Liberty".
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      I mean, "essential" really is in the eye of the beholder, which makes the whole point moot, especially as this quote is often brought up in cases where the "essential-ness" of what is being curtailed is highly debatable. This isn't an academic argument, either. Just look at the gun debate in the US. Many argue that any curtailment of the right to bear arms, from a pistol to a bazooka, is an infringement of essential liberty. Many others strongly disagree that the right of individuals to own high-powered firearms is an essential liberty.
      - ALittleLight 5y ago
        Of course it's in the eye of the beholder. The quote is just one man's subjective opinion. It's a pretty way of stating one person's opinion as to the relative importance of essential liberty and safety which many people agree with. It's a matter for debate what liberties are essential and different people believe different things.
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    This particular quote includes two adjectives which I'm not seeing on all occasions it is brought up: "essential Liberty" and "temporary Safety". Operating a vehicle under influence and in an unsafe manner does not fall under "essential" in my view.
  - rajin444 5y ago
    His point is still essentially the same, even if the roles have reversed a bit. Replace Penn family with today's government, and the governor with a citizen about to give up his rights. The governor was going to give up the people's right to tax the Penn family in exchange for a one time payment. The governor would be making a short term sacrifice to help those dying on the frontier at the long term expense of the people. That is more or less how most people use the quote today. That being said, I don't think most would consider driving 120 mph while snorting coke an essential liberty. The OP makes a much more reasonable point which you refuse to address.
  - raincom 5y ago
    Legitimacy of any government, monopoly on voice by any government is defended on such grounds: different varieties of social contract theorists. As one of the replies suggest, you are picking on "little", whereas the parent poster mentions "essential".
    - MichaelZuo 5y ago
      Even “essential” liberties were infringed on from the very beginning, and maintained until now. Defamation and free speech being a common example.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    >cruise down the highway at 120 MPH Your example is not one of "liberty", at most can be one of "licence", and surely not of "essential liberty".
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      There's the rub. What is a "license", what is a "liberty", and what is an "essential liberty". People disagree on this.
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        (Sorry for the delay, UncleMeat) While debatability is normal, that in this context of liberty the point of discrimination is "how and how much one's action affects others" - akin to the dialectic between "freedom to vs freedom from" - should be a trivial point, and at the same time is evidently something not clear in many. Categorizing "speedracing under an influence" is not a hard exercise. Edit: I am also seeing - and in the past 18 months the evidence has boomed -, a widespread inability towards the judgement of "why this policy", both in the affected public and the issuing power, including monstrous faults deviating from straight reasoning and display of shallow arguing (not even any more explainable by electorate positioning). I have seen a boost in lack of judgement. This is very ghastly - it is a return to the famed quality/quantity of discrimination in times of witch-hunting.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  All of civilization is a balance between safety and liberty. It's an agreement to limit certain activities and standardize their consequences. Inequitable societies will prioritize the safety & liberty of some groups above others. People also have different ideas on where the balance should be (well, excluding anarchists) but that is merely a matter of degree, not kind. Of course that oversimplifies things, but this over used & out of context quote ignores that fundamental fact of any minimally organized group of people.
  - mikem170 5y ago
    In defence of the quote, it did mention trading essential liberty for a little security. Implying a bad trade. I agree with what you say about these decisions being made as a society, and there being disagreements. I would like to point out that you may misunderstand anarchists. Anarchists understand disagreement over such trade-offs better than most, and work harder than most for compromise and census. Anarchists are fine with large political structures and rules, as long as they are not forced upon anyone. Anarchists prioritize not forcing anything on others [0]. An anarchist might refer to what they have been doing in Switzerland for the last 150 years as a great example of bottom-up direct democracy in action [1], which is basically what political anarchy is. Currently a country of 8.5 million people, Switzerland is split into 26 cantons (they divide into more when needed). Each canton has its own constitution and parliament (averaging ~330k people each). Cantons are divided into municipalities (some large, like Zurich, and some small, with only 2-3k people). A big part of their political culture and the structure of their government is that what can be done locally is done locally, and the people are in charge. People can petition for a vote to not only create new laws and amendments, but to have laws they don't like removed. Many of the problems in the U.S. are due to the fact that the federal government was never meant to be as involved in our lives as it is (10th amendment, powers default to the states) and was not designed to be responsive to the people (technically states vote for president, not people). So now there are 330 million of us arguing about more and more stuff. Even worse we allow rich people and corporations to fund politicians (which is illegal in most civilized countries), to the detriment of most people. The U.S. needs less plutocracy (rule by the rich) and more democracy (rule by the people). Sorry, this has been on my mind lately. I just learned about how much anarchists are into democracy, and about Switzerland's democracy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchists (refer to first sentence) [1] https://wolf-linder.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Swiss-political-system.pdf https://wolf-linder.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Swiss-poli... (page 4 shows how powers are divided)
- malwarebytess 5y ago
  I modify this instead to, "An increase in Justice leads to a decrease in Freedom; and an increase in Freedom leads to a decrease in Justice."
underseacables 5y ago
"If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide, You’ve Got Nothing to Fear" -Eric Schmidt
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Anyone who wears clothes has something to hide.
DennisP 5y ago
That might even be true. The problem is that in some countries it's against the law to say bad things about the government.
- pfortuny 5y ago
  You can surely conclude his reasoning… If you shut up, there is nothing to be afraid of.
austincheney 5y ago
Somewhat ironic is that people seem to abhor the surveillance state and authoritarianism but the moment the culprit becomes social media there is an instant emotional reaction to the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941805
pfortuny 5y ago
Does HE have anything to be afraid of?
- tgv 5y ago
  No, and that's why they're so transparent about their work.
- unstatusthequo 5y ago
  Maybe now he does…
janpot 5y ago
Which law should we abide by then? Didn't he sell his spyware all over the world?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jonplackett 5y ago
I thought the entire point of the complaint is that it's being used to target journalists and people not breaking any laws.
daxuak 5y ago
The "afraid of" or fear is bad framing. Plenty of (justified) distrust and privacy concerns do not fall into this rhetoric. Not yours to view and judge != it's hidden with bad intent.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
I don't have to be personally afraid of NSO's products being used to target me to believe that them being used to suppress dissident journalists and humans rights advocates makes the world a worse place.
bumblebritches5 5y ago
lol
JulianMorrison 5y ago
This is a distraction. Autocrats make law that lets them do as they please. The reality is that this software was designed and sold to repress protest and democracy movements, both directly and by creating a climate of fear and paranoia around them.
ipv6ipv4 5y ago
The CEO comes of as a callous idiot here. That being said, the obsession with NSO is a bit much given that the real culprits are governments. Yes, NSO is supplying a nasty tool to authoritarian governments when it should not but I don’t see anyone vociferously fretting over NSO showing an ounce of concern for the billions in financing and in actual weapons of war being sold, or the material support of these same authoritarian governments by the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, etc., etc. France, for example, has officially done a lot more to prop up Saudi Arabia and its cruelty than NSO ever has or will. The hypocrisy is astounding.
tehjoker 5y ago
What about laws that are unjust? Should we accept blanket surveillance and the disruption of social movements? Why should we accept a unidirectional concentration of power into a tiny number of hands?
dasil003 5y ago
NSO is not the problem, secrecy and lack of public awareness are the problem. This scandal is good because it's shining light on the power that governments can wield in the shadows which most people are unaware of. The solution is to keep shining light and putting pressure on technology makers to improve security, end-to-end encryption, and keeping the power in the hands of individual users. The pressure piece is critical since the natural business incentives to centralize and collect more data make us more vulnerable to centralized surveillance and compromise.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  No they are also a problem.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  It is stupendously difficult to make vuln-free software to the level where actors like NSO are unable to produce exploits. In many ways, we don't even really know how to do it, especially if you as a vendor don't write literally your entire stack. The folks at Google and Apple can rewrite everything in memory safe languages and use the absolute state of the art in static analysis and still fail because some Qualcomm chip in the bluetooth stack has a vuln or because of some side-channel exploit that works around the assumptions of any formalism. NSO are selling weapons to authoritarian governments who use those weapons to identify and either jail or murder people they don't like. That's bad. End of story.
antiterra 5y ago
> "The people that are not criminals, not the Bin Ladens of the world— there's nothing to be afraid of. They can absolutely trust on the security and privacy of their Google and Apple devices," Hulio said. So is he saying that journalists are the Bin Ladens of the world?
iamshs 5y ago
Yeah in some parts there's no law... law-abiding has no meaning.
ohashi 5y ago
The automaker example is awful in this case. This is a drunk guy going into a car rental and asking to take it for a spin. NSO being the rental company says do you have cash? Drunk guy gives a pile of cash and rental company gives them a car to drive. Drunk driver kills someone. Is the car rental company liable? We just rent cars they say as a defense, but know they are selling to someone who is dangerous and isn't known for abiding by international (or perhaps western) norms of behavior. You cannot have it both ways, if you're going to sell the software to awful regimes who target people like journalists, you're responsible for the outcomes. The fact they found it was used on Khashoggi family phones would seemingly implicate them in the murder of a journalist. Did they kill him? Probably not. But if their software is being used by governments who did kill him, then they contributed. I hope they get criminally held responsible for assisting in the murder of Khashoggi if they are found guilty and we need laws and norms to catch up to a place where this kind of business is more restricted/limited.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Where do we end up? Anyone who sells a knife is charged for any murder committed with that brand of knife. Does that mean anyone buying a knife has to sign a form releasing the company from legal issues that may arise?
  - capelio 5y ago
    A knife has plenty of valid uses beyond being able to kill someone. Malware doesn’t.
  - ekster 5y ago
    A better example would be a specially designed knife for bringing undetected onto an airplane.
  - BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
    > Where do we end up? Anyone who sells a knife is charged for any murder committed with that brand of knife. We could split the difference and just assign liability for the ones done by serial murderers and people who show up asking for knives that are good for murdering. Knowing that your product is going to be used for some purpose and providing it anyway makes you an accomplice.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
inopinatus 5y ago
Number of adults alive on earth who have never infringed on some statute somewhere: 0. Especially true in nations where the legal system is captured by special interests and routinely weaponised to suppress dissent, coerce minorities, and perpetuate disparities. Which is to say, of course, every nation. Ergo, you (we) should all be afraid.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
I really hope this will age like the LifeLock CEO's "I can publish my social security number because LifeLock will protect me" statement, and someone will demonstrate what the CEO has to fear by installing something like the NSO spying toolkit on his devices and publishing the findings.
headShrinker 5y ago
The Public: "How do you know if I'm law abiding or not?" NSO: "We checked, you're clean" The Public: "I plan to speak publicly about this violation of my privacy" Local DA: "An investigation revealed some suspicious activity in your secretly subpoenaed browser history... 6 years ago..." The Public: "Investigation? I didn't do anything wrong! Is this because I want to voice my objection to the current privacy laws?! This sounds an awful lot like parallel construction" Local DA: "We are not at liberty to disclose the nature of the information we have on you as it contains information involving other active cases. You are under arrest."
- skywal_l 5y ago
  Glory to Arstotzka !
davesque 5y ago
Sounds like they're in denial then.
vmception 5y ago
According to which country's laws?
the-dude 5y ago
Doesn't the NSO group have a PR department? Because PR should tell him to shut the f*k up for (quite) a while.
tootie 5y ago
I think their business is ethically dubious but there's an outsize degree of outrage compared to companies like weapons manufacturers. It's the same thing. They make extremely dangerous tools and sell them to governments who can optionally use them for good, evil or a bit of both. You can certainly criticize them for their role in the death of Jamal Khashoggi for example. But he only died because the government of Saudi Arabia wanted him dead. They've also had no trouble acquiring fighter jets they've used to kill thousands of Yemenis.
- arminiusreturns 5y ago
  Please dont forget that the war machine now kills people based off phone metadata. That should shift your perspective a touch.
  - tootie 5y ago
    Yeah but it's like 0.001% of the people killed by conventional means. We're only flipping out because it's new. It's not like the Minneapolis police needed George Floyd's phone metadata or encrypted chats. Or that Russia was picking targets in Crimea with it. Arguably fear of spying has caused more deaths than actual spying if anti-vaxxers are being honest.
nickysielicki 5y ago
I'm more interested in the "how" of this. Are these intentional backdoors, and what qualifies this group to be privy to the information flows to exploit them? What sort of connections do they have? Are these backdoors/bugs in the baseband or are they in userspace? If it's not an intentional backdoor, do they just have vastly superior technical ability? How did they hire such a talented pool of people, able to consistently find remotely exploitable 0days in every major smartphone brand? This group isn't new, they've been around for over a decade doing this. I doubt they've monetized a single exploit for 10 years. They're adapting. If I had to bet, I'd bet on the former, but I'm curious what everyone else thinks. It just seems unreasonable to me that there exists such a talented pool of exploiters, all aggregated in the same place, able to consistently find 0days that nobody else seems to be able to find.
- bagomips 5y ago
  My own take is that some exploits initially fall through the cracks in a social way when being triaged or getting somewhat inadequate fixes. It becomes harder to go back and correct the initial triage. At the same time, some people in the company might be connected to their governments and help that bug stay in the grey zone probably not for the NSO group but maybe for the NSA. (Of course this only applies if the exploit is one the government identified and decided to use offensively and doesn't think is being used in the wild.) Now when you are examining images as a company updates them, you are reviewing what's notable in the fixes in the very least to know how to attack older OSes. You might happen to have the perspective that understands how the triage was wrong. With enough bugs like this it is inevitable that sometimes you will if you can afford to analyze every fix.
HeckFeck 5y ago
Excellent, if that's the case then there is nothing of my business he need know of.
slim 5y ago
Those guys think we are afraid of them. I wish their private information or those of their families get in the wrong hands, so they can understand what's at stake
CodeWriter23 5y ago
I thought posting satire on HN was frowned upon.
- rvz 5y ago
  Irony on HN (especially against the HN crowd) is also frowned upon. For example, A company that didn't use Kubernetes [0] had their blog knocked down and the HN crowd was jubilant over the matter to recommend them to use K8s for a blog. It's not even their main service offering. Then 48 hours later [1], major parts of the internet using Akamai went down and the company that previously was 'the joke' was still up. All I suggested was for Akamai to use K8s as well. [2] I turned the joke on them and got downvoted due to the irony of the situation. Look at the comments in [0] and [1] and you can see the strength of [2] humiliating their short lived victory parade. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27893482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27893482 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920665 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920792
  - detaro 5y ago
    It's funny to see people with thousands of karma pretend that there is a universal "HN crowd" that shares all opinions in all threads, but that they are of course not part of... That's just not how it works.
harha 5y ago
Doesn’t sound very law abiding to me to circumvent courts and procedure to install such spying tools.
notahacker88 5y ago
Ah looking back on Project Mayhem, perhaps the antisec crowd was right- https://youtu.be/xDyBIpqZcNI https://youtu.be/xDyBIpqZcNI
einarfd 5y ago
Every community or country has people who has no moral compass, and will sell anything to anyone as long as they don't end up in prison over it. It's getting clearer and clearer that the NSO management team is this type of people. Israel needs to have a look at fixing their laws. I'm hard pressed to see that it's in Israel's interest having their industry assisting Marocco spying on the French, or Saudi killing dissident.
- mberning 5y ago
  I think it’s a bad assumption that most governments would see this as something needing fixing. Even with the current public blowback this will probably just “go away”.
kmeisthax 5y ago
So... is he afraid of someone pirating his exploit and using it against him? If he isn't, then he's stupid. Because that's entirely possible. There is no such thing as a NOBUS (NObody But US) exploit. Someone else will find it - either your network will get hacked and someone will use the exploit. This is how Wannacry happened. A bunch of NSA-NOBUS exploits got leaked and sold off to people who built a ransomware tool with them. How the leak happens doesn't matter, what matters is the fact that the leak will happen. The only ethical thing to do is to disclose so that the exploit can get fixed.
1qwerty 5y ago
just curious how many anti-NSO group people use amazon ring devices and are just ok with that cause those devices do enough bad things (still many use them)? In the same spirit I think we should start putting pressure on Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other companies because they literally produce mass distraction tools that do way more harm than NSO made tools. IMHO tools that NSO builds can do good and bad depending on what hands control those tools. I am not sure though how exactly NSO can control what its customers do.
dang 5y ago
This article just reports on https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/07/22/nso-group-ceo-defends-1-billion-spyware-company-against-pegasus-project-hacking-allegations/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/07/22/nso-g..., which was discussed a couple days ago: ‘If You’re Not a Criminal, Don’t Be Afraid’– NSO CEO says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920055 - July 2021 (48 comments) Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
apalmer 5y ago
1) the 'nothing to be afraid of' statement is just PR, and nothing else, so not going to dig into that. 2) government has and will always use whatever tools exist, trust Pegasus is 1 out of many... 3) from a realistic standpoint it is up to 'Apple' is anyone to fix this issue from a technical standpoint, there will always be security holes and tools to take advantage of them. Shaming the toolmaker does little. 4) the real solution is the people have to control the government, only in those scenarios can you put 'ethical' constraints on this kinda thing... Those who are in countries where the people don't control the government really have no recourse
- HappyDreamer 5y ago
  > there will always be security holes and tools to take advantage of them. Shaming the toolmaker does little. And there'll always be ways and weapons to rob banks and kill the clerks, so selling weapons to bank robbers is fine then, as per that logic > Those who are in countries where the people don't control the government really have no recourse They can arrange protests and other things and try to long term change the country to a democracy. And that gets harder and more dangerous, when NSO and others help the dictators track down dissidents.
raarts 5y ago
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. -- Cardinal Richelieu
FpUser 5y ago
To NSO Group CEO - Go fuck yourself. You've got no right to snoop into my private life. Go back to that rat hole you came out from.
tim333 5y ago
>law-abiding citizens have 'nothing to be afraid of' Though what if they laws are unreasonable? Which quite a few are in dictatorships.

128 points by mbroncano 5y ago

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Without commenting are the article itself: 1. This quote is frequently taken out of context to mean something very different from its original intent. 2. More importantly, we give up a little "Liberty" for a little "Safety" all the time, it's basically a primary purpose for any government. I mean, should I be able to cruise down the highway at 120 MPH as I'm snorting a line of coke? Liberty-vs-safety tradeoffs are nearly all the tough calls in government.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  The phrase says "essential liberty" not "a little Liberty".
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I mean, "essential" really is in the eye of the beholder, which makes the whole point moot, especially as this quote is often brought up in cases where the "essential-ness" of what is being curtailed is highly debatable. This isn't an academic argument, either. Just look at the gun debate in the US. Many argue that any curtailment of the right to bear arms, from a pistol to a bazooka, is an infringement of essential liberty. Many others strongly disagree that the right of individuals to own high-powered firearms is an essential liberty.
    - ALittleLight 5y ago
      Of course it's in the eye of the beholder. The quote is just one man's subjective opinion. It's a pretty way of stating one person's opinion as to the relative importance of essential liberty and safety which many people agree with. It's a matter for debate what liberties are essential and different people believe different things.
- rzzzt 5y ago
  This particular quote includes two adjectives which I'm not seeing on all occasions it is brought up: "essential Liberty" and "temporary Safety". Operating a vehicle under influence and in an unsafe manner does not fall under "essential" in my view.
- rajin444 5y ago
  His point is still essentially the same, even if the roles have reversed a bit. Replace Penn family with today's government, and the governor with a citizen about to give up his rights. The governor was going to give up the people's right to tax the Penn family in exchange for a one time payment. The governor would be making a short term sacrifice to help those dying on the frontier at the long term expense of the people. That is more or less how most people use the quote today. That being said, I don't think most would consider driving 120 mph while snorting coke an essential liberty. The OP makes a much more reasonable point which you refuse to address.
- raincom 5y ago
  Legitimacy of any government, monopoly on voice by any government is defended on such grounds: different varieties of social contract theorists. As one of the replies suggest, you are picking on "little", whereas the parent poster mentions "essential".
  - MichaelZuo 5y ago
    Even “essential” liberties were infringed on from the very beginning, and maintained until now. Defamation and free speech being a common example.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  >cruise down the highway at 120 MPH Your example is not one of "liberty", at most can be one of "licence", and surely not of "essential liberty".
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    There's the rub. What is a "license", what is a "liberty", and what is an "essential liberty". People disagree on this.
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      (Sorry for the delay, UncleMeat) While debatability is normal, that in this context of liberty the point of discrimination is "how and how much one's action affects others" - akin to the dialectic between "freedom to vs freedom from" - should be a trivial point, and at the same time is evidently something not clear in many. Categorizing "speedracing under an influence" is not a hard exercise. Edit: I am also seeing - and in the past 18 months the evidence has boomed -, a widespread inability towards the judgement of "why this policy", both in the affected public and the issuing power, including monstrous faults deviating from straight reasoning and display of shallow arguing (not even any more explainable by electorate positioning). I have seen a boost in lack of judgement. This is very ghastly - it is a return to the famed quality/quantity of discrimination in times of witch-hunting.
ineedasername 5y ago
All of civilization is a balance between safety and liberty. It's an agreement to limit certain activities and standardize their consequences. Inequitable societies will prioritize the safety & liberty of some groups above others. People also have different ideas on where the balance should be (well, excluding anarchists) but that is merely a matter of degree, not kind. Of course that oversimplifies things, but this over used & out of context quote ignores that fundamental fact of any minimally organized group of people.
- mikem170 5y ago
  In defence of the quote, it did mention trading essential liberty for a little security. Implying a bad trade. I agree with what you say about these decisions being made as a society, and there being disagreements. I would like to point out that you may misunderstand anarchists. Anarchists understand disagreement over such trade-offs better than most, and work harder than most for compromise and census. Anarchists are fine with large political structures and rules, as long as they are not forced upon anyone. Anarchists prioritize not forcing anything on others [0]. An anarchist might refer to what they have been doing in Switzerland for the last 150 years as a great example of bottom-up direct democracy in action [1], which is basically what political anarchy is. Currently a country of 8.5 million people, Switzerland is split into 26 cantons (they divide into more when needed). Each canton has its own constitution and parliament (averaging ~330k people each). Cantons are divided into municipalities (some large, like Zurich, and some small, with only 2-3k people). A big part of their political culture and the structure of their government is that what can be done locally is done locally, and the people are in charge. People can petition for a vote to not only create new laws and amendments, but to have laws they don't like removed. Many of the problems in the U.S. are due to the fact that the federal government was never meant to be as involved in our lives as it is (10th amendment, powers default to the states) and was not designed to be responsive to the people (technically states vote for president, not people). So now there are 330 million of us arguing about more and more stuff. Even worse we allow rich people and corporations to fund politicians (which is illegal in most civilized countries), to the detriment of most people. The U.S. needs less plutocracy (rule by the rich) and more democracy (rule by the people). Sorry, this has been on my mind lately. I just learned about how much anarchists are into democracy, and about Switzerland's democracy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchists (refer to first sentence) [1] https://wolf-linder.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Swiss-political-system.pdf https://wolf-linder.ch/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Swiss-poli... (page 4 shows how powers are divided)
malwarebytess 5y ago
I modify this instead to, "An increase in Justice leads to a decrease in Freedom; and an increase in Freedom leads to a decrease in Justice."

underseacables 5y ago

"If You’ve Got Nothing to Hide, You’ve Got Nothing to Fear" -Eric Schmidt

ipaddr 5y ago
Anyone who wears clothes has something to hide.

DennisP 5y ago

That might even be true. The problem is that in some countries it's against the law to say bad things about the government.

pfortuny 5y ago
You can surely conclude his reasoning… If you shut up, there is nothing to be afraid of.

austincheney 5y ago

Somewhat ironic is that people seem to abhor the surveillance state and authoritarianism but the moment the culprit becomes social media there is an instant emotional reaction to the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27941805

pfortuny 5y ago

Does HE have anything to be afraid of?

tgv 5y ago
No, and that's why they're so transparent about their work.
unstatusthequo 5y ago
Maybe now he does…

janpot 5y ago

Which law should we abide by then? Didn't he sell his spyware all over the world?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jonplackett 5y ago

I thought the entire point of the complaint is that it's being used to target journalists and people not breaking any laws.

daxuak 5y ago

The "afraid of" or fear is bad framing. Plenty of (justified) distrust and privacy concerns do not fall into this rhetoric. Not yours to view and judge != it's hidden with bad intent.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

I don't have to be personally afraid of NSO's products being used to target me to believe that them being used to suppress dissident journalists and humans rights advocates makes the world a worse place.

bumblebritches5 5y ago

lol

JulianMorrison 5y ago

This is a distraction. Autocrats make law that lets them do as they please. The reality is that this software was designed and sold to repress protest and democracy movements, both directly and by creating a climate of fear and paranoia around them.

ipv6ipv4 5y ago

The CEO comes of as a callous idiot here. That being said, the obsession with NSO is a bit much given that the real culprits are governments. Yes, NSO is supplying a nasty tool to authoritarian governments when it should not but I don’t see anyone vociferously fretting over NSO showing an ounce of concern for the billions in financing and in actual weapons of war being sold, or the material support of these same authoritarian governments by the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, etc., etc. France, for example, has officially done a lot more to prop up Saudi Arabia and its cruelty than NSO ever has or will. The hypocrisy is astounding.

tehjoker 5y ago

What about laws that are unjust? Should we accept blanket surveillance and the disruption of social movements? Why should we accept a unidirectional concentration of power into a tiny number of hands?

dasil003 5y ago

NSO is not the problem, secrecy and lack of public awareness are the problem. This scandal is good because it's shining light on the power that governments can wield in the shadows which most people are unaware of. The solution is to keep shining light and putting pressure on technology makers to improve security, end-to-end encryption, and keeping the power in the hands of individual users. The pressure piece is critical since the natural business incentives to centralize and collect more data make us more vulnerable to centralized surveillance and compromise.

tehjoker 5y ago
No they are also a problem.
- deleted 5y ago
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UncleMeat 5y ago
It is stupendously difficult to make vuln-free software to the level where actors like NSO are unable to produce exploits. In many ways, we don't even really know how to do it, especially if you as a vendor don't write literally your entire stack. The folks at Google and Apple can rewrite everything in memory safe languages and use the absolute state of the art in static analysis and still fail because some Qualcomm chip in the bluetooth stack has a vuln or because of some side-channel exploit that works around the assumptions of any formalism. NSO are selling weapons to authoritarian governments who use those weapons to identify and either jail or murder people they don't like. That's bad. End of story.

antiterra 5y ago

> "The people that are not criminals, not the Bin Ladens of the world— there's nothing to be afraid of. They can absolutely trust on the security and privacy of their Google and Apple devices," Hulio said. So is he saying that journalists are the Bin Ladens of the world?

iamshs 5y ago

Yeah in some parts there's no law... law-abiding has no meaning.

ohashi 5y ago

The automaker example is awful in this case. This is a drunk guy going into a car rental and asking to take it for a spin. NSO being the rental company says do you have cash? Drunk guy gives a pile of cash and rental company gives them a car to drive. Drunk driver kills someone. Is the car rental company liable? We just rent cars they say as a defense, but know they are selling to someone who is dangerous and isn't known for abiding by international (or perhaps western) norms of behavior. You cannot have it both ways, if you're going to sell the software to awful regimes who target people like journalists, you're responsible for the outcomes. The fact they found it was used on Khashoggi family phones would seemingly implicate them in the murder of a journalist. Did they kill him? Probably not. But if their software is being used by governments who did kill him, then they contributed. I hope they get criminally held responsible for assisting in the murder of Khashoggi if they are found guilty and we need laws and norms to catch up to a place where this kind of business is more restricted/limited.

ipaddr 5y ago
Where do we end up? Anyone who sells a knife is charged for any murder committed with that brand of knife. Does that mean anyone buying a knife has to sign a form releasing the company from legal issues that may arise?
- capelio 5y ago
  A knife has plenty of valid uses beyond being able to kill someone. Malware doesn’t.
- ekster 5y ago
  A better example would be a specially designed knife for bringing undetected onto an airplane.
- BugsJustFindMe 5y ago
  > Where do we end up? Anyone who sells a knife is charged for any murder committed with that brand of knife. We could split the difference and just assign liability for the ones done by serial murderers and people who show up asking for knives that are good for murdering. Knowing that your product is going to be used for some purpose and providing it anyway makes you an accomplice.

deleted 5y ago

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inopinatus 5y ago

Number of adults alive on earth who have never infringed on some statute somewhere: 0. Especially true in nations where the legal system is captured by special interests and routinely weaponised to suppress dissent, coerce minorities, and perpetuate disparities. Which is to say, of course, every nation. Ergo, you (we) should all be afraid.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

I really hope this will age like the LifeLock CEO's "I can publish my social security number because LifeLock will protect me" statement, and someone will demonstrate what the CEO has to fear by installing something like the NSO spying toolkit on his devices and publishing the findings.

headShrinker 5y ago

The Public: "How do you know if I'm law abiding or not?" NSO: "We checked, you're clean" The Public: "I plan to speak publicly about this violation of my privacy" Local DA: "An investigation revealed some suspicious activity in your secretly subpoenaed browser history... 6 years ago..." The Public: "Investigation? I didn't do anything wrong! Is this because I want to voice my objection to the current privacy laws?! This sounds an awful lot like parallel construction" Local DA: "We are not at liberty to disclose the nature of the information we have on you as it contains information involving other active cases. You are under arrest."

skywal_l 5y ago
Glory to Arstotzka !

davesque 5y ago

Sounds like they're in denial then.

vmception 5y ago

According to which country's laws?

the-dude 5y ago

Doesn't the NSO group have a PR department? Because PR should tell him to shut the f*k up for (quite) a while.

tootie 5y ago

I think their business is ethically dubious but there's an outsize degree of outrage compared to companies like weapons manufacturers. It's the same thing. They make extremely dangerous tools and sell them to governments who can optionally use them for good, evil or a bit of both. You can certainly criticize them for their role in the death of Jamal Khashoggi for example. But he only died because the government of Saudi Arabia wanted him dead. They've also had no trouble acquiring fighter jets they've used to kill thousands of Yemenis.

arminiusreturns 5y ago
Please dont forget that the war machine now kills people based off phone metadata. That should shift your perspective a touch.
- tootie 5y ago
  Yeah but it's like 0.001% of the people killed by conventional means. We're only flipping out because it's new. It's not like the Minneapolis police needed George Floyd's phone metadata or encrypted chats. Or that Russia was picking targets in Crimea with it. Arguably fear of spying has caused more deaths than actual spying if anti-vaxxers are being honest.

nickysielicki 5y ago

I'm more interested in the "how" of this. Are these intentional backdoors, and what qualifies this group to be privy to the information flows to exploit them? What sort of connections do they have? Are these backdoors/bugs in the baseband or are they in userspace? If it's not an intentional backdoor, do they just have vastly superior technical ability? How did they hire such a talented pool of people, able to consistently find remotely exploitable 0days in every major smartphone brand? This group isn't new, they've been around for over a decade doing this. I doubt they've monetized a single exploit for 10 years. They're adapting. If I had to bet, I'd bet on the former, but I'm curious what everyone else thinks. It just seems unreasonable to me that there exists such a talented pool of exploiters, all aggregated in the same place, able to consistently find 0days that nobody else seems to be able to find.

bagomips 5y ago
My own take is that some exploits initially fall through the cracks in a social way when being triaged or getting somewhat inadequate fixes. It becomes harder to go back and correct the initial triage. At the same time, some people in the company might be connected to their governments and help that bug stay in the grey zone probably not for the NSO group but maybe for the NSA. (Of course this only applies if the exploit is one the government identified and decided to use offensively and doesn't think is being used in the wild.) Now when you are examining images as a company updates them, you are reviewing what's notable in the fixes in the very least to know how to attack older OSes. You might happen to have the perspective that understands how the triage was wrong. With enough bugs like this it is inevitable that sometimes you will if you can afford to analyze every fix.

HeckFeck 5y ago

Excellent, if that's the case then there is nothing of my business he need know of.

slim 5y ago

Those guys think we are afraid of them. I wish their private information or those of their families get in the wrong hands, so they can understand what's at stake

CodeWriter23 5y ago

I thought posting satire on HN was frowned upon.

rvz 5y ago
Irony on HN (especially against the HN crowd) is also frowned upon. For example, A company that didn't use Kubernetes [0] had their blog knocked down and the HN crowd was jubilant over the matter to recommend them to use K8s for a blog. It's not even their main service offering. Then 48 hours later [1], major parts of the internet using Akamai went down and the company that previously was 'the joke' was still up. All I suggested was for Akamai to use K8s as well. [2] I turned the joke on them and got downvoted due to the irony of the situation. Look at the comments in [0] and [1] and you can see the strength of [2] humiliating their short lived victory parade. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27893482 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27893482 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920665 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920792 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920792
- detaro 5y ago
  It's funny to see people with thousands of karma pretend that there is a universal "HN crowd" that shares all opinions in all threads, but that they are of course not part of... That's just not how it works.

harha 5y ago

Doesn’t sound very law abiding to me to circumvent courts and procedure to install such spying tools.

notahacker88 5y ago

Ah looking back on Project Mayhem, perhaps the antisec crowd was right- https://youtu.be/xDyBIpqZcNI https://youtu.be/xDyBIpqZcNI

einarfd 5y ago

Every community or country has people who has no moral compass, and will sell anything to anyone as long as they don't end up in prison over it. It's getting clearer and clearer that the NSO management team is this type of people. Israel needs to have a look at fixing their laws. I'm hard pressed to see that it's in Israel's interest having their industry assisting Marocco spying on the French, or Saudi killing dissident.

mberning 5y ago
I think it’s a bad assumption that most governments would see this as something needing fixing. Even with the current public blowback this will probably just “go away”.

kmeisthax 5y ago

So... is he afraid of someone pirating his exploit and using it against him? If he isn't, then he's stupid. Because that's entirely possible. There is no such thing as a NOBUS (NObody But US) exploit. Someone else will find it - either your network will get hacked and someone will use the exploit. This is how Wannacry happened. A bunch of NSA-NOBUS exploits got leaked and sold off to people who built a ransomware tool with them. How the leak happens doesn't matter, what matters is the fact that the leak will happen. The only ethical thing to do is to disclose so that the exploit can get fixed.

1qwerty 5y ago

just curious how many anti-NSO group people use amazon ring devices and are just ok with that cause those devices do enough bad things (still many use them)? In the same spirit I think we should start putting pressure on Boeing, Lockheed Martin and other companies because they literally produce mass distraction tools that do way more harm than NSO made tools. IMHO tools that NSO builds can do good and bad depending on what hands control those tools. I am not sure though how exactly NSO can control what its customers do.

dang 5y ago

This article just reports on https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/07/22/nso-group-ceo-defends-1-billion-spyware-company-against-pegasus-project-hacking-allegations/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/07/22/nso-g..., which was discussed a couple days ago: ‘If You’re Not a Criminal, Don’t Be Afraid’– NSO CEO says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920055 - July 2021 (48 comments) Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

apalmer 5y ago

1) the 'nothing to be afraid of' statement is just PR, and nothing else, so not going to dig into that. 2) government has and will always use whatever tools exist, trust Pegasus is 1 out of many... 3) from a realistic standpoint it is up to 'Apple' is anyone to fix this issue from a technical standpoint, there will always be security holes and tools to take advantage of them. Shaming the toolmaker does little. 4) the real solution is the people have to control the government, only in those scenarios can you put 'ethical' constraints on this kinda thing... Those who are in countries where the people don't control the government really have no recourse

HappyDreamer 5y ago
> there will always be security holes and tools to take advantage of them. Shaming the toolmaker does little. And there'll always be ways and weapons to rob banks and kill the clerks, so selling weapons to bank robbers is fine then, as per that logic > Those who are in countries where the people don't control the government really have no recourse They can arrange protests and other things and try to long term change the country to a democracy. And that gets harder and more dangerous, when NSO and others help the dictators track down dissidents.

raarts 5y ago

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. -- Cardinal Richelieu

FpUser 5y ago

To NSO Group CEO - Go fuck yourself. You've got no right to snoop into my private life. Go back to that rat hole you came out from.

tim333 5y ago

>law-abiding citizens have 'nothing to be afraid of' Though what if they laws are unreasonable? Which quite a few are in dictatorships.