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‘Somebody Has to Do the Dirty Work’: NSO Founders Defend Pegasus Spyware
- bumblebritches5 5y agoDisgusting
- dspillett 5y agoMaybe. Maybe not. But no one has to be happy with you for being willing to do the dirty work.
- wpietri 5y agoExactly. There is a certain logic to "Somebody will do this and I am somebody." But anybody taking the money also has to take the moral burden that comes with the work.
- JohnFen 5y ago> There is a certain logic to "Somebody will do this and I am somebody." Yep. But the logic is deeply flawed. I am always disappointed when this pitiful excuse gets trotted out. Just because someone else will inevitably do evil things is not a justification for you to do evil things.
- light_hue_1 5y agoThe dirty work of helping dictators get away with murder. Of preventing countless people from organizing and taking back their lives from genocidal maniacs. Of aiding human rights abuses all around the world and helping to cover them up. What these people are doing should be a crime against humanity and they should end up in jail over it.
- da_chicken 5y agoI'm not sure if anybody an Nuremberg adopted the defense of, "Look, they kept shipping in prisoners but expected that none of them leave. We didn't have food or facilities for them all! We had to make room for them somehow!" but this feels along that same track. The fact that this is an Israeli company makes it a very bitter irony. Then again, many current Israeli policies would make their grandparents blush with shame.
- bradknowles 5y agoWho was the most recent known official Terrorist that they decided would make a good Prime Minister? Don’t tell me that they’ve only had one. If they’re going to elect a Terrorist as a Prime Minister, then you have to know what some of the other things are that they would be willing to do.
- mcguire 5y agoI see NSO has a functioning PR department.
- dsr_ 5y agoI suspect that from a strictly economic standpoint, the only thing their PR department should be doing is keeping everyone in the company mute.
- anonymousDan 5y agoWhat I find hard to believe is that NSO are the only ones doing this (or by extension Israel). Are there other US based or UK based companies doing the same but we just don't hear about them?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fmajid 5y agoBig nation-state security agencies do it in-house, like NSA's TAO. Israel itself wouldn't rely on NSO, quite the opposite: NSO is alums from Israel's Unit 8200 (IDF signals intelligence) repackaging a dumbed-down version the know-how they learned in the military for retail sale to tier 2 and 3 countries that don't have the capability, or to police departments that don't have access to national-security-grade spyware. I know some Unit 8200 alums, and they are scathing about the ethics of their former colleagues who went on to work for NSO.
- eyelovewe 5y agoThat is very important context to know. Thanks
- myth_drannon 5y ago8200 alumni have much better options than NSO... But yeah, every IT personnel who was installing Microsoft Sharepoint in army and their grandma suddenly become ex-8200 and every grunt becomes a navy seal.
- anonymousDan 5y agoVery interesting, thanks. Is Israel actually concerned about reputational damage from NSO? Or are they perceived as serving a useful purpose?
- neatze 5y agoSince when spying (by means of hacking personal info including family members) on journalists and political oppositions is a dirty work ?
- nathanaldensr 5y agoIt's the "if we don't do it, someone else will" defense.
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoIs that even a defense? It sounds like something a 6 year old would say after punching their sibling for whining incessantly.
- atatatat 5y agoHard to avoid thinking about that being the reason many defend USA holding dozens of countries in a sleeper hold with military bases.
- 8note 5y agoSomeone needs to ensure american owners get a profit. If not the American military, who else is going to do it?
- google234123 5y agoThis is a lazy non sequitur. You really think there are americans on the korean DMZ so that "american owners" (whatever that means) can get a profit?
- google234123 5y agoIf they wanted the US to leave they could ask e.g. Philippines.
- klyrs 5y ago
- apercu 5y ago'NSO Founders Defend Revenue Stream' FTFY.
- the-dude 5y agoArticle is from July 25th, probably does not contain much new info. Previous : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920055
- atatatat 5y agoProbably being upvoted because of the importance of the education of both sides of this debate.
- eyelovewe 5y agoBoth sides? The public vs NSO clients or what? Debate? It’s more like an exposé, hopefully followed by investigations and criminal trials or at least mega class action lawsuits. Their spyware was used for murdering countless humans. The list of target phone numbers was heavy on cartel victims etc, in case you hadn’t heard.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sanbor 5y ago> The agents said the Israelis’ technology, which helped carriers troubleshoot their customers’ smartphones by sending them an SMS link that enabled the carrier to access the phone remotely, could be useful for saving people’s lives. A decade later: > Saudi Arabia, using “Pegasus,” hacked the phones of Jamal Khashoggi’s ex-wife, and of his fiancée, and used the information gleaned to prepare for his monstrous killing and its subsequent cover-up. [1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-nso-group-pegasus-spyware-found-jamal-khashoggi-fiancee-phone/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-nso-group-peg... [2] https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-legal https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-l...
- kwere 5y agoThink about the children!
- jareklupinski 5y agoPeople who are trusted to do "dirty work" are usually licensed or otherwise tested by a credible organization of similarly-employed professionals to make sure each individual is morally and legally accountable for their own actions. Guess it's finally time for software engineers to be licensed in order to legally write code that affects human lives (just like every other professional engineer). The ethics oversight boards that come with the territory can then laugh off the next "Pegasus" that anyone tries to work on. Not like this will stop people from trying, but at least they won't have a professional engineer writing their code :^)
- arpa 5y agoif therac-25 didn't do that in the eighties, i doubt anything will.
- moistly 5y agoTo my ear this sounds just like an excuse made 88 years ago: “Somebody has to kill all these ____!” Ironic and disappointing.
- legerdemain 5y agoHey, if NSO hadn't built Pegasus, then an unscrupulous, unprincipled actor like Palantir would have stepped in and made the same argument!
- agency 5y agoNo comment re: Palantir’s scruples/principles but the fact is they’re not an infosec company. They don’t make malware or anything close to it.
- legerdemain 5y agoAsk someone inside Palantir about "Project Torch."
- myth_drannon 5y agoI wouldn't be surprised if all this bruhaha is to kick them out from a lucrative market. Just curious if it's an American company or Russians trying to find jobs for their hacking forces, now that the US elections are over.
- JohnFen 5y ago"And all we hear is this campaign that we are violating human rights, and it’s very upsetting. Because I know how much life has been saved globally because of our technology." Oh, pity poor NSO. Give me a break. Even if their goals were good (and I honestly have no reason to think otherwise), the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And everything they're saying boils down to "trust us". We have no reason to believe they can be trusted, and we have several reasons to think they can't. I also don't doubt that lives have been saved. But that doesn't excuse everything. There are costs that are too high to pay to accomplish the laudable goal of saving lives.
- bradknowles 5y agoSure, someone has to do the dirty work. I get that. But in that same vein, there always has to be someone to take the fall. NSO — you knew this when you started doing the dirty work. You knew this when you were in the Israeli military. You don’t get to complain now that you’re being made the scapegoat, when you knew damn good and well what might happen to you when you started doing the dirty work.
- m-p-3 5y agoMaybe, but they also need to be accountable.