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On Pegasus – NSO, Israel, and the World
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- mitchbob 5y agoArchived: https://archive.ph/RiHRq https://archive.ph/RiHRq
- Synaesthesia 5y agoRelevant blog post by Ed Snowden. https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-legal https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-l...
- Synaesthesia 5y agoOnce again the Israeli model of control will be employed against protests and uprisings around the world, having been perfected in their "lab" of the West Bank and Gaza.
- helge9210 5y agoFun fact: it is deployed now within Israel itself.
- Synaesthesia 5y agoAlso Israeli publications are subject to military censor. Its very much a militarised society.
- helge9210 5y agoTrue. No freedom of speech. Not only publications, communications in messengers also. In some cases WhatsApp messages were removed by censor command.
- Eelongate 5y agoIn past HN conversations about this topic, there have always been some who deny or downplay the relationship between NSO and the Israeli government. This article paints a convincing story to the contrary: NSO and the rest of Israel's cyberoffense industry were/are used as a negotiating chip by Israeli diplomats. NSO only exported their technology/services with the approval of the Israeli government, and Israeli courts have cleared the Israeli government of any negligence in that approval process.
- bitcharmer 5y ago> there have always been some who deny or downplay the relationship between NSO and the Israeli government But this has been the mainstream trend in major news outlets for years, no? Make no dirt stick to the IDF/Israeli government. Try to criticise Israel for their war crimes against the Palestinians and see what you get branded as.
- montblanc 5y agoIsrael isn't criticized on mainstream news outlets? Lol
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- bitcharmer 5y ago[flagged]
- flyinglizard 5y agoI don’t think the word “genocidal” means what you think it does.
- bitcharmer 5y ago
- 1cvmask 5y agoImagine the coverage if NSO and the intricately close relationship it had with the government was say Russia or China. The headlines would be like “Putin kills Saudi journalist Kashoggi” or “Xi kills dissidents and human rights activists” instead of the current ones ascribing all agency and blame to just NSO.
- Eelongate 5y ago> "[...] instead of the current ones ascribing all agency and blame to just NSO." The article does not claim that NSO has sole responsibility for any of the crimes it was an accomplice to.
- flyinglizard 5y agoBut NSO (or, by extension, Israel) didn’t kill him. It was Saudis who did.
- YouWhy 5y agoI stopped reading at the early point the article asserted Bennett propelled himself to premiership though whatever policies he enacted. This simply ignores the entirety of a 2 year long politicial crisis whose main actor was the former PM Netanyahu, and in which essentially nothing anyone else did mattered. Once Netanyahu was gone, it was a random twist of fate that brought Bennett ahead of at least 3 other parliamentary leaders.
- rapsey 5y agoSo any reason two different accounts posted this exact message in this thread?
- u_y 5y agoI stopped reading at the early point the article asserted Bennett propelled himself to premiership though whatever policies he enacted. This simply ignores the entirety of a 2 year long politicial crisis whose main actor was the former PM Netanyahu, and in which essentially nothing anyone else did mattered. Once Netanyahu was gone, it was a random twist of fate that brought Bennett ahead of at least 3 other parliamentary leaders.
- rapsey 5y agoSo any reason two different accounts posted this exact message in this thread? (also posting the same question twice).
- xvector 5y agoLooks like he tried to make an account, didn't realize his message went through, and for some reason made a new account (???) to post the same message.
- u_y 5y agoTl;dr: Apologies, bug/misunderstood UI/UX I tried to create an account, was told the user name is already taken, and just created another one.
- dadarecit 5y agoAs someone who worked in Israel and is familiar with the tech scene there firsthand I can testify to the fact that the entire cybersecurity industry is intertwined with the IDF and the Israeli government to such a degree that any differentiation that could be made would be purely superficial. The intelligence units of the IDF are petri dishes in which the talent that later creates the very cybersecurity firms whose products are sold under the direct supervision of the Israeli government is cultivated. There is an entire framework focused around funding and training these graduates of intelligence units to create commercial companies that are essentially subsidiaries of the IDF. And these companies don't discriminate when it comes to sales - clients include tyrants, criminal organizations and even Muslim states. Big corporations e.g. Microsoft are also involved, as they usually end up buying these infosec enterprises, essentially funding the Israeli government / military. It's truly disturbing to see the opportunistic nature of all of this.
- joelbluminator 5y ago> and even Muslim states What's wrong with Muslim states? Israel isn't actually in war with the entire Muslim world you know, though some people really wish that was the case.
- rvp-x 5y agoThey're "funding the israeli government/military" as much as a purchase from a US firm funds the US military - they're legally required to pay a tax and some of that money goes into the military. Once released from the military these people have no additional obligation to pay for the military more so than people in more tame business - in fact, they might be seen as owed something for serving in the military, rather than the other way around.
- jongorer 5y agoYes, this is why subsidiaries in the private sector are useful - when something goes terribly wrong with one, like it did with NSO, it doesn't implicate the whole of Israel/IDF - at least not explicitly.
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- joelbluminator 5y ago"Israel’s leading tabloid, Yedioth Ahronoth" Huh, Yedioth Ahronot is a tabloid? It's centrist, it's no tabloid. It's probably the most important newspaper in the country still. Sorry this article is trash and the topic has been beaten to death here on HN. Stop with the Israel obsession please, this should be flagged.
- downWidOutaFite 5y agoNope not going to stop until they stop exporting cyber weapons for profit.
- joelbluminator 5y agoHacker News Guidelines What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. Seems more off topic to me. It's not new, it's political (arguably also criminal) and it's not a new phenomenon. It has been discussed dozens of times throughout the years on HN.
- ryanlol 5y agoThis is interesting, even if it paints your favourite gang of thugs in a bad light. There are always other posts you can move on to if this one bothers you.
- james-redwood 5y agoBig red flag. Yedioth is a newspaper along the lines of the NYTimes but for Israel. Nowhere near a tabloid
- Eelongate 5y ago
- atmosx 5y ago> The biggest shock came from Morocco, which was apparently responsible for installing Pegasus spyware on the phones of five French cabinet ministers and for seeking to target Emmanuel Macron. So much bias, superiority complex and stupidity packed in this statement alone. Amazing.
- eli_gottlieb 5y agoWhen you're right, you're right. Did people really think economic growth would bypass the entire MENA region just because the Arab Spring revealed some unsavory things about the governments? Or that anyone in the regional tech sector would hesitate for a second to make money off MENA states getting back at their old colonizers? Actually, the author's name being Edan Ring (eg: obviously Hebrew) aside, that's the most interesting political angle here! NSO is opening doors for Israel to act as a Middle Eastern country, eg: spying, cracking, abusing human rights, trying to fuck with Europe, and making money off the whole lot. To a certain degree, the "shock and horror" angle is because Israeli Leftists and Westerners have actually bought their own bullshit about Israel being a Western implantation into the region, rather than a native growth: they have to at least pretend to be surprised when a Middle Eastern country (Israel) acts like its Middle Eastern peers (Morocco, the UAE).
- atmosx 5y ago:-)
- bjourne 5y agoBack in the 90's Sweden was one of the world's centers of cracking and piracy. I don't remember who it was but it was someone well respected and he said (I'm paraphrasing) "Swedish hackers are amazingly talented why are they wasting their time cracking games and piracy?" It pissed off a ot of Swedish hackers. Think something similar could be said here.
- phantom_oracle 5y agoThis must be a PR nightmare for Israel, which brings me to my related topic of Israel's other major weapon in its cyber arsenal. I think this falls under a type of disinformation. I don't know of any other state that has effectively weaponized any/all criticism against it as religious discrimination: antisemitism Here is a basic example: > (in no way am I promoting antisemitism or encouraging racial stigmas but this example is so common and the least harmless I can think of) "all Jews are greedy" - clearly antisemitic > Israel is guilty of murdering non-combatant children in Gaza - has nothing to do with Judaism. Involves the very sensitive problem of murdering innocent children. Is part of the complex Israel/Palestine political issue. Yet this could also end up being spun as an attack on Jews and being antisemitic. I think getting labelled an 'antisemite' in a country like the USA is career-suicide. It does play into the conspiracies about Israel's influence, but my theory goes that criticism of Israel in a country like the USA is just wrong-think/wrong-speak. Getting to this level of disinformation is incredible. Hopefully the dictators in the Middle-East(and customers of NSO) don't catch on and start weaponizing criticism of them as Islamophobic ...
- catlikesshrimp 5y agoAll you said is fine as long as you recognize antisemitism is a thing. It is just a branch of racism/xenophobia. Any group with a name can be marked as enemy and attacked if retaliation is not expected. Now, everything you said.
- xbar 5y agoAntisemitism is definitely a thing, a very bad thing with a very long history and lots of horrific things done to semitic peoples in many places over that long history. For sake of discussion, I will stipulate that it is a branch of racism/xenophobia. Lots of ethnic groups/races in lots of countries have been victims of racism and xenophobia by lots of other groups in their own countries and in other countries. Israel, as a country, has been very effective at weaponizing its "victim of racism/xenophobia." The ubitquity of the term "antisemitism" and the staunch defenders of the term are part of this weaponization. I have difficulty identifying other words that represent "a specific group that is a victim of racism/xenophobia" as well as antisemitism does.
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- orteam 5y agoWhat a badly written piece. It creates a narrative simply by juxtaposing unrelated and inaccurate facts in the same paragraph. For example, Covid tracking or apps utilize phones location services, same ones that pinpoint phone location for road navigation. These apps were tried in many countries and found mostly ineffective and intrusive. This has nothing to do with phone hacking, NSO etc. Talking about Covid and Pegasus in the same paragraph without additional context just doesn't make sense. Mentioning Bennett and NSO CEO together might try to create some link that just isn't there either. Contrary to the picture painted in the article, most Israeli cyber companies, including most unicorns in this space, are dealing with defensive cyber (intrusion detection/prevention, anti-malware etc). The IDF unit associated with cyber is 8200. Unit 81 mostly creates new hardware/electronics. The Israeli officer who committed suicide while incarcerated wasn't an Israeli Snowden. The unofficial version/rumor is that he intended to start an unsanctioned cyber attack that would have exposed some secret capabilities. And so on.