81–90 of 135 posts
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Attacking NSO would be like attacking the Israeli government and you don't do that because your PM's shitty OpSec was exposed.
Remember the Israelis also need allies.
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Remember the Israelis also need allies.
The Israeli's have two allies of note, the US and Saudi Arabia. Everyone else dislikes to hates them. The geopolitical clout of the US and Saudi Arabia are in decline.
I appreciate the faux outrage tho.
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I think it’s worse than just abdicating responsibility. As if they just didn’t know bad things cound happen. They’re selling this software to literal tyrants. They knew full well what this would be used for.
I don't think they're claiming they didn't know bad things could happen. Their "Transparency and Responsibility Report" is essentially a detailed accounting of how they weighed that risk when licensing their software. I think one can certainly take issue with their approach, but they don't appear to be naive about the risks.
> "The list is not a list of targets or potential targets of Pegasus.
> "The numbers in the list are not related to NSO group.
> "Any claim that a name in the list is necessarily related to a Pegasus target or Pegasus potential target is erroneous and false.
> "NSO is a technology company. We do not operate the system, nor do we have access to the data of our customers, yet they are obligated to provide us with such information under investigations."
My read of this is it's the kind of carefully worded intel-like response, basically saying the people targeted are not Pegasus(tm) targets because Pegasus is the name of the product and it 'technically' doesn't do the targeting on its own, the customers do the targeting - therefore not our fault and not related to us, we just sell software. (Even though the customers used NSO software to do the targeting, sold to them by NSO).
Pretty embarrassing response, honestly. If you specifically work in an area that can be used for sensitive purposes, you have a moral responsibility as to who you choose to sell to and what you choose to enable them to do. Moreover, if you're going to engage in moral indignation -- we can't possibly be responsible for what our customers do!!! -- then you can't end with a paragraph about how you're a league of superhe…
This is an excellent point. "We're responsible for the good applications, just not the bad ones"
Capitalism is often touted as an "engine of wealth generation", but what is in fact measured in financial reports and national GDP accounts is not wealth but profit, revenues less costs, where both seek the advantage of ecnomic externalities (positive externalities for profits, negative externalities for costs) to maximise those profits. The foundations of economics of the firm (microeconomics) are found in cost-accounting, and cost-accounting itself was limited to the expenses and revenues that could be measured (theree's a version of Goodhart's Law buried in here somewhere). Alexander Hamilton Church is the father of modern cost-accounting and gives some interesting insights. (Yes, related to the othere A.H.)
GDP is a measure of cash flows, rather than actual increase in national capital, wealth, or well-being. (With some adjustments.)
Economic definitions of wealth differ, though Adam Smith's was "the annual labour and produce of the nation". In general, it is the notion of productive capability (labour, motive, or change power, effectively available energy) plus stored capital to use that energy, plus resources to act on, and sinks to exhaust to. (Industrial knowledge is a form of copital.)
NSO Group's activities and rhetoric are par for the course.
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It’s an Israeli weapon, subject to arms control legislation. But that legislation can only be authored by Israel itself. So it doesn’t matter what other countries outlaw, Israel will continue to authorise NSO to sell the software to state actors around the world. Israel could always do with an extra friend or two and providing this software gains them a friend while costing them nothing.
Israel is not immune from international pressure though.
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Corporations do not have any moral at all. It is always virtue signaling when they pretend they do have.
While broadly I can agree with you, a corporation is still made up of people, and is lead by people. It’s perfectly possible for someone with a backbone to lead a corporation in a moral way.
Pretty embarrassing response, honestly. If you specifically work in an area that can be used for sensitive purposes, you have a moral responsibility as to who you choose to sell to and what you choose to enable them to do. Moreover, if you're going to engage in moral indignation -- we can't possibly be responsible for what our customers do!!! -- then you can't end with a paragraph about how you're a league of superhe…
> you're a league of superheroes saving the world from all its evils. Never mind that every authoritarian regime labels its opponents as "terrorists". Thanks, "War On Terror" for enabling this!
The truly good tend to doubt themselves to the extreme.
Regarding the "list": Amnesty said 34 iPhones were forensically checked. 23 successfully had malware (specifically NSO's Pegasus) installed on them. The other 11 saw attempts at malware infection. [0] That's a 100% hit rate on their sampling of the "list". That makes this statement demonstrably false: "The numbers in the list are not related to NSO group." At this point, why would you even care to read the rest of th…
(I'd like to see the infection rate for an alternate control-group listing of devices.)