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U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#231

Post by cwkoss »

markus_zhang wrote: post #206
dqpb wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3) have almost zero regulation; What would shadow government regulation look like?

It's difficult, you have to break down those brotherhoods who will fight to death to be "independent". And then you have to find a way to prevent them from spawning again. I don't have any idea how to do it properly.

I'd expect if we lived in the sort of society that would execute the head of the NSA for treason or something similar when the Snowden revelations came out, it would have societally beneficial chilling effect on intelligence organization brazenness.

Unfortunately, it seems intelligence is mostly immune from liability, and lack of consequences lets the rot fester.

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#232

Post by theknocker »

l33tbro wrote: post #165
JohnWhigham wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just another incident in a long list that goes back decades of Israel getting carte blanche to do whatever they want to the US with little to no repercussion. The most famous probably being USS Liberty ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident )

Why would Israel be allowed to do whatever they want?

Exactly, genius.

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#233

Post by JumpCrisscross »

montblanc wrote: post #223
KMag wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This wasn't done by NSO knowingly. In the past month or so, there was a front page story on HN about NSO and a journalist, detailing evidence that NSO-controlled servers served up the exploit to the journalist's phone. This suggests that the NSO group has less of an arms-length relationship with their clients than they let on. It seems that at least for some clients, they're running some variant on exploits-as-a-se…

That still doesn't mean they knew about this. How would they even know it were American phones? Its very possible it were some IPhone with a Ugandan sim card. How do you know who's using it - do the Ugandans tell you? It's a very real possibility NSO servers simply show some Ugandan number. I have no more knowledge on this than anyone here but I don't find it realistic NSO would take this chance.

> doesn't mean they knew about this

Mitigating but not exonerating. (Also, unknown and possibly unknowable.) NSO are still selling cyberweapons hitting the United States. If they didn't give a shit about keeping an eye on their kit, that's a negligent gap in oversight by Jerusalem.

It's a good thing we have a talking-not-shooting relationship with Israel. The U.S. would be within its rights to launch a proportional counterattack were that not the case. If Israel doesn't deal with this properly, there's a decent chance we'll see calls for criminal penalties and targeted sanctions.

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#235

Post by chucksmash »

montblanc wrote: post #211
snowwrestler wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

U.S. weapons manufacturers receive a lot of criticism too, both domestically in the U.S. and internationally. The comments here focus on NSO because the story is about what NSO did. This is computer tech kind of community so you’re going to see more computer weapon stories here than stories about improper use of rifles.

The U.S sells super sophisticated weapons such as attack drones, F-15s or nuclear submarines. The tech behind these things is probably super interesting and there's a lot of software involved. If you look at the comments here, around 90% of them don't care about the tech at all but focus on bashing Israel. This isn't a tech story.

It would certainly be a news story if someone used a U.S. built submarine to attack the U.S. State Department.

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#236

Post by markus_zhang »

cwkoss wrote: post #231
markus_zhang wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's difficult, you have to break down those brotherhoods who will fight to death to be "independent". And then you have to find a way to prevent them from spawning again. I don't have any idea how to do it properly.

I'd expect if we lived in the sort of society that would execute the head of the NSA for treason or something similar when the Snowden revelations came out, it would have societally beneficial chilling effect on intelligence organization brazenness. Unfortunately, it seems intelligence is mostly immune from liability, and lack of consequences lets the rot fester.

Once the system is setup who is in control is going to be irrelevant. I believe the best approach is to educate the citizens so that 1) They follow scientific methods; 2) They are more resistant to advertisement/propaganda; 3) They are keen to corruption and willing to protest.

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#237

Post by smoldesu »

triactual wrote: post #229
smoldesu wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't justify it, but if we're going to take a stance against spyware, we have to take a stance against all spyware. That includes the home-rolled stuff that the NSA pushes out to Apple and Google.

No, we don’t.

What makes that kind of hypocrisy okay?

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#238

Post by BrianOnHN »

seoaeu wrote: post #199
fabianhjr wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And simultaneusly: - not have any indication their tools were used - canceled the relevant accounts Which "relevant" accounts if NSO's tools weren't used?

Presumably the full accusation is "Entity ABC used NSO tools for XYZ ". So the reaction was to cancel ABC's account while NSO investigates whether ABC actually did use the tools for XYZ, or whether ABC was only using them for other (approved) purposes.

Regardless, NSO rules over international law.

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#239

Post by Eelongate »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #207
markus_zhang wrote: post #150

This is a typical "shadow government" symptom. You have forces working within the government that 1) have their own agendas; 2) have connection to international communities, usually military-intelligence ones; 3) have almost zero regulation; 4) even many high ranking government officials don't know about them because they are brotherhood-like closed circles. This reminds me of Operation Gladio or Propaganda Due but d…

Implying that Israeli spying on the US is some fringe "shadow government" sub-group of the Israeli government is strange given a long, long history of high profile Israeli spying incidents against the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Franklin_espionage_sc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ami_Kadish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer…

> Then there's the time they stole nuclear material from us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apollo_Affair

On a related note, JFK was trying to shut down Israel's nuclear weapons program in the months before his murder.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/kennedy-letter-to-ben-g...

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#240

Post by [deleted] »

shmatt wrote: post #173
q1w2 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from that obvious contradiction - this also indicates that the tools they deploy are either NSO hosted or use a licensing system to run. There was a recent Darknet Diaries episode that reported evidence that at least some of the NSO tools are hosted services.

I can't imagine something like this not being in the cloud. The potential for a customer to give their local NSA/8200 the tool to figure out the 0days used is too large Pegasus is only as good as its 0days are secret

[deleted]
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