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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

#481

Post by seoaeu »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #280
KennyBlanken wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Anyone who doesn't think the USA and Israel don't spy on each other 24/7 is living in a dream world. Israel is an ally but I don't think that they are our friends.

Spying between friendly countries happens all the time. It make diplomacy happen much smoother!

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

#482

Post by sennight »

tablespoon wrote: post #347
colordrops wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They officially decided it was a mistake, as it did neither government any good to officially announce that it was intentional. But the sailors that were on the ship say otherwise.

> They officially decided it was a mistake, as it did neither government any good to officially announce that it was intentional. But the sailors that were on the ship say otherwise. How would the sailors on the ship being attacked be able to know anything like that (e.g. know if the Israeli pilots thought they were attacking an Egyptian ship or an American one)?

> e.g. know if the Israeli pilots thought they were attacking an Egyptian ship or an American one

The sailors would know because they have access to the same information that you do, but a greater incentive to actually do the reading. The Israeli pilots knew it as a US ship, their radio traffic questioning their attack orders - after visually identifying the USS Liberty as a US ship, was recorded and the transcripts widely known about. This happened several times, so unless the Israeli command center had the memory of a goldfish - they intentionally kept sending attack aircraft until they eventually got a pilot to pull the trigger. Why would they do such a thing? Because the US wasn't onboard with the Israeli preemptive strike and they didn't want a signals intelligence boat tipping off the Egyptians. Israel doesn't appear to reciprocate the fond feelings expressed by American politicians - the mere idea of the "Samson Option" is proof enough of that.

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

#483

Post by spiderice »

mike_d wrote: post #471
Cyph0n wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty clear by now that they have 100% visibility into the entire exploitation chain for all of their customers. Their "official statements" mean nothing.

Well since they do the exploitation on behalf of customers, yes? NSO is very popular with governments that don't have robust domestic intelligence because all you have to do is type a phone number into a web form and in anywhere from an hour to a week you get a point and click GUI for accessing the contents of the phone.

> all you have to do is type a phone number into a web form and in anywhere from an hour to a week you get a point and click GUI for accessing the contents of the phone.

You have a source for this? I genuinely want to know if they make it that simple

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

#484

Post by jonnybgood »

jacquesm wrote: post #480
hugh-avherald wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to clarify, you're asking for evidence of secret foreign intelligence operations? Establishing mere capability is pretty trivial: they have diplomats in the United States who can talk to people.

We have plenty of proof of the US spying on allies in spite of those being secret foreign intelligence operations, there is afaik none whatsoever of say the Germans, the Belgians or the French doing something similar to the US.

Spying is intelligence collection. There many ways to collect intelligence. Some completely innocuous like going to a defense trade show and taking pictures. Or using satellites to capture imagery of sensitive locations or developments [1]. Military attaches at embassies who observe their host country’s military developments and operations [2]. These are capabilities that every developed nation has access to. For them not to use it puts them at a disadvantage.

You don’t think the French would love to have known about AUKUS submarine deal before it was made? It’s detrimental to not attempt to spy. The French were blindsided and I’m sure they don’t want to be blindsided again.

[1] https://www.space.com/arianespace-soyuz-rocket-launches-cso-...

[2] https://franceintheus.org/spip.php?article10460

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

#485

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#486

Post by Sebguer »

bjourne wrote: post #411
Sebguer wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, you were actually being serious? How about this one: https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-document... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spying_on_United_Nations_leade...

Please state which of these examples involve spyware or cut the snark.

Do you think they asked UN dignitaries nicely for their passwords?

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

#487

Post by seoaeu »

Thorncorona wrote: post #252
smoldesu wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes that kind of hypocrisy okay?

It seems if Israel is receiving money from the US government and Israel controls the usage of NSO group weapons that are being targeted at the American government then there are problems yea?

Presumably no bigger problems than arose when the US wiretapped the Israeli prime minister’s phone…

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

#488

Post by webmaven »

cronix wrote: post #112

As an American, it's becoming harder for me to muster sympathy for an entity that actively discovers and exploits technological flaws to use against their adversaries while simultaneously purposefully not alerting the manufacturers in order to correct the flaws so they can continue to exploit them and then those flaws are subsequently discovered by others and used against them. Poor you.

> As an American, it's becoming harder for me to muster sympathy for an entity that actively discovers and exploits technological flaws to use against their adversaries while simultaneously purposefully not alerting the manufacturers in order to correct the flaws so they can continue to exploit them and then those flaws are subsequently discovered by others and used against them.

It is worth distinguishing between the State Department and the NSA. The US government is hardly monolithic, even if we restrict our discussion to just the executive branch:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/10/05...

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

#489

Post by Cyph0n »

mike_d wrote: post #471
Cyph0n wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty clear by now that they have 100% visibility into the entire exploitation chain for all of their customers. Their "official statements" mean nothing.

Well since they do the exploitation on behalf of customers, yes? NSO is very popular with governments that don't have robust domestic intelligence because all you have to do is type a phone number into a web form and in anywhere from an hour to a week you get a point and click GUI for accessing the contents of the phone.

I understand that, but they have repeatedly denied that this is the case, which is simply absurd.

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

#490

Post by faeyanpiraat »

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

Couldn’t you hack your own phone and somehow log traffic to get the exploit used?
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