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UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

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Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#91

Post by dataflow »

haltingproblem wrote: post #83
gerdesj wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Britain is not a democracy in any modern sense of the word." Demos kratos - things/doings of the people (or similar) - Old Greek. Nowadays it describes a generally agreed form of government and approach to governing. After that it gets pretty complicated - your democracy may not match mine ... I'm going to be voting for councillors soon in Somerset, along with everyone else here who can be bothered to turn out. We a…

Yours is the most honest answer, but yes, lets agree that Democracy means one person/one vote and everyone's vote is equal. The Brits have a pretty good form of government for its citizen but a one-person/one-vote-and-equal vote it is not. Similarly a country where the Majority's choice does not become President (like the US) does not qualify no matter how loudly they proclaim themselves to be the world's oldest demo…

As much as I might want to believe in "one person, one vote" defining a democracy, I don't think it does. It's certainly not in the dictionaries I look it up in (e.g., [1]), and it's not like we don't carve out exclusions even in the most democratic societies (e.g., a 15-year-old would have a hard time finding a place where they could vote). Heck, my understanding is you don't even need to have elections for a democracy, let alone letting every person vote - check out the system in [2]. I don't really like that lottery system, but it sure seems pretty democratic to me.

This isn't to say the US or UK or whatnot is a perfect democracy by any stretch, but that's how I'd describe them: flawed democracies. They're still close enough to democracies to be called democracies, but they're flawed/defective/etc., so that's what I'd call them. (Unless you're going for a no-true-Scotsman thing.)

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy

[2] https://democracywithoutelections.org/

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#92

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

jonpalmisc wrote: post #56
drexlspivey wrote: post #51

Can’t phone vendors have people pose as a client to NSO to get access to the latest RCE and patch it?

There are others who would know more about this than I do, but a few reasons come to mind: 1. NSO almost certainly has more than one exploit chain at a time. While this would burn one of their exploits, it wouldn’t put them out of business or eliminate the ability for them to get RCE on phones in general. 2. Vendors already have bug bounty programs with established award ceilings. These exploits are almost always far…

Vendors may be more incentivised to intentionally kill the Pegasus business model, which would have immeasurable PR value if executed well.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#93

Post by coliveira »

qiskit wrote: post #57
Someone1234 wrote: post #2

I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too, since the Israeli intelligence company was supposedly "closely monitoring how their customers were using the software" or akin to that. Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better.

> I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too Are you really surprised? I'd be surprised if the UK and its media made a fuss about it. Certainly we won't be making a fuss about it here in the US that's for sure. I'd imagine russia and china wishes they had 1/10th the influence that israel has in the US/UK. Say what you want about israel, but for such a tiny country, it punches f…

I don't know about Russia, but China doesn't let people from other nationalities to occupy positions of power especially in foreign policy, in which they're completely right. This is the main weakness of the USA and UK. They will let foreign born people to raise to power and dictate self servicing policies, many times in detriment to their own population. For example, take Henry Kissinger: a german born person, he spent his whole life influencing American policy to accommodate his views concerning Europe and the rest of the world. It is not a surprise that the Western world is in this situation.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#94

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

usrn wrote: post #15
tomatowurst wrote: post #13

The question is then what phone exists that is immune from this? A flip phone? A Nokia 1011? I might be completely misinformed but seems like SIM card and the underlying OS is vector. What happens if I use a cell phone from late 90s and early 2000s? What is there to hack with those flip phones? JavaME over the wire? What if the cell phone dates even further? Legitimately curious what options is there. Could If you ar…

I would be shocked if people couldn't find an RCE in an early 2000s flip phone. I had a friend who had hers since 2010 and MMS crashed it all the time.

Attack surface reduction is the important part. I’m not in disagreement with what you said, but if you took a modern iPhone and removed all capabilities other than sending and receiving phone calls, it would be much more secure than one which supports mms, email, browsing, etc.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#95

Post by LegitShady »

drexlspivey wrote: post #51

Can’t phone vendors have people pose as a client to NSO to get access to the latest RCE and patch it?

Do you think the phone vendors have better intelligence apparatus' than NSO, or that NSO doesn't vet the background of who they sell to, given it requires cabinet approval?

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#96

Post by outoftheabyss »

l33tbro wrote: post #37
eganist wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the fact that it's not playing out as a major dust-up in public will probably only further contribute to conspiratorial thinking in re: the Israeli gov't.

Israel seems to have a relative degree of immunity when it comes to subverting UK pol. Anyone ever see the investigative journalist piece of the Zionist group trying to subvert the UK Labour Party? They had a journalist go undercover for 6 months recording all kinds of things they weren't meant to: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ceCOhdgRBoc There was only minor fallout from this incident, and I imagine it will be the sa…

I watched the first 15 minutes of this and what shocked me is how unrevealing it was. If someone recorded me over the course of weeks or months, I would almost certainly say something that would land me in hot water in some sense. This piece of 'investigative journalism' I actually found embarrassing, all this editing to big it up as some major conspiracy when to me, in that 15 mins at least, was at worst run of the mill lobbying. Considering how unsavoury a character Corbyn was, I actually found the subjects incredibly restrained, perhaps part of the JD however.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#97

Post by haltingproblem »

dataflow wrote: post #91
haltingproblem wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours is the most honest answer, but yes, lets agree that Democracy means one person/one vote and everyone's vote is equal. The Brits have a pretty good form of government for its citizen but a one-person/one-vote-and-equal vote it is not. Similarly a country where the Majority's choice does not become President (like the US) does not qualify no matter how loudly they proclaim themselves to be the world's oldest demo…

As much as I might want to believe in "one person, one vote" defining a democracy, I don't think it does. It's certainly not in the dictionaries I look it up in (e.g., [1]), and it's not like we don't carve out exclusions even in the most democratic societies (e.g., a 15-year-old would have a hard time finding a place where they could vote). Heck, my understanding is you don't even need to have elections for a democr…

It does though - "rule of the majority" in the Webster definition implies one person, one vote. If you work out the mathematics starting from n=2, and then by induction it holds. If not one-person/one-vote then for every n, there exists a set of weights, for which one person can usurp the popular vote. In the US, due to the electoral college, some state resident's vote counts for more than others which is why the loser of the popular vote can be the President. Company boards are famously not one-share-one-vote as the latest Muskian opera shows.

The legal age cutoff is a red-herring - every self-proclaimed democracy has a legal voting age i.e. definition of what constitutes the one-person. As long as it is applied uniformly across genders, races and the rest then it is does not take away from the one-person/one-vote criteria. I would argue that if they can enlist you to fight (and die) for them, then you should be able to vote. However different societies might have different criteria for what constitutes the person in one-person-one-vote.

BTW, thank you for your comment, after all the sneering and name-calling it is nice to engage is reasoned discourse.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#98

Post by jen20 »

coliveira wrote: post #93
qiskit wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too Are you really surprised? I'd be surprised if the UK and its media made a fuss about it. Certainly we won't be making a fuss about it here in the US that's for sure. I'd imagine russia and china wishes they had 1/10th the influence that israel has in the US/UK. Say what you want about israel, but for such a tiny country, it punches f…

I don't know about Russia, but China doesn't let people from other nationalities to occupy positions of power especially in foreign policy, in which they're completely right. This is the main weakness of the USA and UK. They will let foreign born people to raise to power and dictate self servicing policies, many times in detriment to their own population. For example, take Henry Kissinger: a german born person, he sp…

Which UK politician are you referring to? The only one I’m aware of in high office currently who was born abroad is Boris Johnson, who was born in New York - a fact so far down the list of reasons for his unfitness for office that it does not really register.

The idea that this is the “main” problem in the UK is frankly laughable.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#99

Post by alasdair_ »

jimbob45 wrote: post #48
Someone1234 wrote: post #2

I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too, since the Israeli intelligence company was supposedly "closely monitoring how their customers were using the software" or akin to that. Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better.

>since the Israeli intelligence company was supposedly "closely monitoring how their customers were using the software" If the Israelis were going to veto a country's use of the software, it's reasonable to assume that the country was intelligent enough not to tell them what they were doing with it.

The important thing to realize is that NSO doesn’t just hand over their attack tools completely. If they did, they would just get copied and they wouldn’t be able to charge for them.

NSO maintains control and is semi-actively involved in the exploitation (NSO servers are used and they control this access). This is very different from selling someone a knife that is later used in a murder.

There is a very good Darknet Diaries breakdown of what the NSO group can and cannot do - https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/ - and despite their claims otherwise, the evidence strongly points to them being complicit in attacks rather than just being a vendor.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#100

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

yaa_minu wrote: post #23

This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure electronic voting system that can beat the security and auditability properties of old school pen and paper voting.

I’ve always wondered they we’ll get the cyberpunk future we envisioned when people decide physical media is the sweet spot between paper/written representation and digital media. Like old cdrom style discs that can only possibly be write-once, and the provenance of the data on it depends on the physical presence of the media itself.

Not that I’m necessarily advocating for it. Just they seems like a plausible future.

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