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UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

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Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#181

Post by 0xedd »

ehsankia wrote: post #77
sgjohnson wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. There will always be cyberweapon brokers. If not NSO, then someone else. And money talks. Why would there be any oversight? What you need is plausible deniability. I’d prefer if they started selling Pegasus to absolutely anyone at all. Like, online, for $999 a month or something. Maybe then there will be actual ef…

> If not NSO, then someone else. There's a big difference between an underground group doing it in semi-secrecy, vs a state-sponsored company doing it publicly. With said company somehow not being sued into the ground or said country's action not being taken as an act of war in situations like this. > I’d prefer if they started selling Pegasus to absolutely anyone at all The high value of what they offer comes from t…

NSO isn't the equivalent of NSA. While NSA is part of the US government and actively spied on allied countries with no repercussions, NSO is a privately held company employing ex intelligence. With mandatory service at 18 and the private sector paying between 8 to 10 times more, it's common to find these intelligence boys leaving the service asap and working in different private companies.

Implying Israel has anything to do with NSO or that the government is behind it, coupled with the amount of attention this gets relative to a company like Italian based Hacking Team (which both the FBI and Russian government made business with) is cause for concern. Is this hacker news or culturally biased vent club?

I think the domain cyclonefront is nice for a new forum, don't you? You can be an admin there, grow a short mustache and do quarter jumping-jacks.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#182

Post by ycuser2 »

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…

Tin foil chat!

https://github.com/maqp/tfc

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#183

Post by CamelRocketFish »

csmpltn wrote: post #175
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.

> "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." The UK itself is one of the largest weapon exporters in the world, exporting to many countries in the Middle East with dubious human rights track records. The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol…

The difference is NSO control the Pegasus servers. They know who is using their tools and who is being targeted. This isn’t the same as untraced weapons.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#184

Post by petesergeant »

petre wrote: post #148
coliveira wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The UK is quite xenophobic as it is. No need for extra laws to prohibit foreigners to ascend to positions of power. Your peers will take care of that. I'm quite surprised that an UK born citizen of Pakistani heritage is currently the mayor of London. Maybe Labour is less xenophobic that the others.

> I'm quite surprised that an UK born citizen of Pakistani heritage is currently the mayor of London

The only surprise here is that he's Labour, not Tory.

Half of the current Great Offices of State are held by brown people under the Tories, who also had the first Jewish PM, the first (and second, and only) female PMs, and then there's Saj who's been Chancellor and Home Secretary, and I reckon is about as likely as Sunak to be the next PM. They appointed the first female, gay head of the Met Police, and the leader of the party in Scotland was also a gay woman for 8 very recent years.

Some of these people are clearly the worst of British politics (hello Priti Patel!), but the Tories have an excellent record of putting people who aren't straight, white, Christian men into positions of power.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#185

Post by IshKebab »

arlort wrote: post #160
beprogrammed wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly

That's only viable in countries/situations where secret ballots are not a strict requirement and vote buying is not perceived to be a problem With paper ballots if you want to be sure that your vote was counted correctly you generally can go and see the counting process, as a bonus like that you help ensure that every vote is counted correctly

No, you could do it in a way where the voter can verify their vote was recorded correctly but can't prove it to anyone else. Trivial method: require the voter to assign random numbers to each candidate. They remember the number of the candidate they chose. The voting system later says "you voted for 6".

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#186

Post by mschuster91 »

nivenkos wrote: post #173
Jenk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current home secretary, Priti Patel, was forced to resign from her previous (lesser) role as Minister for International Development for secretly (and thus illegally) meeting with Israeli diplomats. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41923007 It is completely unsurprising that there is little care shown by our government.

Israel was also behind many of the efforts to smear the former opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn - https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/news/israeli-diplomat-sough... The current government is a huge ally of Israel.

No post body was provided.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#187

Post by skobovm »

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.

There’s actually a pretty interesting approach in which: voters can see that their vote counted, everyone can tally anonymous votes, and it is resistant to DoS https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf

Of course, the real problem would be explaining to the general population that this works. Great in theory, but will never pan out

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#189

Post by IshKebab »

rapind wrote: post #132
Spellman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.

I think the problem is who builds it. I wouldn’t trust election software that wasn’t open source with a lot of eyeballs on it. Diebold wasn’t exactly a shining example to set. Preferably a non profit organization backing it and then having it adopted as a standard. I just don’t see that happening in the US where voter obstruction is part of at least one party’s strategy.

The only output of the machine could be a bit of paper that you can view through a window and verify. Doesn't really matter if it's closed source.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#190

Post by rapind »

IshKebab wrote: post #189
rapind wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is who builds it. I wouldn’t trust election software that wasn’t open source with a lot of eyeballs on it. Diebold wasn’t exactly a shining example to set. Preferably a non profit organization backing it and then having it adopted as a standard. I just don’t see that happening in the US where voter obstruction is part of at least one party’s strategy.

The only output of the machine could be a bit of paper that you can view through a window and verify. Doesn't really matter if it's closed source.

So we don’t have to trust that the company wrote it correctly. https://www.wired.com/2009/08/diebold-audit-logs
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