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UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

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Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#271

Post by maccard »

rapind wrote: post #197
vlovich123 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source doesn’t actually matter here. A closed source electronic system should work just as well. Why? The way it should work is the machine should just print out a scantron AND a human legible copy (probably with a bar code linking the two). The person submits both by hand. You get early results by counting the scantron. Before certification, there is a statistically significant manual counting of the human legi…

Back in 2004, “Official federal voting system standards require audit logs to record all normal and abnormal events that occur on the system.” And yet at that time Diebold had a system that did NOT do that deployed all across the US. Someone was deleting votes, and it wasn’t being logged. Here’s lawmakers saying “should” do something, and an opaque reality where that didn’t happen. It was also running windows… This i…

> Open source would help.

How does open source help? If I place a device in front of you and tell you it's open source, there is no guarantee that it is running what you can download from github.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#272

Post by coldtea »

Veen wrote: post #241
coldtea wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy if you make it up. It's also easy to find "presence of anything" in some members of any large group, including satanism, doesn't mean it defines the group or is a big element of it.

And this attitude is why hundreds of thousands of liberal and left-wing Jews no longer support the Labour party.

Which attitude? Basic sense?

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#273

Post by freeflight »

raxxorraxor wrote: post #205
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.

Because western countries use the same services to spy on their citizens. Even if they feigned outrage, the potential blowback could topple some people. Besides, governments also tend not to want to be scrutinized on moral ground for trading war assets of any kind. Why should I be enraged if government officials were put under surveillance? They made abundantly clear that they are in favor of increased monitoring. Th…

Indeed, reminds me a lot about Oracle trying to sell predictive policing tech to China, tech that was already beta-tested on US protesters [0] or on the more grey scale end; Nokia facilitating lawful intercept in Russia [1]

[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/05/25/oracle-social-media-surv...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220328071032/https://www.nytim...

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#274

Post by ignoramous »

simonh wrote: post #263
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.

There's nothing to be gained by wringing our hands and kicking up a public fuss, crying to the press about it. That's not how grownups do business. We all know everyone spies on everyone else, it's a given. I'm sure GCHQ spies on Israel and UAE. For all we know the security services already knew about this and were feeding false info to manipulate the UAE. Heck, the Israelis might have even tipped us off, I'm sure th…

Not saying you are wrong, but the kind of leaps in assumptions you make remind me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#275

Post by freeflight »

mandevil wrote: post #134
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…

When 11 US diplomats in Uganda turned up with NSO Pegasus Malware on their phones, the US government responded by listing NSO as a covered Entity and forbidding any US company from buying or selling with it without express permission of the USG- Dell can't sell them monitors or laptops without the State Department publishing written, specific permission. Several US congresspersons advocated for even harsher response…

> Dell can't sell them monitors or laptops without the State Department publishing written, specific permission.

I wonder how this is enforced in practice? I have to assume Israel has retailer shops where anybody can just buy whatever, most likely even Dell laptops and monitors.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#276

Post by drexlspivey »

PeterisP wrote: post #143
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?

In general, no. Two aspects. The first is client vetting - such organizations (I have in mind a particular organization that's not NSO but also has products which rely on RCEs) simply don't sell at all to random companies - I'm not sure if they sell to companies at all as all the published cases have been from the government sector, but in any case they already know all the potential clients they might have, it's not…

re your second point: you don’t need access to the RCE itself, you could say I want to hack XXX phone number where XXX is a honeypot and try to reverse engineer it from there.

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#277

Post by _AdAstra_ »

simonh wrote: post #256
caoilte wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK bilateral trade with Russia was ~$17 billion in 2021 (i assume that's imports plus exports right?). Russia was a very close friend twenty years ago, Iraq was a very close ally in the 1980s. I'm sure Israel realises how quickly the west can turn on friends and allies when it suits us and that this is why they spend tens of millions a year wooing US and UK politicians. Russia became a pariah over night and the momen…

Russia's been a pain in the arse continuously. 20 years ago they were up to their eyeballs in the Iranian nuclear programme, carpet bombing Chechnya, blowing up their own apartment blocks and blaming it on terrorists, destabilising Georgia and goodness knows what else. That's all just from memory. But they have a lot of oil and gas so we let it all slide. More fool us.

You are aware that the Israely government does similar things, right?

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#278

Post by OtomotO »

mschuster91 wrote: post #186
nivenkos wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

I have a problem with Israel and its politics, not with Jews or any other religion.

Does that make me an antisemit? Because then the term has been redefined and I'll gladly wear it

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#279

Post by smcl »

pydry wrote: post #240
Veen wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's impossible to prove the absence of something True, but in this case it was quite easy to prove the presence of anti-semitism in the Labour party, especially in the far left membership.

You were 5x more likely to be purged from the Labour party as a Jew than as a non Jew: https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/labour-is-pu... This wasnt antiracists purging antisemites. It was racists purging antiracists.

This "5x more likely" sounds horrific ... until you look at how it was reached:

""" According to Labour statistics, by March 2021 there had been 1,450 "actioned complaints" against Labour party members in relation to allegations of antisemitism - equivalent to 0.29 percent of Labour’s membership, which averaged 500,000 between 2015 and 2020, when Corbyn was leader.

By contrast, says JVL, there were at least 35 actioned complaints against Jewish members. This is equivalent to 1.4 percent of Jewish members, who the group estimate to have numbered around 2,500 during the same period. """

Having 35 "actioned complaints" against Jewish members does not sound like a purge from the Labour Party, and portraying it as such is pretty misleading. I'm also wondering if there's some careful wording here, since they're comparing a total number of actioned complaints against Jewish members, vs number of actioned complaints specifically relating to allegations of antisemitism. Interesting that one of the two authors of the article is a Conservative (ie, the party Labour is in opposition to)

Re: UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus

#280

Post by lostmsu »

cloutchaser wrote: post #259
gghhzzgghhzz wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well that's exactly the trap isn't it? The others have clearly been contextualised and explained many many times, but that's never enough and there's always 'but what about this one..' Throw enough stuff at the wall and hope something will stick. And if I put up a list of the times where Corbyn has gone above and beyond to support Jewish communities in the UK, people will undoubtedly put the effort in to dismiss them…

No, you are doing exactly what you are claiming was done, explaining away one thing (which still btw doesn’t work, Blair and brown are both labour too), and saying the others don’t matter because you’ve proved one wrong. Yet somehow it’s always Corbyn labour that gets “misquoted”. Why is that? The Labour Party has plenty of motivation to smear the conservatives over antisemitism, yet somehow they don’t have the mater…

Did you just call "the left" "antisemitic" and then immediately complained about people who "blame identity groups for the world's problems" in two consecutive statements?
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