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Espionage Against the European Parliament

citizenlab.ca

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Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#31

Post by DocTomoe »

dizlexic wrote: post #26
jongjong wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like they've been paid to sell out the users themselves, not just the data. It's weird that EU is so dependant on US tech when it comes to media platforms... While there are alternatives out there. In a lot of related areas in tech, it feels like suppression.

This might be taken as hyperbolic, but the EU seems to have trouble building anything.

Network effects are real. It is hard to convince people to move over to your platform if the selling argument is 'not quite there yet, but we got you covered on the minilib front, plus it's less usable because of our weird interpretation of our own data protection laws'.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#32

Post by jongjong »

dizlexic wrote: post #26
jongjong wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like they've been paid to sell out the users themselves, not just the data. It's weird that EU is so dependant on US tech when it comes to media platforms... While there are alternatives out there. In a lot of related areas in tech, it feels like suppression.

This might be taken as hyperbolic, but the EU seems to have trouble building anything.

This is where I disagree as a software engineer who has seen EU products built and not adopted... I've also built products myself which were fully functioning and scalable but not widely adopted. Building is not the bottleneck.

It feels like there is a limit on distribution. Just getting people to try a product is incredibly hard. Very hard to reach them and ads feel like they're only served to bots.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#33

Post by throw0101d »

bawolff wrote: post #27
dewey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a policy and what happens in the real world are most of the time very different things (Understandably, as the line between work and personal time is often blurry).

True but one would hope though that people dealing with national security would follow more than your average employee.

> True but one would hope though that people dealing with national security would follow more than your average employee.

The more important you are the more you may think that exceptions can be made for you.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#34

Post by leonidasrup »

jongjong wrote: post #19
shevy-java wrote: post #3

Not quite surprising. The more important question is: how much are lobbyists paid to sell out data of EU citizens to US corporations here? Will they prevail? There is enough money to go around for certain.

It feels like they've been paid to sell out the users themselves, not just the data. It's weird that EU is so dependant on US tech when it comes to media platforms... While there are alternatives out there. In a lot of related areas in tech, it feels like suppression.

"PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies.

The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012 "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#35

Post by aetch »

leonidasrup wrote: post #29
hammock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US does not spy on Five Eyes government leadership or that of Israel. And perhaps more: in the wake of Snowden, which obliterated many diplomatic relationships the U.S. has with other countries, Obama issued a directive that the U.S. would not monitor heads of state and government of close friends and allies (even outside Five Eyes) unless there was a compelling national security reason. As far as we know that di…

US does spy on Five Eyes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_espionage_in_Aus... "In December 2010, leaked US diplomatic cables indicated senior New Zealand Defence Ministry officials had been spying for the United States, secretly briefing the United States embassy on Cabinet discussions about the Iraq War." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_espionage_in_New_Zeala...

That’s pre-Snowden

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#36

Post by matheusmoreira »

hammock wrote: post #18
EA-3167 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be the case, although he claims to have somehow missed them. Overall this is one of those stories that's obviously an outrage, except for the fact that every country on Earth spies on the rest, and quite a few private entities do as well. Still the way the game is played if you get caught you have to act ashamed, and the people catching you get to gloat. It's silly, but it's a show the public never tire…

The US does not spy on Five Eyes government leadership or that of Israel. And perhaps more: in the wake of Snowden, which obliterated many diplomatic relationships the U.S. has with other countries, Obama issued a directive that the U.S. would not monitor heads of state and government of close friends and allies (even outside Five Eyes) unless there was a compelling national security reason. As far as we know that di…

> The US does not spy on Five Eyes government leadership or that of Israel.

Doubt.

> unless there was a compelling national security reason

There always is.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#37

Post by jongjong »

DocTomoe wrote: post #31
dizlexic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be taken as hyperbolic, but the EU seems to have trouble building anything.

Network effects are real. It is hard to convince people to move over to your platform if the selling argument is 'not quite there yet, but we got you covered on the minilib front, plus it's less usable because of our weird interpretation of our own data protection laws'.

Yes and my perspective is that GDPR has harmed EU startups and helped US companies by virtue of them being incumbents and having the resources to dedicate to compliance. Probably can't be fixed as easily now because of corporate culture around standards like SOC2 and ISO27001... Which I think are more harmful to security than helpful as they create complacency and hinder progress by creating barriers.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#38

Post by thin_carapace »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #15
shevy-java wrote: post #3

Not quite surprising. The more important question is: how much are lobbyists paid to sell out data of EU citizens to US corporations here? Will they prevail? There is enough money to go around for certain.

Pro tip: if you’re going to try a propoganda - don’t be so transparent on your redirect.

if you believe that the parent comment is propaganda, would you care to share why exactly you believe that the average european citizen benefits from mass surveillance funnelled through american channels?

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#39

Post by stavros »

benjiro29 wrote: post #30
stavros wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kouloglou is a famous investigative journalist, not you and me. Yes you and I might think we're being scammed, but someone who actually spent a lot of their life getting death threats probably would pay more attention.

Fairly sure that if anybody using a advanced piece of hacking software, they are also going to delete any messages that are related to detection of such hardware. PC viruses used to do that stuff going back so many years ago. Suppressing any notification under Windows, by disabling the AV software, its notifications, windows notifications related to it. So it will amaze me that this is not done by any modern espionag…

Maybe the software can only exfiltrate information, rather than change it.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#40

Post by matheusmoreira »

petcat wrote: post #4

> In May 2026, Kouloglou contacted the Citizen Lab and we conducted a forensic analysis of artifacts from his iPhone. We found with high confidence that his device was successfully infected with Pegasus spyware on or around October 21, 2022, and again on March 6 and 7, 2023.

I wonder if we can forensically analyze our own phones to see if some nutjob with Pegasus has targeted us as well.
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