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Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

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Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#181

Post by vmception »

dragonwriter wrote: post #94
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So should we considered the NSA a terrorism-aiding organization This statement needs the "we" defined to be meaningful. If it is the U.S., then obviously no, the NSA is an arm of the state. If "we"` is e.g. China, probably no, because words have meanings and the arms of recognized foreign states don't conduct terrorism, they do espionage and they do war. If "we" is a freshman dorm room, then, of course, the NSA is…

> > So should we considered the NSA a terrorism-aiding organization > If it is the U.S., then obviously no, the NSA is an arm of the state. Its perhaps worth noting that “terrorism” originally exclusively denoted action by the State against its own subjects, though it was within a few years expanded to include other activities.

Okay that settles it, the word terrorism has so many conflicting and overlapping contexts that it is useless

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#182

Post by sofixa »

polar wrote: post #67
CTDOCodebases wrote: post #16

WTF? Wasn’t it the NSO that hacked Bezos’s and Khashoggi’s phone? I guess the customer is always right up until the point the widow of your murdered employee goes to the press.

> Bezos Bezos' phone probably wasn't hacked. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-05-05/how-jeff-...

Didn't Bloomberg ruin their tech reputation with the still-unproven (years later) and probably baseless claims of nano chips planted in the supply chain of Supermicro ?

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#183

Post by vmception »

r00fus wrote: post #133
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So should we considered the NSA a terrorism-aiding organization This statement needs the "we" defined to be meaningful. If it is the U.S., then obviously no, the NSA is an arm of the state. If "we"` is e.g. China, probably no, because words have meanings and the arms of recognized foreign states don't conduct terrorism, they do espionage and they do war. If "we" is a freshman dorm room, then, of course, the NSA is…

> If it is the U.S., then obviously no, the NSA is an arm of the state. Some here in the states don't exactly feel like the people running the USG have the people's best interests at heart. Common folk across countries probably have more in common with each other than with the ruling elite. State-sponsored terrorism is a thing - and has been for a LONG time. And US citizens are targets as well as non-citizens.

It requires indoctrination to believe the US as an aggregate sovereign brand functions with the interest of US people in mind.

Nothing about US foreign policy suggests that. Very little about the Federal government’s domestic policy does.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#184

Post by sorokod »

vmception wrote: post #180
sorokod wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an radio interview with NSO spokesman ( an ex spokesman for the IDF ), all sales require the Israeli MoD approval.

Is that more of a notification form or an actual collaborator process with a tribunal?

In the same interview the spokesman said that some companies choose to avoid it by operating from offices outside of Israel (Bulgaria and Cyprus were mentioned). This seems to imply that the process is burdensome.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#185

Post by TechBro8615 »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #157
TechBro8615 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be so quick to rush into a future where Amazon takedowns are as easy as YouTube DMCA requests.

One would hope Amazon is capable of having a reasonable terms of service and enforcing it without the need for government intervention.

Sure, but the OP was an anecdote about an individual that requested Amazon to cease rendering services to a third party. No government was involved.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#187

Post by giantg2 »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #123
sloshnmosh wrote: post #20

I contacted Amazon to report an advertiser out of Tel Aviv that was using JavaScript hosted on CloudFront to fingerprint user's devices and if an Android device was detected a fake media player or fake CAPTCHA would trick user's into accepting push notifications for fake virus warnings to install questionable apps from the Play Store. This script also pushed ads for a fake AdBlock app that was a dropper for banking t…

I wouldn’t be so quick to rush into a future where Amazon takedowns are as easy as YouTube DMCA requests.

It doesn't really matter how difficult it is. What this demonstrates is that AWS is not a public utility and will be swayed by mob rule to take down companies that are no longer "acceptable".

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#188

Post by kdkdkdkdk »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #154
bakuninsbart wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Israeli government classified Pegasus, the software by NSO currently in the news, as a weapon, thus restricting its exports. If you look at the list of customers, it quickly becomes clear that they are the same organizations that make the laws.

"same organizations that make the laws" More importantly, they are the ones that decide what laws are enforced. What is sad is that in America, the law around surveillance and security is largely a nice marketing campaign. Sure, you have rights that protect you from the government. But practically speaking the government won't enforce them, doesn't stop its employees from abusing them even for personal drama, undermi…

[flagged]

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#189

Post by xoa »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #168
xoa wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, and it "seems like" the extremist propaganda that Big Tech shut down was violating all sorts of other laws like incitement. Most of it actually wasn't FWIW, hateful extremist content is generally perfectly legal free speech. "Incitement" gets used way, way too often on the internet, almost nothing that gets posted online is legal incitement. But neither "Big Tech" (such a dumb term) nor Hacker News nor a rand…

> " Private society looking at extremist content and saying "we're not going to shoot you over it but we do strongly object and we're going to socially ostracize you and deny you business and our support in any way we can" is free speech working as intended. " Given that such logic was once used to attempt to deny service to and harass PoCs, religious, LGBTQ and other formerly "undesirable" classes, society clearly d…

>Given that such logic was once used to attempt to deny service to and harass PoCs, religious, LGBTQ and other formerly "undesirable" classes, society clearly doesn't buy that logic and made them into protected classes and required businesses to serve them on an equal footing.

No, that was not the logic, businesses were not discriminating based purely on speech and choices of content. That's the point. I mentioned Protected Classes, but those are about entire classes of people and things that are innate to their personhood. Skin color and sex/gender being obvious ones, but disabilities either at birth or acquired later in life still are innate aspects. We've decided that public businesses as part of the privileges they have may not discriminate and rightly so.

But none of that has anything to do with actions and expression, and indeed a core part of the point is that all protected classes are in no way "inferior" or less capable of reason, argumentation, responsibility, social activities and so on! No one is born with some political alignment, as humans we all have to develop that ourselves.

>* It's not a valid argument unless you're arguing to roll back protected classes too*

No, because the worldview you've come to about given issues, morals and so on have nothing to do with protected classes.

Re: Amazon Shuts Down NSO Group Infrastructure

#190

Post by xoa »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #166
xoa wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporations aren't humans; they don't have free speech rights. As a matter of law in the United States you are objectively wrong. This has been settled in a series of SCOTUS decisions starting with Buckley v. Valeo (1976). Corporations are legal persons, and further the individual humans that make them up do not somehow lose the free speech rights just because they decide to take collective action. And in turn: as…

> " As a matter of law in the United States you are objectively wrong. " You are quite correct, of course. I meant to write "shouldn't" instead of "don't". > " So what, you think individuals should be able to investigate something all by themselves, but the government should be free to put the boot down on newspapers because they're corporations? " I'll point out that there's an entirely separate and intentional carv…

:\

>I'll point out that there's an entirely separate and intentional carve-out for freedom of the press that is distinct from freedom of speech

Not really as a matter of law we're talking about here. "The press" isn't some special legal entity, there's no licensing for it or anything. Absolutely critical press victories like NYT v. Sullivan were based on freedom of speech protections.

But whatever, so you don't want Mozilla Corporation to be able to advocate for Firefox if the government doesn't want it to because Google managed to lobby successfully? No company can come out in favor gay rights or Pride Day if the government doesn't want them to? You're fine with with the government being able to punish companies for arguing against encryption backdoors? And what about the individuals at those companies, if the CEO speaks about those things is that the company speaking and punishable or is it ok if he says "this is my opinion" first every time? What about employees?

Like, we can go through a million examples here if you want but I don't think it's that hard to see how maybe government might abuse that just a little bit.

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