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Wow! You found one instance of the US spying on a friendly government. That totally justifies NSO leasing spyware to authoritarian third world regimes! Carry on folks, nothing to see here.
Wait, you were actually being serious? How about this one: https://www.theguardian.com/world/us-embassy-cables-document... / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spying_on_United_Nations_leade...
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It doesn't justify it, but if we're going to take a stance against spyware, we have to take a stance against all spyware. That includes the home-rolled stuff that the NSA pushes out to Apple and Google.
No, we don’t.
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Maybe stop funding them, for a start? Congressional oversight used to be a thing. Snowden showed the NSA lied to congress. No heads rolled.
I can believe there are shadow organizations that lack oversight. In fact, it seems likely. But that these shadow organizations are maintaining power by surveiling and blackmailing congress people is a whole other ballgame and seems highly unlikely to me. For one, it's likely that not every Congressperson has some deep dark secret that makes them blackmail-able. And pissing off the only group of people that could cut…
There's a long history of illegal domestic surveillance since at least the 1940s - why would it have stopped?
> For one, it's likely that not every Congressperson has some deep dark secret that makes them blackmail-able. And pissing off the only group of people that could cut your funding and expose your shadow organization as well as bring oversight is not the group that you want to be pissing off.
Secret blackmail files worked for J. Edgar Hoover[0].
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/fbi-director-hoovers-dirty-fil...
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According to Wikipedia, NSO is owned by by its two founders Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio and Novalpina Capital. According to Sky News Novalpina Capital is getting liquidated and their stake in NSO will be sold to a third party: https://news.sky.com/story/pegasus-spyware-owner-novalpina-t...
Right. I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or not. :) Prior to Novalpina, it was Francisco Partners. Point being, NSO has received huge amounts of money from the kind of people who, well, YCombinator founders seek out.
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5) many high ranking government officials do nothing about this because they're being blackmailed by the spooks. Tinfoil hat territory? Sure. Plausible and possible? Sure.
What happened to the “spooks” that hacked the intelligence oversight committee computers? You know, the people who are supposed to watch them?
I seriously have no damn clue what those buggers have gotten up to that they’ve bullied the government into leaving them alone.
> NSO Group said in a statement on Thursday that it did not have any indication their tools were used but canceled the relevant accounts and would investigate based on the Reuters inquiry. Why would they cancel accounts without knowledge of wrongdoing?
I mean, they could also be lying, but its also pretty standard business practise to not work with people who bring your reputation into disrepute. For example, consider how hard it was for parler to get hosting.
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What happened to the “spooks” that hacked the intelligence oversight committee computers? You know, the people who are supposed to watch them?
I know some spooks called the Church of Scientology. I seriously have no damn clue what those buggers have gotten up to that they’ve bullied the government into leaving them alone.