The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself (opens in new tab)

The Italian Carabinieri bought Paragon even though they can't legally use it, because mass surveillance is obviously illegal and against our constitution.

And yet, nothing's being done.

The fact that the US can continue to economically do so well relative to others despite currently being run by some of the stupidest and most abhorrent people possible is... sad.

On the intelligence front, Mossad does a wonderful job performing extra-judicial killings using the dirtiest tricks you could think of. They’re also very good partners: almost every counter-intelligence outfit sings their praises.

Certainly the common practice of looting civilian homes and posting about it on social media implies something about their infantry.

Sounds like a decent deal to me.

You aren't burning money, you're getting services and technologies.

Source that a large proportion of founders/employees are actually American/British? The more believable claim is that such Israeli startups are US/UK backed, but that's not as damning as it sounds, because US/UK is the finance hub, so thats where you expect funding to come from, rather than "colonialism foreign base" or whatever.

Which makes the failure of October 7th even more striking. It's insane Israeli leadership hasn't paid for this.

So the Palestinians and Arabs thought a hundred years ago. It served them badly.

It’s not that US/UK and others don’t get anything out of the relationship, as you note. But the arrows have been mostly pointing the other way for a long time. Trump and his background, as well as Epstein/Mandelson/McSweeney/Labour are just the latest, blatant examples of how this works.

It makes sense in a way, most Israelis probably acquire a fair bit of skills and contacts as part of being in the military there. And because the military 'needs' to surveil millions of people it rules over without any mandate whatsoever, what better way to get a contract than to enhance the surveillance capabilities of the army once you get back into civilian life?

By the way, UK, South Wales especially claims an 89%+ success rate and 1 in 6'000 false positives, you can read it on UK's official website.

The company between Oosto claims 99%.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...

Also I mean you and I can recognize people we know. A surveillance camera has millions of sensors sampling every ~50 ms. It’s plausible.

Pretty extreme bar your setting. I would think most people would agree it could still have extremely (and surprisingly) potent accuracy and still fail in this case. I wouldn't expect facial recognition to work in a case when there is little to no face to work with... if that guy came dressed like that to any airport or mall he would've been detained immediately.

So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? Knowing about Mossad operations? With Bibi on the record saying

> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank

With most of the world's spyware, including Pegasus and NSO group, having hailed from Israel?

It's not "going down a very dark rabbit hole", it's the by far most likely option and therefore your whole comment makes no sense, presuming the much less likely option.

If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god..

The other parts layered defense, reducing the number of privileged/non-sandboxed applications/processes, not shipping spyware/adware, etc.

Only Apple/GrapheneOS and to a slightly lesser extend Google Pixel are good at this. Many phone manufacturers still use the TrustZone TEE on the main CPU (rather than a separate security processor), isolated radios, hardware memory tagging, and dozens of other defense-in-depth features.

Woah there cowboy, sure you want such a broad and strong claim? Maybe you've eaten too much asbestos, breathed too much lead-gasoline fumes or otherwise inhaled something strange, because I'm sure there are countless of examples of regulation working just fine. Not to say it isn't without problems, but come on, "never"?

My take is that this is probably a test account.

But I think this is more about China wasting resources on trivial things while the US wisely focuses on more important things /s.

And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.

But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)

One of these are not like the others...

You can't trust software not to be buggy and both, hardware, and software not to be purposely compromised because "think of the children" (that the EFs proved to be BS).

I only know pegasus broke iOS.

I find it interesting that Apple has spun Lockdown mode from a 'we are terrible at security' into a feature for marketing.

Now when someone gets hacked Apple can say: "Well they weren't in lockdown mode, its their own fault."

Gosh I wish I was as good at marketing as Apple. They really need to sell their marketing team as a service. If they did that, I'd buy their stock outright.

But also, imaginary tokens are really really valuable. I'm sure there are normal-ish people with ~100-1000 bitcoin, let alone a few of the outspoken people who are bitcoin billionaires.

Your theory has really not been borne out by reality.

Somehow Hamas committed October 7th and has fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israel since Gaza was given in its entirety to the arabs.

Somehow Iran has been financing and arming multiple terrorist groups even though it obviously is its own country far away from Israel.

Somehow Hezbollah has fired tens of thousands of rockets at civilians as well.

Somehow the Houthis have been committing terrorism sa well and their flag is literally "God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel".

Yeah, I'm sure if Israel just stopped all the security measures on the West Bank, all terrorism would stop!

Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." - are you saying exploding bombs, knife attacks, and firing rockets indiscriminately against civilians is not terrorism?

So a two state solution makes much more sense.