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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

"The Canadian researchers who reported that Israeli software was used to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi's inner circle before his gruesome death are being targeted in turn by international undercover operatives, The Associated Press has found."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/citizen-lab-toronto-under...

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> The truth is that strongly encrypted platforms are often used by pedophile rings, drug kingpins, and terrorists to shield their criminal activity.

> Without sophisticated technologies, the law enforcement agencies meant to keep us all safe face insurmountable hurdles.

> NSO's technologies provide proportionate, lawful solutions to this issue.

Funny how the same technologies meant to protect children are also being used to intimidate researchers and kill dissidents and journalists. Nobody could possibly have foreseen this!

Let's not forget, totalitarian governments are way, way more dangerous for its citizens than any kind of criminals.

This should be upvoted. While the net deaths from murders, drug overdoses, and manslaughter of various cases might be a really high number, they are not even close to what a single government can do in a year or a nuclear-armed government can do in a few minutes.

In regards to the whole NSO thing, I’m completely baffled how their principals and employees are not on a sanctions list and don’t have arrest warrants out for them. Consider how much trouble non-malicious hackers have gotten in for pointing out security holes publicly. What we have here is a company actively conducting espionage against some of the most valuable public companies in the United States. Even more egregious, they are targeting those companies’ customers, illegally.

> I’m completely baffled how their principals and employees are not on a sanctions list and don’t have arrest warrants out for them.

The parties responsible with sanctions and warrants are their clients.

>>>In regards to the whole NSO thing, I’m completely baffled how their principals and employees are not on a sanctions list and don’t have arrest warrants out for them.

Lemme see if I can communicate this without committing karmic suicide like the other responder.... putting an Israeli cybersecurity firm on a sanctions list, or issuing arrest warrants, is simply a political non-starter in the US. It would be career suicide for most Congresspeople to take such a position.

all fighter jet principals and employees should have arrest warrants out for them. those damn fighter jets makers, killing people around the world with their jets. I mean, what did they think they are making a fighter jet for, they chose to work there and should have known the risks of being in the jet fighter business.

Also funny that it's not so hard to find pedophile material, drugs and people associated with terrorism _outside of the strong encrypted platforms_.

Yeah, that's the part that seems to get dropped in the discourse. Even when these vices had well-known places to gather - like the Silk Road, for example - they still leaked through into the world. But, after some of the most prominent platforms got busted, they're now scattered, so of course, some will try to get on encrypted platforms.

It's the same as a social media platform dying. Kik's recent demise undoubtedly brought a bunch of teens onto similar apps while some maybe reverted back to Facebook.

Funny how most of those could easily be eliminated by other means... drug kingpins by legalizing drugs, and terrorists (to a large extent) by stronger KYC requirements (which are already being implemented). But, of course, those measures don't provide ability to spy on your political opponents and dissidents / journalists.

This shouldn't be such a big surprise to those who inform themselves about the war business and its criminal usurpation of democracy in the West.

The same legal machinations that are used to suppress free speech in the West, especially regarding Western military failures, are also being used to suppress reporting on Julian Assange's torture in Bellmarsh today.

We have well and truly slipped.

> Twice in the past two months, men masquerading as socially conscious investors have lured members of the Citizen Lab internet watchdog group to meetings at luxury hotels to quiz them for hours about their work exposing Israeli surveillance and the details of their personal lives. In both cases, the researchers believe they were secretly recorded.

Apparently Canada has a digital rights advocacy group that is being intimidated through these meetings?

On the plus side, now we know their group exists. Hope they get some more funding now!

What are you referring to?

jammygit hopes that the publicity around Citizen Lab helps Citizen Lab get more funding.

Yes, kudos to Citizen Lab and Raphael Satter for detecting this and exposing it publicly. I've seen many attacks like this by corporate intelligence targeting activists over the years and the extent that they will go to are very concerning. Moreover they seem to be increasing. Bugging, physical surveillance, digital surveillance, placing someone inside, turning someone inside, private/public smear campaigns etc - the list goes on. We see it all the time but for obvious reasons having public examples that we can reference when training or investigating others is really useful.

This twitter user claims an identity for one of the spies that were targeting Citizen Lab: https://twitter.com/bibken/status/1089991510203027457

Found this tweet by reverse image searching and looking a few pages down in the results.

There have been a number of articles mentioning that same guy. Apparently he's an employee of Black Cube.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/world/black-cube-nso-citi...

Employees of the same company targeted the email accounts of Laura Codruta Kovesi a few years ago (she’s now the first ever European Public Prosecutor [1]).

Back at that time she was the chief of the Romanian anti-corruption agency and she was doing a pretty good job, which was unfortunate for some of the local oligarchs and corrupt politicians who tried everything to bring her down. Afaik the Black Cube employees’ hacking actions were pretty lame, I remember reading that some of them had checked in at one of the most expensive Bucharest hotels during their operation, literally a couple of hundred meters away from one of the headquarters of our local counter-intelligence agency. I had been under the false impression that if you try to carry out such an action you at least try not to phisically show yourself in front of the people who are supposed to catch you.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Codruța_Kövesi

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