Digital Violence: How the NSO Group Enables State Terror
digitalviolence.org
digitalviolence.org
The website features a platform for exploring over 1,000 "NSO-related activities, and demonstrates new connections and patterns between ‘digital violence’ using Pegasus and real-world violence directed at lawyers, activists, and other civil society figures": https://www.digitalviolence.org/#/explore
Especially if it mentions NSO Grouo!
And more news like this. I have been told by a WhatsApp admin who runs a news group how the police took his mobile phone and returned it back after some time and he has been warned multiple times to not post any news critical to india.
I believe they install this nso spyware or something similar on their phones so they get to know what is spreading and who is doing what.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-kashmir-internet-id...
i have friends who have been pulled from a public bus, their phones checked and one guy was beaten for having a vpn app and another one was forced to show his whatsapp when they proceeded to beat him for having "incendiary content". basically photos and memes critical of government
just a few days ago this kid was killed, heck his throat was first slit. the police say he joined militancy on 18th june but locals say he played cricket and scored runs on 28th of june so who knows.
then you have multiple times when the army and the police was found to have conducted fake encounters where they killed innocent civilians in the name of getting prize money.
few week ago there was the grenade attack in srinagar but that was immediately after the all party meeting with the drone attack that caused another stir.locals belive these are diversionary tactics.
This is kind of stupid.
I was able to get the site functioning with uMatrix still operating by using the vertical three dot menu and disabling referer spoofing. Even then it wasn't clear how to get to the content, since all that shows is a huge map with a timeline of events.
This is the sad state of the web today
Edit: Was meant as reply to noduerme
Awful? Absolutely, but I'd argue these objections reduce to "interception capabilities for me and not for thee," as western domestic spy agencies can just send a fax to your telco and get the same access. That is, the U.S. doesn't need NSO because it has the FISA stamp pad.
I'm very much a privacy advocate who has in one way or another worked closely to the key surveillance issues of the day for years, and so to defend NSO at all feels absurd, but the devil must be given his due.
Sure, NSO and the former HackingTeam and even Stratfor were great activist targets, but from the perspective of a state or a regime who buys an NSO-like service, N-GO's are just another foreign funded operator fighting a proxy war for policy leverege on behalf of their home governments and companies. They aren't secular colonial missionaries, (or perhaps, that's precisely what they are) they're running a playbook[1].
It's hard to separate NSO from Israeli policy because of how close their industry and military are linked, but I also think the objections to Israel's involvement itself reduce to how it is the last new free and independent nation state in a time where the nation state as thing itself is being wound up by the very class of academics/NGO's who militate against Israel's sovereignty. The academic/NGO anti-Israel thing has a lot of old entrenched anti-semitism, but the most reliable filter to identify what bothers them about Israel's involvement in this platform is NGOs are motivated by academic anti-sovereignty. These spy agencies as a service like NSO provide sovereignty to unfavorable countries, and Israel benefits strategically from preserving the sovereignty of nation states, no matter how repugnant. That's a painful steelman argument to make on behalf of the very abusive surveillance I have worked personally in my career to prevent, but when I see what amounts to selective privacy astroturfing using artists I like as propaganda mascots, the whole thing leaves a bad taste.
The skepticism I had with the university affiliated project that first uncovered Pegasus was they seemed really interested in foreign abuses but had not done anything on domestic surveillance issues, or even investigated those countries' influence on their own, which made them a para-governmental org using the cover of a loosely academic NGO to play spy games. To me the whole enterprise is seedy.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dictatorship-Democracy-Gene-Sharp/dp/...
I genuinely believe (perhaps naively) that there are good people, and we do crafty things to pursue our interests, but we punch the clock out at some point and respect that the battle of our conflicting interests must cease so we can return to being people. This is predicated on the idea that we are just humans recognizing we are dealing with other humans, and we will find an equillibrium of interests at some point. Where that breaks down is when we lose sight of that and just start to exterminate each other for its own sake by all deceptive and mendacious means necessary. For that you have to give up your own humanity first. Maybe that view is as quaint as the famously naive "gentlemen do not read each others' mail," statement, but without some guiding humanity, we might as well just use biological warfare because the only thing stopping using that is polite convention. Some rulers have been content to rule over slaves and disposable subjugated automatons reduced to living like animals, but their ambition is meaningless and unsatisfying because without some assent, they do not rule over people. When you have subjugated a people, the only solution is to find more people to subjugate. It's on everyone else to engage in total war to prevent that from happening, imo.
That's a big philosophical hope statement, but in terms of the ethics of building these tools, the truly evil empires have their own infrastructure, and don't need tools like those made by the NSO's of the world. Globally, and species wise, NSO's clients aren't the problem.
I’m examining the scripts now.
However, there is a blob of JavaScript that doesn’t load into urlscan. Highly suspect.
Is this some watering hole?
... along with video investigations narrated by Edward Snowden ...
Huh, that's quite a pleasant surprise