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Comment by nickfromseattle | Hacker News Reader

Pegasus and it's capabilities have been publicly known for several years. Pegasus recently appeared in connection with hack that stole Jeff Bezos' nude selfies.

It sounds like the new info putting them back in the new cycle is related to this sentence:

"The Guardian and its media partners will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days. They include hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers."

Should be a very interesting release.

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This does prove or disprove any other Pegasus related claims but regarding the Bezos “hack”, Brad Stone who is a Bezos biographer says in this interview (https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1400539983333793792?...) that all the evidence about the nude photos leak point to Bezos’ girlfriend’s brother actually just taking the photos from her phone through physical access and leaking them.

>brother actually just taking the photos

Bezos asked his security consultant Gavin De Becker, to conduct the investigation he did and published his oped in a month.

The brother bla bla bla is just a distraction deployed by those who want you to believe NSO wasn’t used on to hack the phone of an American citizen.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeff-bezos-investigation-finds...

We discussed it here as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532185

I don't think all the evidence points to the brother in law.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v74v34/saudi-arabia-hacked-j...

Let's just ignore what all the people who would know have to say. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-05-05/how-jeff-...

Please note: This is the same institution that published outrageous claims of multiple tech companies detecting backdoored Supermicro motherboards, which everyone denied and no one claims to have know anything about.

The most positive thing about this leak is that it includes government officials. The more they realize that the mass surveillance they are pushing on us will also apply to them, the more chances we'll have that they push back against it.

The problem is that politicians often seem to view themselves as an exalted caste. Targeting individuals is only problematic insofar politicians from the ruling parties are targeted. If the Spyware companies promise to exclude them from being targets, all is fine.

Bezos nudes weren’t stolen by a hack, but by physical access to his mistress’s device. Her brother. At least, that’s what I recall.

The forensic investigation showed that bezos’ device was clean. From what I saw.

The analysis claimed that some video sent by MBS might be malware, but then claimed to be unable to decrypt it and prove that or analyze it in any way.

HN called them out on failing to decrypt and properly analyze the file when that came up:

https://github.com/ddz/whatsapp-media-decrypt

Here's the forensic report from FTI Consulting:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v74v34/saudi-arabia-hacked-j...

Reviews of the report suggest that it contains circumstantial evidence, but lacks conclusive evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos_phone_hacking#Analy...

What adult, a tech executive no less, is dumb enough to send nude selfies in 2021?

All of them? I mean, they're still human and get just as horny (and irrational because of it) an any other sex-osessed monkey.

No, not all of them. Most people have the sense to never even take nude photos with a connected device.

Some people are just normal people and realise that living in a prison because of the chance of someone leaking your nudes is just isn’t worth it so they just take the chance. It doesn’t mean they would not retaliate if someone actually leak their nudes.

I was exaggerating a bit for effect, but the point is that they are still just as human as everyone else. Just like everyone else, sometimes they don't keep themselves 100% under control.

Personal disclosure: I've never sent nude photos of myself, until I had a super-hot girlfriend repeatedly ask for them. She got the photos. Was it a long-term smart move on my part? Probably not. Anything could happen in the future. Did I care at the time? Not at all. Sometimes a zero-tolerance, "just say no" policy isn't going to work.

I hope you always wear pants while using your phone. Otherwise how can you be sure to never having pointed your smartphone camera in your nude genitalia's direction? A hacker could've been filming and potentially ended your life through a devastating leak.

A hacker stealing photos while I’m using my phone is not the same as sending nude photos from that phone to your significant other.

One is an crime.

You're missing the point of my reply, the risk is the same: potentially exposing your biological gender and detailed attributes to the world.

> I hope you always wear pants while using your phone.

Don't you?

Who does?

I use mine in the bath.

You don't wear pants in the bath?

This sounds absolutely huge. It feels like a Snowden lite.

Snowden says: “Stop what you're doing and read this. This leak is going to be the story of the year”

https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1416797153524174854?s=20

I'm not judging the importance of the story, but based off past reception of these stories it is wildly naïve to believe this will be the story of the year. That is especially true in a year in which the globe is still not through a global pandemic that has killed millions.

Most people simply don't care that much about digital privacy. Lots of people believe Facebook is spying on them constantly including recording everything said in the presence of their phone and many of those people go right on continuing to use those apps.

> "...wildly naïve to believe this will be the story of the year. That is especially true in a year in which the globe is still not through a global pandemic that has killed millions."

if this were true, cardiovascular disease and cancer would be the top stories everyday, as they combine for tens of millions of deaths per year. the media focuses on novel fear because it's attention-getting, not rationally dire.

You phrased that like a disagreement, but I think it actually goes to support by point. A pandemic that has shutdown much of the planet for going on a year and a half seems like a much more novel fear than someone's phone spying on them.

And you can't just blame this on the generic "media". They sell what the people want to buy. They report on novel fears because that is what attracts more attention from readers/viewers. The story about a murder is always going to get more attention than a dozen people dying of heart disease.

It isn't that the media doesn't care about these privacy issues. It is that people generally don't care about these privacy issues.

ah, the apologist argument. might as well throw up our hands and do nothing then. sheep are easier to tend when subdued and mollified anyway.

the point is that the pandemic isn't a bigger threat to our daily lives than common diseases for most people, yet we've blathered on about it like it's an imminent threat to everyone for over a year and a half. we don't do that for (other) respiratory infections or tuberculosis, for instance, which affect the same order of magnitude of people worldwide every year. this misfocus is acutely irrational (an availability/recency bias). the novelty only exacerbates the misfocus, it doesn't justify it in any way.

the pandemic isn't even a long-term threat in the way that concentration of power, as manifested by this privacy/surveillance issue, is for every person on earth (and the way climate change is for humankind on a multigenerational scale). it's just that the change is so relatively slow and incremental that we don't understand the severity of the threat until it's overwhelming. it's how we boil frogs so easily.

You've underestimated how quickly people normalize things. The pandemic and the shutdown isn't big news anymore.

And digital surveillance is still big news 8 years after Snowden's leaks? It has also been normalized. There is little chance that the average person would rate this a bigger story than the pandemic.

The technology is there. It is obvious that if it is being sold, it will be used. And like most things that do give people power, it is likely to be abused. At least in some sectors there is a strict regulation of what can be used and why ( and there is a cost associated with it so companies tend to scrutinize for unnecessary searches ), but an individual with too much money and time on their hands? The only limit is that person.

I will admit I am tantalized.

And like [all] things that [] give people power, it is [guaranteed] to be abused.

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