"Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
"Spyware doesn't spy on you. [Other] People spy on you."
Guns are a much better analogy than cars.
"Spyware doesn't spy on you. [Other] People spy on you."
Guns are a much better analogy than cars.
Let’s compare that with the list we have. All the users are being spied on illegally. Some leading to deaths. 100% of use is society harming.
Guns are a tool statistically not used often for crime.
NSO’s software on the other hand is used for crime exclusively.
(I do not want to get into a gun debate. I’m only using guns in my example because the GP alluded to mass shootings)
Vigilante justice certainly wouldn't be a benign market, even if someone did that with Pegasus (or guns)
I don't even have to search for 2 minutes before I can bring up countless articles about missing children, murders, thefts, and other immoral acts that the police or federal agencies do not care or have enough resources to address. These victims' only recourse is vigilantism. It's easy to sit in an ivory tower of bureaucracy when you haven't been affected by the corruption or incompetence of the nanny state.
Read this for size: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/world/americas/miriam-rod...
Necessary but insufficient condition.
Tyranny happens when ... tyranny happens.
[ EDIT: actually, it's not even a necessary condition. Plenty of tyranny has occured even when non-government actors have recourse to use force ]
That doesn't mean that every so called justice system brings justice. Most countries have very broken justice systems that just benefit those in power. Preventing corruption is hard. Individual violence can useful on the path towards a solution, but it is never the solution itself.
That's a bold statement to make. When mankind is a space civilization, the speed of light will prevent any kind of universal police force from responding to events in an expedient manner. The limit of expansion is guilds and retribution. Defense is never impenetrable. Only punishment and retribution deter future infringements. If you cannot extend your philosophy to the future of civilization, it is a flawed one.
Alliances are the way pretty much all sci-fi writers have written the climate of that era. And for good reasons. When you don't have the ability for defensive policing, all you have left is deterrence through retribution. And that is either personalized or clan/guild based.
I see this attitude in tech a lot and I think it is incorrect, and very harmful. Systems have emergent properties that only exist at certain scales. The best principles for an FTL civilization spanning the universe are not the best principles for present day, and an appeal to claims of first principles is blind to this.
The same logic applies to arguments over censorship of large social media companies citing counterpoints involving small, niche internet forms with a few dozen users. Or amazon scale superstores vs. a grocery chain. Or large nations comprising a mix of heterogeneous cultures vs. small, uniform island nations.
That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Has anyone successfully used your software to drive their kids to school?
Has anyone successfully used your software to kill an enemy?
I'm with the guns analogy, probably closer to illicit arms dealer in NSO's case.
They have more issues if the statement is true than if it is not!
Products like Pegasus are almost always an on-prem enterprise-product it's simply the only model that makes sense security wise. If you were a client of NSO would you trust them to not look at the data?
My guess is that the list is from one of NSO's other products or someone trying to gather business intelligence on NSO - for example: location tracking, check when user is online etc - anything that can reasonably justify the data not being sensitive enough for customers like security agencies to be OK with it being in the cloud.
Consider if any of those dictators would want the US and Israeli governments to have access to whomever they're tapping on.
That's why they don't buy from the US or Israeli government: they buy from NSO who are a bunch of crooks.
Intel agencies use the cloud extensively for all sorts of use cases. This is 100% fact. Google “Amazon C2E”
the idea that we can scatter tools of enormous power around and just not worry about it is crazy
The flower children have returned apparently.
Like i said in a previous comment, i personally won't be able to draw a gun on another person, but doing the same as the BPP used to do do have some appeal to me. Walking the door of your company and saying "hi" to your factory manager with a gun on open carry must feel good.