‘Somebody Has to Do the Dirty Work’: NSO Founders Defend Pegasus Spyware | Hacker News Reader

‘Somebody Has to Do the Dirty Work’: NSO Founders Defend Pegasus Spyware

thewire.in

64 pointsmyth_drannon37 comments

> The agents said the Israelis’ technology, which helped carriers troubleshoot their customers’ smartphones by sending them an SMS link that enabled the carrier to access the phone remotely, could be useful for saving people’s lives.

A decade later:

> Saudi Arabia, using “Pegasus,” hacked the phones of Jamal Khashoggi’s ex-wife, and of his fiancée, and used the information gleaned to prepare for his monstrous killing and its subsequent cover-up.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-nso-group-peg... [2] https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-l...

Think about the children!

People who are trusted to do "dirty work" are usually licensed or otherwise tested by a credible organization of similarly-employed professionals to make sure each individual is morally and legally accountable for their own actions.

Guess it's finally time for software engineers to be licensed in order to legally write code that affects human lives (just like every other professional engineer). The ethics oversight boards that come with the territory can then laugh off the next "Pegasus" that anyone tries to work on.

Not like this will stop people from trying, but at least they won't have a professional engineer writing their code :^)

if therac-25 didn't do that in the eighties, i doubt anything will.

"And all we hear is this campaign that we are violating human rights, and it’s very upsetting. Because I know how much life has been saved globally because of our technology."

Oh, pity poor NSO. Give me a break.

Even if their goals were good (and I honestly have no reason to think otherwise), the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And everything they're saying boils down to "trust us". We have no reason to believe they can be trusted, and we have several reasons to think they can't.

I also don't doubt that lives have been saved. But that doesn't excuse everything. There are costs that are too high to pay to accomplish the laudable goal of saving lives.

Maybe. Maybe not.

But no one has to be happy with you for being willing to do the dirty work.

Exactly. There is a certain logic to "Somebody will do this and I am somebody." But anybody taking the money also has to take the moral burden that comes with the work.

> There is a certain logic to "Somebody will do this and I am somebody."

Yep. But the logic is deeply flawed. I am always disappointed when this pitiful excuse gets trotted out. Just because someone else will inevitably do evil things is not a justification for you to do evil things.

Since when spying (by means of hacking personal info including family members) on journalists and political oppositions is a dirty work ?

It's the "if we don't do it, someone else will" defense.

Is that even a defense? It sounds like something a 6 year old would say after punching their sibling for whining incessantly.

Hard to avoid thinking about that being the reason many defend USA holding dozens of countries in a sleeper hold with military bases.

Someone needs to ensure american owners get a profit. If not the American military, who else is going to do it?

This is a lazy non sequitur. You really think there are americans on the korean DMZ so that "american owners" (whatever that means) can get a profit?

If they wanted the US to leave they could ask e.g. Philippines.

I've seen it used quite a few times in HN discussions of unethical business practices. My favorite is when the meme "corporation's sole responsibility is maximize profit to the shareholder" gets mixed in and folks argue that it's a moral imperative to take the dirty money

Hey, if NSO hadn't built Pegasus, then an unscrupulous, unprincipled actor like Palantir would have stepped in and made the same argument!

No comment re: Palantir’s scruples/principles but the fact is they’re not an infosec company. They don’t make malware or anything close to it.

Ask someone inside Palantir about "Project Torch."

I wouldn't be surprised if all this bruhaha is to kick them out from a lucrative market. Just curious if it's an American company or Russians trying to find jobs for their hacking forces, now that the US elections are over.

I see NSO has a functioning PR department.

I suspect that from a strictly economic standpoint, the only thing their PR department should be doing is keeping everyone in the company mute.

What I find hard to believe is that NSO are the only ones doing this (or by extension Israel). Are there other US based or UK based companies doing the same but we just don't hear about them?

Big nation-state security agencies do it in-house, like NSA's TAO. Israel itself wouldn't rely on NSO, quite the opposite: NSO is alums from Israel's Unit 8200 (IDF signals intelligence) repackaging a dumbed-down version the know-how they learned in the military for retail sale to tier 2 and 3 countries that don't have the capability, or to police departments that don't have access to national-security-grade spyware.

I know some Unit 8200 alums, and they are scathing about the ethics of their former colleagues who went on to work for NSO.

That is very important context to know. Thanks

8200 alumni have much better options than NSO... But yeah, every IT personnel who was installing Microsoft Sharepoint in army and their grandma suddenly become ex-8200 and every grunt becomes a navy seal.

Very interesting, thanks. Is Israel actually concerned about reputational damage from NSO? Or are they perceived as serving a useful purpose?

Sure, someone has to do the dirty work. I get that.

But in that same vein, there always has to be someone to take the fall.

NSO — you knew this when you started doing the dirty work. You knew this when you were in the Israeli military.

You don’t get to complain now that you’re being made the scapegoat, when you knew damn good and well what might happen to you when you started doing the dirty work.

To my ear this sounds just like an excuse made 88 years ago: “Somebody has to kill all these ____!” Ironic and disappointing.

The dirty work of helping dictators get away with murder. Of preventing countless people from organizing and taking back their lives from genocidal maniacs. Of aiding human rights abuses all around the world and helping to cover them up.

What these people are doing should be a crime against humanity and they should end up in jail over it.

I'm not sure if anybody an Nuremberg adopted the defense of, "Look, they kept shipping in prisoners but expected that none of them leave. We didn't have food or facilities for them all! We had to make room for them somehow!" but this feels along that same track.

The fact that this is an Israeli company makes it a very bitter irony. Then again, many current Israeli policies would make their grandparents blush with shame.

Who was the most recent known official Terrorist that they decided would make a good Prime Minister?

Don’t tell me that they’ve only had one.

If they’re going to elect a Terrorist as a Prime Minister, then you have to know what some of the other things are that they would be willing to do.

'NSO Founders Defend Revenue Stream'

FTFY.

Article is from July 25th, probably does not contain much new info.

Previous : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920055

Probably being upvoted because of the importance of the education of both sides of this debate.

Both sides? The public vs NSO clients or what? Debate? It’s more like an exposé, hopefully followed by investigations and criminal trials or at least mega class action lawsuits. Their spyware was used for murdering countless humans. The list of target phone numbers was heavy on cartel victims etc, in case you hadn’t heard.

Maybe, but they also need to be accountable.

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