On Pegasus – NSO, Israel, and the World
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
The intelligence units of the IDF are petri dishes in which the talent that later creates the very cybersecurity firms whose products are sold under the direct supervision of the Israeli government is cultivated. There is an entire framework focused around funding and training these graduates of intelligence units to create commercial companies that are essentially subsidiaries of the IDF. And these companies don't discriminate when it comes to sales - clients include tyrants, criminal organizations and even Muslim states. Big corporations e.g. Microsoft are also involved, as they usually end up buying these infosec enterprises, essentially funding the Israeli government / military.
It's truly disturbing to see the opportunistic nature of all of this.
What's wrong with Muslim states? Israel isn't actually in war with the entire Muslim world you know, though some people really wish that was the case.
Once released from the military these people have no additional obligation to pay for the military more so than people in more tame business - in fact, they might be seen as owed something for serving in the military, rather than the other way around.
Your assertion that the IDF, Israeli government, and cybersecurity industry are effectively one unit is also bizarre to say the least, considering that they're entirely private companies who refuse to take orders from the government and have raised a stink about attempts to do so on more than one occasion. Your comment becomes more and more laughable when you assert that these companies are 'essentially subsidiaries' of the IDF. Please, you're fooling nobody. The issue here is about control - whether these companies advance Israeli foreign policy goals at the explicit direction of the government. Yet even a quick look at the clients of many of these groups shows this to be not the case.
That’s an interesting choice of words but I guess settler colonies with apartheid policies do tend to be precarious
I'm pretty sure OP means exactly that. In fact there are very few progressive leftists who haven't adopted this line of thinking.
--Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall, (We and the Arabs) (1923)
But since you asked, I don’t think citizens of Israel should have to leave, I would advocate for Israel to do something similar to South Africa when they ended their apartheid policies
To my knowledge, almost all Phishing takedown and ethical deplatforming services are based in Israel.
Israeli firms enjoy quite a large footprint in the US too, clustered around Route 128 in Boston for example. I've met many engineers from firms like Carbon Black there. And I got the same sense as the article: when it comes to cyber capability, there is no international system at work, it's every party to fend for themselves. And you thus get these situations where nominal allies are infiltrating their fellow so-called allies!
In military budgeting, the requests always come for the next threat. We need an F-35 jet, because our adversaries now have Su-49s. And so the next gen cyber startups are already selling the new: quantum internet. With the tagline: "no eavesdropping over arbitrary distances" ;)
But this has been the mainstream trend in major news outlets for years, no? Make no dirt stick to the IDF/Israeli government. Try to criticise Israel for their war crimes against the Palestinians and see what you get branded as.
Not only publications, communications in messengers also. In some cases WhatsApp messages were removed by censor command.
I think this falls under a type of disinformation. I don't know of any other state that has effectively weaponized any/all criticism against it as religious discrimination: antisemitism
Here is a basic example:
> (in no way am I promoting antisemitism or encouraging racial stigmas but this example is so common and the least harmless I can think of) "all Jews are greedy" - clearly antisemitic
> Israel is guilty of murdering non-combatant children in Gaza - has nothing to do with Judaism. Involves the very sensitive problem of murdering innocent children. Is part of the complex Israel/Palestine political issue. Yet this could also end up being spun as an attack on Jews and being antisemitic.
I think getting labelled an 'antisemite' in a country like the USA is career-suicide. It does play into the conspiracies about Israel's influence, but my theory goes that criticism of Israel in a country like the USA is just wrong-think/wrong-speak. Getting to this level of disinformation is incredible. Hopefully the dictators in the Middle-East(and customers of NSO) don't catch on and start weaponizing criticism of them as Islamophobic ...
Now, everything you said.
Lots of ethnic groups/races in lots of countries have been victims of racism and xenophobia by lots of other groups in their own countries and in other countries.
Israel, as a country, has been very effective at weaponizing its "victim of racism/xenophobia." The ubitquity of the term "antisemitism" and the staunch defenders of the term are part of this weaponization. I have difficulty identifying other words that represent "a specific group that is a victim of racism/xenophobia" as well as antisemitism does.
Here in the US, there is plenty of legislation at the state level that requires individuals and businesses sign agreements in order to gain employment or secure funding (advertisement, in the case of newspapers). For example, the law in Texas prevents an individual from being employed as a teacher (or contractor) if they support boycotts of Israeli companies. I'm not arguing for or against these boycotts but legislation preventing boycotts is now a condition of employment in some states.
There was a good documentary about this recently in DOC NYC: https://www.docnyc.net/film/boycott/
The article does not claim that NSO has sole responsibility for any of the crimes it was an accomplice to.
Huh, Yedioth Ahronot is a tabloid? It's centrist, it's no tabloid. It's probably the most important newspaper in the country still. Sorry this article is trash and the topic has been beaten to death here on HN. Stop with the Israel obsession please, this should be flagged.
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Seems more off topic to me. It's not new, it's political (arguably also criminal) and it's not a new phenomenon. It has been discussed dozens of times throughout the years on HN.
There are always other posts you can move on to if this one bothers you.
However Haaretz routinely publishes opinions against the editorial line and has a cadre of right wing writers, whereas NYT has a shit storm and people losing their jobs over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton. Haaretz is much more neutral as a whole (by allowing both extremes) and still tries to adhere to old school newspaper values; NYT since 2016 became a tool of progressive indoctrination. I never feel that reading Haaretz.
NYT also has Bret Stephens , up until recently Bari Weiss and I assume there are a few more centrists? Haaretz tries to challenge its readers with opinions from the other spectrum I'd agree with that. But still, every Israel knows it's a left wing and recently a borderline anti Zionist newspaper ( I don't think Haaretz themselves will dispute this. Their writers acknowledge anti Zionism repeatedly). The fact it has an anti Zionist line, which basically goes against the idea of the country itself, makes it a very niche product. Also let's not forget the left is now in power in the U.S, and even on a bad day it gets almost 50% of the vote. In Israel what Haaretz would call left is 5%-10% of the votes (Meretz and thats pretty much it).
Then you're not checking Haaretz English against Haaretz Hebrew ;-). Haaretz did this particular business model before the Times did.
Economics of digital media are basically the same everywhere, especially when you actually face more competition from trying to act as a genuinely local, printed paper than in the digital space.
In the UK the Mirror is more or less left meaning while the Sun is very right wing.
So much bias, superiority complex and stupidity packed in this statement alone. Amazing.
Actually, the author's name being Edan Ring (eg: obviously Hebrew) aside, that's the most interesting political angle here! NSO is opening doors for Israel to act as a Middle Eastern country, eg: spying, cracking, abusing human rights, trying to fuck with Europe, and making money off the whole lot. To a certain degree, the "shock and horror" angle is because Israeli Leftists and Westerners have actually bought their own bullshit about Israel being a Western implantation into the region, rather than a native growth: they have to at least pretend to be surprised when a Middle Eastern country (Israel) acts like its Middle Eastern peers (Morocco, the UAE).