The secret Uganda deal that has brought NSO to the brink of collapse

For example: Infineon is building a 100M€ plant in HU. The German government(s) could pressure german companies not to do business in countries where democracy is endangered, or where human rights are violated, but it has chosen to not exercise any kind of moral suasion.

HU or PL are not Apartheid-era South Africa, but there is more you can do as a freaking head of government then make a "we are worried" statement.

Top talent will make way more in private firms, it's the only way to make a ton of money. Government pay is basically capped. The government pay also encourages the government employees to hire contractors, because that's how you get side benefits (not bribes! tooootallly not bribes), like ultra cushy jobs for relatives, a "consulting" job once you get sick of the government, etc.

I'd say it's like aerospace contractors. Just wayyyy to high tech for a government project and mediocre pool. Even NASA can't efficiently design complicated engineering projects, and they probably are the only government agency with a good reputation and decent people.

The only interesting thing about these vendors is that their weapons are in active, constant use, but it's not that obvious to the victims.

In this instance, Israel needs the US, Pegasus was Israel's technical gorilla in the spy world, and it got used on the US by someone they sold it to. This level of fallout given that is not unexpected; Israel cares more about maintaining ties with the US than they do about a given tool, company, or to enable Ugandan spying operations.

Curious, do you happen to know what such spies do?

I'm wondering if it's just a reporting the news, talking to people and collecting information that can be legally obtained.

I think many of us may fear a transnational government, yet we have transnational organized crime, transnational companies, transnational communication networks, etc. at some point, I hope we also get more transnational governance to balance some of those other entities.

For example, you could secure access and get insight into a terrorist ring using encrypted messengers, once the necessary paperwork has been done, reviewed and approved by an independent judge. Phone taps and internet taps worked great until everything became encrypted. Hard drives that cannot be accessed, conversations that cannot be monitored, you name it; the governments of the world have a difficult decision to make after about 120 years of easy access to criminal's conspiracies.

I'm not sure if there's any system of government in the world I'd currently trust with this power, but it's not inherently impossible to use these tools ethically. At the end of the day, governments are desperate for a solution for the encrypted nature of modern data and communications and don't think that there are any other solutions than either allowing the police to hack or banning/restricting encryption. I'm not sure which option I prefer, but I believe (fear) either will become the accepted norm within our lifetimes.

In general, I am against government overreach, so I agree with a lot of what you said.

However, let us say I have a court order to surveil person X - how am I ever going to get all the information when they could be communicating via a phone call, SMS, iMessage, whatsapp, gmail, facebook messenger, signal, telegram, discord and a myriad of other mechanisms with a myriad of identities. The easiest solution for me (the snooper) would be to surveil your entire phone, including click history and screenshots when feasible. No?

Once again, let us forget the person side for a minute. Let us talk about someone with genuine need to surveil. How will ever do it with today's technology? It aint easy.

Basically, you scan a paper document. It contains a mixture of line art, text, and photographs—“mixed” types of content. You can segment it and use different codecs to encode these different segments, and then combine the results in a PDF.

> Essentially, 1990's algorithms used in photocopying and scanning compression are still lurking in modern communication software, with all of the flaws and baggage that come with them.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/googl...

Given than JBIG2 wasn't standardized until 2000, and that the Apple vulnerability was in their implementation (vs the standard) I just don't understand this characterization.

Also, for them to have a +1 number outside the USA means they have to be on a USA network and then roaming onto a local network. This presents dozens of problems, such as often not being able to get the best connection, not being able to get data connections, not being able to get any local support, and it costing a small fortune.

All the embassy employees I have ever known have gone full native with all of their technology etc.

With an Ugandan sim comes the security of the Ugandan mobile network and its employees

But given the number of countries under nanpa, I bet they filter at the area code level. Can’t turn away that sweet Dominican Republic opportunity.

How does data work if you get NSO’d? There’s gotta be some Canadians facing massive mobile phone bills because of NSO shenanigans.

They won’t want to be seen as reining in Israeli military overreach because there’s a feeder pipeline from the Israeli military into both politics and the weapons industry. It’s the same people running the country that are selling these weapons.

Yes and sort of and no.

The thing with weapons is that occasionally you sell them to people you end up fighting. Take the Falklands war - Argentina was using American, French, and British weapons to fight the British. It happens, it's a bit of egg on everyone's face, but it is what it is.

When you're a major arms dealer, you'll eventually end up selling guns to an enemy of your ally, or supposed ally.

it isn't that easy :) If you work on any major and/or popular software it is most probably used by State Dept (even if it is just an obscure part of some software stack that some State Dept LOB is using implicitly). Theoretically any software may have bugs/holes and thus be a part of such a spying.

Rather I suspect they were selling it as hacking-as-a-service and the clients they had never actually got their hands on the software or any physical servers (apart from possibly NSO relays), rather everything probably passed through their servers hosted in Israel where they could control that +1 and +972 numbers were never targeted.

The people they had as client only cared as long as they got into the iPhones,etc they wanted, I doubt they cared if they had control of the software or not.

Have you not thought how US companies like MS, Apple, Google do stuff for the US govt, just like when it comes to financial sanctions on Russians, its the US asking the UK to do it. Look at the Ukraine and the NordStream2 pipeline between Germany and Russia, US leaned on the EU to make things difficult for Russia.

Look at the criticisms of China's HueWei spying using 5G networks, the fact HueWei hold more global 5G patents seems to be irrelevant to the US except its not because its a classic case of leap frogging in technology whilst older tech patents are milked.

Its what you would expect from the leading nation on this planet ie the US to engage in behaviour wise but all this US repression makes those countries double down and come back with something better.

NSO is just the latest fallout, but its nuanced and not everyone picks this up when reading the global news.

The US is end of empires time, its just natural just like Afghanistan is the only country on the planet to have never have been colonised by an outside force, namely Russia empire, British empire and US empire and how many people knew that?

You should google up the story of the Swiss company Crypto AG Tl;dr; bought by the CIA and the BND (German counterpart) in 1970 and sold security software to governments all around the world. With built in backdoors for the CIA and BND. It was the main source of foreign intel for decades for the CIA.