Which is odd because NSO made many assurances to the US govt they were in control of the tech and that US nationals were not to be included. Looks like they weren't in as much control as they stated they were.
NSO built in a complete block of +1 phone numbers. But those US diplomats were not using +1. Which itself is a security issue that i'm sure is already being discussed at the state department
[1]https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/04/07/dea-bulk-tele...
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.
Like the whole business around US military bases and Strava.
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.
But from what I can see, nanpa is also a Japanese word for something that sounds like random approaches on women in malls, etc. for dating. I forget the term in English.
> NSO has always told its customers that US phone numbers are off-limits. In this case, all 11 targets were using Ugandan numbers, but had Apple logins using their state department emails, according to the two US officials.
That's why you do recon before targeting somebody.
Do you suppose they just sprayed the malware onto random phones?
I get the impression that Pegasus is meant to be used in a very targeted way, at people you have identified before, and have some reason to spy on. If you do that way, what are you chances of wanting to target somebody else, and accidentally getting 11 US embassy employees?
NSO promised oversight, they can't just weasel they way out by saying "there's no way would could have implemented effective oversight".
I don't disagree with your point, simply saying that IMO the US doesn't take cyberattacks seriously precisely because it leads down a dark path with China (and probably Russia too if we're being honest).
All during the Cold War the USA and USSR engaged in various kinds of low-level sabotage against each other. Fortunately for us all, it didn't escalate out of control.
I highly doubt that israel the country wanted this turn of events, for the simple reason they are not stupid and the cost-benefit ratio of this seems bad for them.
Well… obviously? How else could Israel treat him?
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.
> In this case, all 11 targets were using Ugandan numbers, but had Apple logins using their state department emails, according to the two US officials.
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.
I say this because I've had stuff done to my phones in the past, one strange incident with a "hacked" phone was selecting an AirBnB, which I believe directed me to a few of their "safe" houses. Other examples, include batteries going flat over night when asleep despite phone being switched off, not charging but was fully charged before it was switched off. The phone signal is weak when that took place so it would have burned through the battery amplifying the signal, but listening in to people sleeping can elucidate what might be on their mind!
Once you go conspiracy there’s no end to what seems possible…
A state born of hard-edged refugees escaping a world that had recently written them off to die, carried through several existential wars, and now they are EMPOWERING that same evil.
Also, please please do not trot out the "NSO isn't Mossad/IDF" nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if all of this was a façade to penetrate the infrastructure of states that Israel wanted to monitor.
There has never been a more competent, sophisticated, and dedicated group than that of Israeli intelligence. To imagine that they would allow all this as an oversight without some state benefit is not something my brain can comprehend.
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.