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Comment by keewee7 | Hacker News Reader

>In Uganda, for example, NSO's ForcedEntry was used to spy on U.S. diplomats, Reuters reported.

This was the incident that made US authorities go after NSO. I remember reading that these diplomats were actually involved in espionage.

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Not surprising as diplomat and spy is often interchangeable and there probably was a reason they were spied on.

It's also a bit rich for the US to be complaining about this kind of thing.

You won't stay a world power by allowing others to attack you, even at a smaller scale with lesser weapons.

Counter-intelligence is not attack, it's defence. What this is is the US attacking Uganda and throwing a hissy fit when they defend themselves.

If those were Ugandan spies in the US they could have gotten dissappeared.

First the US is not Saudi Arabia - they won’t make any diplomat disappear.

Second - how did the US attack Uganda?

I think your comment sounds a bit biased that’s all. If you share some light - happy to accept the points raised.

Where did I say diplomats? Of course, you wouldn't disappear the diplomats. However, they almost never operate alone - whenever there is a diplomat engaged in intelligence there are almost always other assets without diplomatic status.

Offensive intelligence operations that the US has been conducting in Uganda are, well, offensive in nature, and are thus an attack. Not all attacks are an act of war.

> I think your comment sounds a bit biased that’s all. If you share some light - happy to accept the points raised.

I don't see how it is biased. The US applying sanctions on Uganda after they got caught spying by Ugandan counter-intelligence (under other pretenses, of course) is massively hypocritical. As far as I know using economic pressure to coax a country into accepting espionage is a new low. The US is trying to normalize and establish as basic expectations that weaker countries should just let it spy on them, and that's hypocritical above and beyond the norm.

Offensive counterintelligence is indeed a thing.

We don't disappear people under diplomatic cover, we PNG them just like everyone else does. And when we do catch foreign agents without diplomatic cover, we imprison them. Why kill a useful asset that could be traded for someone on our team?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Five

Offensive counterintelligence is not the same as catching a spy and hacking them.

Offensive counterintelligence involves manipulation or long-term disruption of adversaries. Hacking someone's phone doesn't qualify, that's just normal defensive counterintelligence.

>We don't disappear people under diplomatic cover, we PNG them just like everyone else does.

Sure.

>nd when we do catch foreign agents without diplomatic cover, we imprison them. Why kill a useful asset that could be traded for someone on our team?

We both know that's not true. When it's more useful to trade them, that's done. When you want to send another signal, the US is not shy at all about killing them.

> When you want to send another signal, the US is not shy at all about killing them.

What information is this based on? I don't have any particularly strong opinions on this subject, but I can't recall ever reading about anything like this.

What exactly do you want evidence of? That U.S. intelligence agencies disappear people? That they do so to send a message? Or are you asking for specific examples of that happening to foreign intelligence operatives? Because you will never be able to read of an example of that happening - when we learn about people kidnapped by U.S. intelligence agencies, it's only because they were eventually released. It's an inference from the fact that US intelligence agencies kill many people for multiple reasons including sending a message, and that U.S. intelligence has clandestine facilities on American soil where they commit crimes on foreign intelligence operative (See the case of Yuri Noseko) without consequence, which have only been expanded since then - the CIA now has extraterritorial black sites, so nowadays Yuri would simply have been sent to Romania and then no record would be available of his torture unless he was released.

That's a long paragraph, but, as far as I can tell, doesn't contain a shred of the evidence or sources I asked for?

The one concrete detail you mention is 'Yuri Noseko' [Nosenko], who seemingly was a defector imprisoned for three years on suspicion of being a spy and then released. I'm not sure how this substantiates any of your claims. It appears to do the opposite.

An idealistic equality of actions using right vs. wrong is not exactly how diplomats look at things.

Agreed, but they are the ones that peddle that way of viewing things to their own population to get what they want, and they should be called out for it.

Come on everyone spies. There’s no point in establishing an embassy if you’re not also getting an understanding of both stated and unstated intentions.

That's not the issue. The issue is the US getting mad at counter-espionage by Uganda while they are themselves engaging in espionage. It's very hypocritical.

It is the issue. Everybody spies. Everybody spies and is hypocritical about it.

But USA is the most hypocritical about it. It systematically spies on its allies, with the exception of Israel and these 2 countries take active measures for some cybertools not to spy on each other. (or Israel tries to make it seem that way).

I guarantee you that the US spies on Israel and vise versa. I'd honestly be surprised if there was a single country both didn't spy on. But I'd say the same about Germany, Australia, France, Spain, UK, Russia, China, and many more.

Hell, DLI teaches Hebrew (once euphemized as "special Arabic" in some settings) [0]. That's not just for exchange/liaison officers... Not to dig up that bucket of worms, but there were Hebrew linguists aboard the USS Liberty.

[0] https://www.dliflc.edu/about/languages-at-dliflc/

That is simply false. Few countries hypocritical about counter-intelligence. You absolutely have to draw the difference between intelligence work and counter-intelligence work. Saying that going after someone for catching your spies is normal is totally insane, no one except the US does it.

If Uganda was spying on the US in the US, then you would have a point. That's not what happened.

> Come on everyone spies.

That's what they want everyone to think so that they can use it to excuse their antisocial behaviour.

Tonga, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Peru, Mongolia... there's a very long list of countries that don't.

They would if they could. Those are mostly tiny countries with almost no resources to spy.

I don’t know about all of them, but a quick Google search shows that both Mongolia and Puru have intelligence agencies, which means very likely they have some sort of collection capability for HUMINT and/or SIGINT.

The ones that don’t have intelligence capabilities are probably the exception rather than the rule, and I doubt they’re doing out of good will vs just not having the resources for it.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or genuinely giving a list of minuscule island chains, culminating in the country that's literally the universal metonym for 'middle of nowhere'.

> also a bit rich for the US to be complaining about this kind of thing

The U.S. isn't complaining as much as shutting down a threat vector. Shooting back isn't hypocritical.

Also, you get the right to complain when you're allies, just as Germany had the right to complain when the NSA was caught tapping Merkel.

Any reason in particular that these spy firms seem to be coming out of Israel?

conducive environment; maybe even shared knowledge or spillover from one company to another...

I think they have a really strong culture/ecosystem around cybersecurity given the close relationships between the IDF and the startup ecosystem and given how many Israelis serve, there's likely much more understanding (if not interest) of govtech/defensetech compared to the U.S. where it's an all volunteer force and not that much crossover in Silicon Valley and DoD, although lots of folks trying to change that like DIU, AFWERX, SOFWERX, etc.

Plus the population is much more open to cooperate on military tech given their political situation.

I imagine they cut deals with the spy agencies and other authorities there to be able have much fewer regulations on what they are working on, particularly if they share it at a very discounted price with the Israeli government.

Russians, Chinese, and Americans prefer keeping these capabilities internal to their militaries. Israel seems to want to use cyber weapons exporting for building diplomatic ties.

And Google's Project Zero is just as productive at finding 0-days - they just conduct responsible disclosure instead of selling the 0-days they discover.

The US has been using Israel as high-tech offshore military R&D for at least the past 40 years. The US "gives" $4 Billion in "military aid" to Israel each year.

You may also be aware that Israel invaded territory in 1967 which it continues to occupy in flagrant violation of "international law," and that this occupation continues to be violently resisted.

Those are a few of the more salient reasons why Israel is a hotbed of military/cyber/border/security technology. It's all developed, tested, and deployed against a vulnerable occupied population, then sold to the "friendly" (ahem) nations of the world.

Jews have taken the flack for centuries in Europe, I notice in the West the financials are not looking so good, you know facebook, Bank of England now rolling back the £800+bn quantitative easing (money printing) to support the financial crisis, so a bit of division being whipped up with stuff like this, usually means there's some high level falling out taking place.

If you think the NSO/KSA/and others are the only one's at it, think again.

In the 90's I used to get hassled by the police with more frequent stop and searches pulled over when driving. Why? Because I was learning about firewalls over the dialup internet and of course, GCHQ have total surveillance but playing down capabilities is a valid military tactic.

Never under estimate the military or more importantly the security services in a country. Those shadowy operators who hate the spotlight!

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