Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41923007
It is completely unsurprising that there is little care shown by our government.
At least from an outside view, it's the UK now that is showing a good leadership in the current worldwide crises. While the US, France and Germany are completely lost, especially on how to deal with a "strong-man".
(Meanwhile nobody remembers Cameron or that guy that was a pure puppet of the US in the forced Iraq war, and they were the posh gentleman everyone was expecting)
The current government is a huge ally of Israel.
How much the UK and EU are allies remains to be seen too
Russia was a very close friend twenty years ago, Iraq was a very close ally in the 1980s. I'm sure Israel realises how quickly the west can turn on friends and allies when it suits us and that this is why they spend tens of millions a year wooing US and UK politicians.
Russia became a pariah over night and the moment it becomes politically convenient to diplomatically recognise Israel as an apartheid state the trade won't count for anything (not least because most of it is the direct consequence of billions in annual US subsidies)
They look at Israel and see a democratic, technologically advanced state with a liberal economy much like their own. They look at the repressive, autocratic extraction economies in the Arab world and recoil in horror.
I'm not making any judgement on this, or whether they're right or wrong, but that's just how many Europeans see the situation.
We're a vassal state, there's no Brexit on the special relationship.
Well, that's certainly one angle.
The other angle is, let's face it, Israel is good at playing the Jewish card and portraying that if you're not pro-Israel you must be some sort of antisemite.
There are all sorts of political ties along those lines, e.g. "Conservative Friends of Israel"[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Friends_of_Israel
[0] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israeli-embassy-rep-caug...
[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220214-espionage-is-a-di...
Are you really surprised? I'd be surprised if the UK and its media made a fuss about it. Certainly we won't be making a fuss about it here in the US that's for sure. I'd imagine russia and china wishes they had 1/10th the influence that israel has in the US/UK. Say what you want about israel, but for such a tiny country, it punches far above its weight.
The idea that this is the “main” problem in the UK is frankly laughable.
Controversially, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Lebedev has been ennobled and is now qualified to sit in the House of Lords, most definitely a position of power though he has not as yet chosen to appear there as far as I know. It turns out that Unelected Lords are also permitted to be ministers in the cabinet, so...
The only surprise here is that he's Labour, not Tory.
Half of the current Great Offices of State are held by brown people under the Tories, who also had the first Jewish PM, the first (and second, and only) female PMs, and then there's Saj who's been Chancellor and Home Secretary, and I reckon is about as likely as Sunak to be the next PM. They appointed the first female, gay head of the Met Police, and the leader of the party in Scotland was also a gay woman for 8 very recent years.
Some of these people are clearly the worst of British politics (hello Priti Patel!), but the Tories have an excellent record of putting people who aren't straight, white, Christian men into positions of power.
What on Earth are you talking about?
10% of parliament are from ethnic minorities (including many high profile positions, Tories included), against a UK background of 14%.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...
9% of parliament identifies as gay/bi against a UK background of 5%.
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/12/31/lgbt-mps-gay-lesbian-b...
It is quite likely the next PM will be of Pakistani or Indian ancestry (unless it’s a Labour PM; they have a poor record of promoting minorities to the top of Government) It's simply not true that the UK is xenophobic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli
The rabbit hole goes deeper, keep digging! They can't keep the truth hidden forever.
So the US has responded, quite forcefully, to people much lower on the food chain being hacked by Pegasus.
See: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/the-s...
I wonder how this is enforced in practice? I have to assume Israel has retailer shops where anybody can just buy whatever, most likely even Dell laptops and monitors.
I think Realpolitik is the reason why and that's all I'm going to say about that.
Last year:
The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, warned Boris Johnson in a text message that UK-Saudi Arabian relations would be damaged if the British government failed to intervene to “correct” the Premier League’s “wrong” decision not to allow a £300m takeover of Newcastle United last year.
As for the NSO, it is rather likely that the UK government itself is a client. In fact taking all of that into account it isn't unlikely that the UK government is more than just a customer and was already aware of being "hacked". But that's all I'm going to say about that.
the sale has been stalled for more than a year at that point , the league had decided arbitrarily to put a fitness check and delay(not reject) the deal. Roman, usmanov (minority holder ) and Abu Dhabi sovereign fund are current owners of major clubs before Saudi Arabia .
The stalling and later approval has nothing to do with concerns of sportswashing (PL has sold out any morality they had long before then). The block and later approval was mostly because Qatar was pissed .
Qatar owns PSG , hosting 2022 World Cup and most importantly owns lucrative PL broadcast rights in Middle East.
beIN with Saudi government informal support has been streaming matches illegally. Complicating this Qatar for last 4/5 years has been pretty much isolated in Middle East and kicked out of many forums in unrelated diplomatic fights.
In the end Saudi paid 1Billion pounds to Qatar to settle that dispute before Newcastle could be bought.
Sovereign/government influence peddling and involving in sports clubs is nothing new. Real Madrid has benefited a lot over the years , west ham got a brand new stadium for nothing , even in the U.S. favorable policies , tax breaks are used heavily to attract sports teams at city /state level all the time.
Democracy or dictators sports are cheap trick to improve ratings , it has been used at least since gladiators in Rome as a tool.
My intention is not defend Saudi actions just that it is not surprising governments were involved.
Disclaimer : I am a Newcastle fan
As-salamu alaykum
I reckon the fans of rival clubs will absolutely terrorize you with taunting going forth.
I had to look them up. Today I Learned about one of the earliest football paintings in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunderland_A.F.C.#/media/File:...
That is pretty neat actually.
I don't really follow football but I do enjoy the shit talking. This seems like a fun team to root for actually :)
No, I cannot explain.
I don't support the team, but I still found the series quite fascinating and found myself rooting for them to succeed. I was surprised to see two of my university friends in the show - Sophie (one of the backroom staff who clashed with the management) and another friend who happened to be in the crowd and got an extreme-closeup before/after a goal in one of the match sequences.
I would rather be taunted and be in the conversation rather than fade away as a once good club .
Newcastle were good once? ;-)
The UK itself is one of the largest weapon exporters in the world, exporting to many countries in the Middle East with dubious human rights track records. The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol, bullet, missile or drone they sell (if they could, nobody would be buying):
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_arms_export
A private Israeli company is exporting weapons to the same countries the UK does, and when those weapons get used inappropriately, you're then "surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel".
By the same account, are you suggesting that there should be a major diplomatic incident between every country in the world and the UK/USA every time they catch terrorists somewhere around the world using either UK/USA built-or-designed firearms?
There wouldn't be any diplomatic relationships left then:
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_firearms
This is a 69 minutes podcast episode, I'm not in a position to listen to all of it and try and pick out the relevant details. A lot of links are provided, but again - which of those are relevant here? Skimmed through some of them, and they don't even touch on this specific issue at-all?
As I've mentioned before, I'm not challenging your assertions - I'm looking for credible proof that NSO can tell, at any given moment, which specific people are being targeted by the clients/governments to which NSO is licensing its' software.
The reason I bring that up is that it's precisely the service you might offer if you wanted more plausible deniability. I still don't consider this hugely complex stuff.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/whatsapp-israe...
—-
According to WhatsApp’s filing, NSO gained “unauthorised access” to its servers by reverse-engineering the messaging app and then evading the company’s security features that prevent manipulation of the company’s call features. One WhatsApp engineer who investigated the hacks said in a sworn statement submitted to the court that in 720 instances, the IP address of a remote server was included in the malicious code used in the attacks. The remote server, the engineer said, was based in Los Angeles and owned by a company whose data centre was used by NSO.
NSO has said in legal filings that it has no insight into how government clients use its hacking tools, and therefore does not know who governments are targeting.
But one expert, John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, who has worked with WhatsApp on the case, said NSO’s control of the servers involved in the hack suggests the company would have had logs, including IP addresses, identifying the users who were being targeted.
“Whether or not NSO looks at those logs, who knows? But the fact that it could be done is contrary to what they say,” Scott-Railton said.
In a statement to the Guardian, NSO stood by its earlier remarks. “Our products are used to stop terrorism, curb violent crime, and save lives. NSO Group does not operate the Pegasus software for its clients,” the company said. “Our past statements about our business, and the extent of our interaction with our government intelligence and law enforcement agency customers, are accurate.”
You say that, but UK export law imposes a bunch of conditions, including that you're not knowingly facilitating resale to embargoed countries. And the legality of exports to Saudi Arabia has been litigated - it's legal, but only just.
Both the UK and Israel have export law, complete with conditions and legal frameworks for enforcement. It surely reduces the possibility of weapons ending up in the wrong hands, but it doesn't eliminate it completely. Regardless, it still doesn't imply that the manufacturers themselves or the jurisdictions they are incorporated in should somehow bear blanket responsibility for misuse.
Cyber-weapons and spying are particularly complex from this perspective, because it can be difficult to draw the lines on what constitutes as "misuse". Especially when the operator of the weapon is part of a government (a law-enforcement agency, for example), and when the victim is a citizen of a foreign jurisdiction.
With this out of the way, we're only really left with the "legal, but immoral" argument. I'm not going to argue against that (mainly because this is where things get very subjective and nuanced) - but I will say that the bar for holding an entire government accountable by invocation of "major diplomatic incidents" should be higher than that.
Oh, yes they would. And they do. Quite fucking happily, too.
There will always be cyberweapon brokers. If not NSO, then someone else. And money talks.
Why would there be any oversight? What you need is plausible deniability.
I’d prefer if they started selling Pegasus to absolutely anyone at all. Like, online, for $999 a month or something. Maybe then there will be actual efforts to patch the vulnerabilities that are being exploited for it to work.
There's a big difference between an underground group doing it in semi-secrecy, vs a state-sponsored company doing it publicly. With said company somehow not being sued into the ground or said country's action not being taken as an act of war in situations like this.
> I’d prefer if they started selling Pegasus to absolutely anyone at all
The high value of what they offer comes from the scarcity, which result in lower likelihood of it being patched.
Implying Israel has anything to do with NSO or that the government is behind it, coupled with the amount of attention this gets relative to a company like Italian based Hacking Team (which both the FBI and Russian government made business with) is cause for concern. Is this hacker news or culturally biased vent club?
I think the domain cyclonefront is nice for a new forum, don't you? You can be an admin there, grow a short mustache and do quarter jumping-jacks.
While NSO isn't part of the government, their work and existence is obviously very much endorsed and allowed by their government.
Of course the problem is that these services are geared towards protecting the state, as distinct from the people. It is a distinctly unpleasant legacy of the cold war. We'll learn the hard way before there's a change of mindset.
The justification that "somebody else would have done it" is morally bankrupt, of course, as shown in Nuremberg or the Eichmann trial. It's also just not true: by definition, the alternative would be worse in some way, or it would have been the first choice from the beginning. For simple products, the margin between the knife you are selling and the next-best choice might indeed be small. For nuclear weapons, the marginal product is 100 % less useful, as far as I can tell: there is no other seller. For tanks, you can probably get some Sowjet era relics if you know the right people in the 'stans, which will be significantly worse than western state-of-the-art but not entirely useless.
I'd say Pegasus is somewhere between the tank and the nuclear bomb on that spectrum, right now. Which might well be the point where export controls are most useful, because they also reduce the need and incentive for others to enter the market as buyers and sellers, respectively.
If we can't stop Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, thinking that we can stop sale of software is, mildly speaking, delusional.
I also fail to see the relevance to Nuremberg trials, because this is a simple matter of supply and demand. There definitely is demand.
I don't see any nukes in Iran.
Maybe because "we" kept that from happening, idk.
I am not convinced if we way we treated Iran is justified, but thats a different suvject. And after Ukraine, noone will. Ever give up nukes
Besides, governments also tend not to want to be scrutinized on moral ground for trading war assets of any kind.
Why should I be enraged if government officials were put under surveillance? They made abundantly clear that they are in favor of increased monitoring. Their secret surveillance programs were laid open.
So how do you propose they should do better?
» Why should I be enraged if government officials were put under surveillance?
I am not worried about the officials themselves but the people who talk to them. Once again, the next thought leader, who could be but will never be because of the surveillance and subsequent actions.
It doesn't even have to be malicious, there are people working in these agencies that are trained to follow orders. They believe intrinsically that what they do is necessary for security. No appeal will ever work, just a tight corset of regulation or protections by law that have actual teeth with heavy sanctions against misconduct. Today some agencies just blatantly disregard the most fundamental laws. If you scrap those you don't even need terrorists anymore, you did it all to yourself.
That's thr rub isn't it - if you startva security agency thst does terrible things, it will hire people that can somehow justify and rationalise those terrible things
Very few people in KGB or whatever thought that they did anything wrong
Then there is the other dimension where corporations just help the worst dictators for profit or provide surveillance capability against the population. Almost all major names in tech are guilty here to certain degrees. Some more than others, but there are no morals in business. Especially not with investment mechanisms like ESG or similar constructs to provide wellness to rich investors, but that is another topic.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/05/25/oracle-social-media-surv...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220328071032/https://www.nytim...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ceCOhdgRBoc
There was only minor fallout from this incident, and I imagine it will be the same here.
If russia did that, they would be treated a lot differently than israel or eg. USA.
Russia poisoned multiple British nationals with chemical and radioactive weapons on British soil and got away with it scot-free.
He doesn't hide his opinions, some of which are quite strongly worded, but I don't think that makes him less worthwhile as an observer. I'd say he is less of a fact-finder/whistleblower and more of an analyser/commenter.
I personally find his articles insightful and nuanced.
Actually Yes Minster joked about surveillance put on certain ministers. Can watch for fun. Sitcoms nowadays rarely talk about political issues.
UAE on the other hand is a decrepit money laundering people smuggling cesspit and should face the full brunt of Iran/Russia style sanctions.
For all we know the security services already knew about this and were feeding false info to manipulate the UAE. Heck, the Israelis might have even tipped us off, I'm sure they value their relationship to us much more than with the UAE. I'd give it at least 50/50 Munk School trying to 'help' us just trashed a perfectly good MI6 counterintelligence op. That's the sort of way these things work.
Yeah, I agree. The western nations which built their lead through brutal colonialism and presently maintain that lead with neo-colonialism structures where brutal governments (Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE) do the dirty work which they (western countries) ostensibly condemn.
How about this: let’s have the western countries leave the world alone. Let’s have the western countries abandon their profit by misery business models (eg western arms industries which profiteer by instigating conflict and supplying aggressors).
It all depends who the (UK) Government is "friends" with. Let's not forget the infamous Russian Novichok poisoning cases in Salisbury - those naughty Russians! The Saudis execute 81 citizens in a day, and Boris visits the day after to beg for oil and gas - those naughty Saudis!
I'm not surprised it isn't a major diplomatic incident!
If the Israelis were going to veto a country's use of the software, it's reasonable to assume that the country was intelligent enough not to tell them what they were doing with it.
NSO maintains control and is semi-actively involved in the exploitation (NSO servers are used and they control this access). This is very different from selling someone a knife that is later used in a murder.
There is a very good Darknet Diaries breakdown of what the NSO group can and cannot do - https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/ - and despite their claims otherwise, the evidence strongly points to them being complicit in attacks rather than just being a vendor.