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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

Why is NSO able to exist in Israel's legal and social culture? Most western societies wouldn't allow it except within police or military agencies.

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NSO develops cyber warfare weapons, it sees itself like any other weapons company building guns or tanks and it's regulated the same way.

Building a tank factory is legal if you pay taxes and only sell your tanks to whomever the government lets you. Killing someone with a tank is not.

However, in this case NSO also operates the tank / spyware. They are more like weapons company and an army for hire at the same time, where you can't just buy the weapons and use them yourself.

NSO claims they don’t operate, and instead their clients/customers run the software from their own infrastructure.

What? There are NSO equivalents in many European countries. A certain Italian company was famously counter-hacked and run out of business by vigilant hackers.

> Most western societies wouldn't allow it except within police and military agencies.

The answer is partially included in the latter part of your comment. Companies like NSO are "out-sourced" entities of the Israeli intelligence apparatus. If the shit hits the fan, as it happened in this company's case, then the intelligence agencies can say that they had nothing to do with it all.

NSO was almost acquired by a US defense contractor, and would have been if the Biden administration hadn't stopped it. NSO is not an "outsourced entity of the Israeli intelligence apparatus", at least not in way that Oracle or Cisco aren't also.

There are companies like NSO all over the world, many competing in the same legal jurisdiction. Like I said upthread: nobody on HN has a weird theory about how an Auckland CNE/xdev shop is an arm of NZSIS, but everyone thinks they understand the IDF well enough to attribute NSO to it.

Probably because Israel is in the news more frequently than NZ.

I'm sure that has a lot to do with it, but equally sure that has very little to do with which commercial CNE firms you should pay attention to.

> HN has a weird theory about how an Auckland CNE/xdev shop is an arm of NZSIS

Some of us do, i.e. even though we might have never personally heard of those companies we almost automatically equate cybersecurity/surveillance stuff with state entities. In this geopolitical climate it would be foolish not to do it.

The thing that is different with Israel is that it has got its mandatory 2-year military conscription and that it has a dedicated cyber unit which is manned by fresh and very bright conscripts. Afaik no other state entity around the world has that.

Nobody needs to conscript CNE operators. Students compete to get slots in these organizations.

I did a bit of digging on this just now, since I was curious why the Biden administration would want to stop a US defense contractor from pursuing this acquisition. Strictly from a strategic perspective, the purchase seems like it would have benefited the US, since NSO possesses uniquely valuable capabilities, and bringing them under the wing of a US defense contractor would mean the US would get to determine which zero-days it kept for itself and which it parsed out to its allies.

According to The Guardian:

"...a senior White House official suggested that any possible deal could be seen as an effort by a foreign government to circumvent US export control measures. The senior White House official also said that a transaction with a blacklisted company involving any American company – particularly a cleared defence contractor – 'would spur intensive review to examine whether the transaction poses a counterintelligence threat to the US government and its systems and information'.

...

There were other complications. The Israeli ministry of defence would have had to sign off on any takeover of NSO surveillance technology by a US company and it is far from clear whether officials were willing to bless any deal that took control of NSO’s licences away from Israel.

...the person also said that the deal faced several unresolved issues, including whether the technology would be housed in Israel or the US and whether Israel would be allowed to continue to use the technology as a customer." [1]

Of these obstacles, it seems like the biggest was related to counter-intelligence, i.e. that the Israeli intelligence services could feed any disinformation they liked to the American intelligence services via NSO? That's how I read this, anyway. I'm a noob to this though, and would love to be corrected if I'm wrong.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/10/us-defence-f...

You really don't have to be a government to do this sort of stuff. I know people who work for these kinds of companies (which does NOT make me happy, fwiw; one of them really really needs a job and is constantly applying elsewhere, but feels stuck), and many of them exist in western societies. Hacking Team got a lot of press a while back because a ton of their e-mails were stolen and leaked to Wikileaks, showing the extent of their client base, and they are run out of Italy (though they got bought a few years ago, apparently; the article referenced about it on Wikipedia is in Italian, so maybe the new company is also Italian, but I'd be shocked if it were not also in western society, so it really doesn't matter that much exactly where).

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

There are companies like NSO in most developed countries.

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