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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> Initially, the NSO sought to block all discovery in the lawsuit, "due to various US and Israeli restrictions," but that blanket request was denied.

Interesting approach. The court could probably care less about Israeli restrictions as it's a different country.

Officially US govt blacklisted Pegasus https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/11/us-blacklists-ma.... However, I wouldn't be surprised if some US spy agencies are still using it. If that's the case, Pegasus might try asking US intel agencies to block the case on the basis of disclose of classified info or harming national interests.

It would be interesting to see if all of the sudden "something happens" and the case is mysteriously dropped.

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I doubt US spy agencies still use it in any official capacity.

Far easier to just request and obtain the resulting intelligence from partner intelligence organizations who are using it.

Arms-length collection is less legally perilous.

But which does bode poorly for any assertion of national security in US courts! "Are you using this software?" "Officially, no." "Then on what basis do you claim national security?"

I don't know much in this space, but if I'm the US Gov I'm happy that all of the attention is on Pegasus and not other (presumably) tens (hundreds) of similar programs out there.

Thanks to the FISA "court" system, I doubt US spy agencies fear any legal reprecussions.

No need to follow the law if you have a secret court where no one has standing to challenge your actions.

Omnipotent and yet completely legally-neutered FISA is a lazy excuse to avoid thinking about things.

There are no illuminati.

There are powerful institutions, who nonetheless fear other powerful institutions.

In this case, intelligence preferring to remain out of the courts and newspapers.

  There are no illuminati.

Interesting psyops to conflate corruption with "illuminati"..

Who said anything about illuminatis? Does FISA effectively allow intelligence agencies to hide stuff or not? And can you show me a concrete example of IA actually getting punished from other powerful institutions in any meaningful way?

FISA allows them to conduct it legally. It doesn't have anything to do with hiding.

Before FISA, they generally just did it, without asking anyone.

And press reports on intelligence operations led directly to the Church/Pike Committees, which led to EO 11905/12036.

Who exactly was punished by that EO? You are proving my point, even the most "push back" IAs have seen in terms of concrete actions against them led to... a directive that forbid them from murdering people in foreign countries. No actual consequences for anyone involved, no one got even a slap on the wrist in terms of actual consequences. And that's after the church committee, which revealed some super damning stuff.

Oh, and they went back to doing it after a few decades.

Are you really asking me to cite classified operations?

And the fact that subsequent Executive Orders explicitly loosened the reigns on intelligence collection (and assassination with respect to "terrorists") indicates that yes, the original orders did restrict intelligence operations.

It sounds like you are claiming that IA’s have been punished for their abuses, but we’ll just have to trust you on it because the punishments were classified operations. Doesn’t make sense at all, unless you’re saying that the punishments were certain spy chiefs secretly murdered or something.

You make a good point. While people may have an issue with FISA being opaque they do not consider that maybe it being opaque is good for reasons that cannot be explained. With an explanation like that, how could anyone have a problem with such a thing?

> There are powerful institutions, who nonetheless fear other powerful institutions.

They don't "fear" other powerful institution. Just like chess players, they "game" with each other.

The problem with FISA as I understand it is not illuminati. It's that the court probably approves almost everything the government asks for without scrutiny. In general, most courts probably have issues like this -- when their job might be oversight and scrutiny they end up as a rubber stamp for the powerful, like cops, prosecutors, etc. For FISA it's especially bad because decisions and arguments made aren't public.

But it nonetheless exists and could be reformed if there were political will. There was a (much worse) time when FISA didn't exist.

There can also be a future time in which something even stronger exists!

It's annoying to get low-effort whatabout'isms that are justifications for inaction on the basis that nothing will ever change.

It has and it can.

I don't think I'm doing whataboutism by stating common criticisms of US criminal justice and of FISA.

Although, having considered these topics over the years, I am skeptical that we will do better. Humans are flawed. Truth and justice are hard to achieve, even with the best intentions. Anyone involved with these topics -- judges, prosecutors, lawmakers -- should have a very high sense of humility in what they are doing. Often they do not.

> Far easier to just request and obtain the resulting intelligence from partner intelligence organizations who are using it.

Couldnt they ask to spy on a phone owned by them to try to learn how the phones are infected?

couldn't* care less

Much as it may pain you, “could care less” is an established idiom in American English that’s been in use for 70 years, and Webster’s dictionary has a whole page about it: https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/could-couldnt-care-l..., in which they say:

> people who go through life expecting informal variant idioms in English to behave logically are setting themselves up for a lifetime of hurt.

I couldn't care less if there's a group of people misusing the phrase, logically "I could care less" means the exact opposite of "I couldn't care less".

The majority of the world is not American, and presumably the majority of Americans don't use the incorrect phrase, so why should the rest of the world cater for a minority within a minority by putting their butchered phrase on equal footing with the correct phrase?

Because you knew what they meant and trying to correct them only serves to make you feel good about your own knowledge.

You aren't helping anyone when you correct them on this.

I agree. I've learned to not care when people say 'expresso' instead of 'espresso', and 'ex cetera' instead of 'et cetera'. I know what they mean, you know what they mean, and correcting everyone only serves to alienate others.

A little kindness goes a long way.

> I've learned to not care when people say 'expresso' instead of 'espresso'

I stopped correcting people on stuff like this 20 years ago, but sadly haven’t been able to stop myself caring :-/ “Expresso” still grates

If you understood someone with difficulty, offering a correction is constructive, particularly on the web where editing is often easy.

It costs everyone time and effort to try to decode nonsensical input.

It's a crime against humanity to not correct grammar.

Does it? I decode it instantly and understand the meaning just like I know what a "fishbowl" is. There is no "decoding" or even nonsensical input in this case.

You are just being stubborn and trying to adhere to an outdated standard. Upgrade or get replaced.

But you are not everyone.

It’s not grammar and it’s not a correction. The phrase “I could care less” has only one meaning and that meaning is “I don’t care”. It is being used correctly.

Grammar nitpick derails like this one have wasted far more time than anyone saying "I could care less" ever has

If I make a mistake like this, please correct me. That's one way I can improve. This attitude of just not correcting people is idiotic.

It's on the person receiving the correction or criticism to ignore it if they wish. Not on people to be silent.

Like I could care less (but the "like" is silent)

It doesn't mean the opposite, though.

For a formal linguistic example, see the concept of compound words. The meaning of the compound word does not equal the meaning of any of the constituent words. Often because the definition of the constituent words has drifted over time while usage of the compound word remained fixed.

You may unilaterally think that's wrong because you wish to impose a set of rules on language that others don't share, but that's not how meaning works. A sentence is just a string of bits. Meaning comes from a shared consensus about how to parse those bits into meaning.

> You may unilaterally think that's wrong because you wish to impose a set of rules on language that others don't share, but that's not how meaning works.

'A set of rules' is called grammar. It may have arisen organically and out of 'shared consensus' but today languages only make sense when we maintain that grammar.

Imagine if the positions of the words in the above sentence were randomly jumbled up. It'd make no sense at all.

English is somewhat more lax than other languages about grammar (stemming from its extremely wide usage) while still being able to get the point through, but striving for correct grammar should always be a goal, even if 'the point has got through'.

Many other stricter and older Indo-European languages that haven't experienced as many changes as English has, can be machine-parsed like a programming language. Sanskrit and Latin come to mind.

The GP is talking semantics, you are talking syntax. We are failing the language game here.

> Imagine if the positions of the words in the above sentence were randomly jumbled up.

But "could care less" isn't random. It is an idiom that has the same meaning as "couldn't care less". If you fed it into a LLM it would know what you mean because meaning is created from global context. Meaning is not some kind of programming language where you input the rules of grammar and the definition of each constituent word, and then out pops the meaning of the sentence. It is impossible to derive meaning that way because meaning is constructed by shared consensus about what collections of words mean in different contexts according to common usage.

> But "could care less" isn't random. It is an idiom that has the same meaning as "couldn't care less".

That is what I meant by 'English is lax enough about its grammar that "the point still gets through"'. 'Could care less' being wrong but semantically understood is exactly along the lines of 'could of' being wrong but semantically understood as 'could've', or the frequent confusion between 'their' and 'they're', or even any other confusion between homophones in written text.

Certainly, most Anglophones know enough English to read past these sorts of mistakes and still understand the underlying meaning (i.e. semantics) from context, but they are all incorrect, full stop.

> but they are all incorrect, full stop.

I don't agree. Correctness is strictly determined by common usage. You're viewing language through the lens of a software engineer, where there are logical rules and primitives that combine together to construct outputs from inputs. Language isn't logically airtight like this. "Could care less" shouldn't be thought of as three words. Think of it as one single new word with its own meaning that has no necessary connection to the meaning of the constituent parts that make it up. Just like compound words and other idioms.

> I don't agree. Correctness is strictly determined by common usage.

Happy to agree to disagree, especially when there is this much teeth-gnashing about how 'correct' this usage is—just within this thread. My point about 'could of' was even brought up elsewhere.

> Language isn't logically airtight like this.

But it is—or at least, people make it so. In a world where what people say or write is regularly misconstrued/misinterpreted and lands them in jail, or persecuted, or even killed, I believe clarity, accuracy, (factual and syntactic) correctness, and honesty should be something that every writer should strive toward. Someone else brought up contronyms—which I believe ought to be avoided as much as possible because of their potential to cause much confusion even with context ('sanction' is a very powerful example).

This sort of wishy-washy 'it is correct because people understand it' only reminds me of 'alternate facts'. I don't like it and I wish people wouldn't put up with it.

> It doesn't mean the opposite, though.

It does in my English though, and it really really grates when I hear it. Just because a minority of people have started abusing the language doesn't mean I have to go along with it.

> compound words

Compound words like "afternoon" where the two words themselves make sense together? "couldcare" might be a compound word, but "could care" isn't. Plus, if I start to say "after noon" to mean "mid morning" then get pissed off when people call me out on my language butchery then perhaps my minority take and desire to impose it on the rest of the world would make me the person in the wrong.

And logically, flammable and inflammable mean the exact opposite, but here we are.

Not quite. "in" here as a prefix is not a negation thing but to _do_ something like "en" in "enhance" or "encapsulate". The word's actual latin root is "inflammare" which means to put something _in_ flames. The subject is the one doing the burning and it's transitive.

Flammable on the hand comes from "flammare", which means for something to catch fire, and is intransitive instead, i.e. the subject is the one catching fire.

The actual opposite of inflammable is uninflammable, which I reckon is only in British English at this point and mostly lost in American English.

In French we don't have flammable, only _inflammable_ (meaning that it CAN catch fire). And the opposite is _ininflammable_ ^^

Something in flames is "enflammé" (there is the en- prefix ^^).

As I’ve followed the news for many years now, not many things in France are inflammable :D

Contronyms are what you're referring to. Indeed, flammable/inflammable, also sanction/sanction (permit/punish) and other examples such as fast/fast (going quickly/held in place).

Still, I do find "I could care less" to be less of a contronym and more of an "Americanism". I'm quite used to it by now, and shall thereby sanction its use.

The majority of the world doesn't speak English, so why care about using correct English at all right? Btw American English is still the most common variant on the internet. More so than British English.

> The majority of the world doesn't speak English

And yet here we are.

To paraphrase David Mitchell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw), the problem is not so much the prevelance of American English, which in a lot of situations makes sense. eg. "sidewalk" makes a lot of sense, perhaps more, than "pavement" for the place that a pedestrian walks at the side of a road. "Parking lot" for a lot of land that is reserved for parking etc. The issue is that "could care less" means the opposite of what people intend them to mean, and they're just expecting the people listening to interpret what they mean.

One day, this reasoning will formalize the use of "would/could/should of" and I will rage quit English as a language.

The examples in that article do not actually argue for the point being made (that this has been going on for 70 years):

> His bearing towards male acquaintances, of whom he knew little or nothing and could care less, ...

Here, "could care less" refers to how little he knows about the male acquaintances, and is effectively saying he cares even less than the little he knows. When we see people write "could care less', they don't write it in the same context, at all.

And then:

> It is impossible that he could care less.

This is clearly a different way to write "couldn't care less", and is again not how we see people use the phrase "could care less".

That being said, "could care less" is definitely a thing of the last 10-20 years and is not going anywhere.

Why do they do this instead of just maintaining the correct usage? The redefining of the word “literal” to mean “potentially not literal” really grinds my gears.

I enjoy deliberately misinterpreting the nonsense idioms to frustrate their users.

Per my "troll metric" / rage bait/"le reddit quantification", formalized as a response's comment's conversational entropy divided by parent comment length, this is a fantastic comment.

Pure, distilled, thought provocation.

Thank you.

I love this humorous video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

What's "interesting" is that they claim protection available to governments, as if they speak and act on behalf of those governments.

Exactly, that's pretty odd. They could be delusional, just bluffing, or they really expect someone from the US government to put their finger on the scales for them, or make the scale disappear altogether.

It would be interesting to see if all of the sudden "something happens" and the case is mysteriously dropped.

Conspiracy theories notwithstanding you’d see a sealed court filing and not “something happens.”

Right. I don't know that I've ever just seen a case vanish from a docketing system like that...!

I would be very surprised if they were. Sanctions are no joke and there are plenty of Five Eye-aligned shops with similar capabilities.

Yep, here's TAG's (Threat Analysis Group) recent report on Commercial Surveillance Vendors (CSVs) making millions with SaaS-like business models: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/doc...

Apparently, the social & political elites worldwide are tripping themselves over to purchase licenses from these CSVs that cost millions.

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