Exposed: How Israeli Spies Control Your VPN
mintpressnews.com
mintpressnews.com
https://www.privacyjournal.net/kape-technologies/
which closes with:
If you decide you can’t trust any Kape-owned VPN, or if you need a VPN for highly sensitive activities such as torrenting or protecting your journalistic sources, there are plenty of independent services you can use instead. Take a look at my Proton VPN review or Mullvad review for two of the most private.Link for anyone who missed this story from April, it's not linked in the article:
Stated that I think it's much more interesting is that the maker of most airport security scanner in the world (~84%) is an Israeli intelligence linked company (Vidisco) https://ransomwareattacks.halcyon.ai/attacks/vidisco-ltd-hit... so they can easily makes any items "not seen" i.e. with a simple tag the scanner read and ignore then the real content showing something harmless. This is just an example of why we need MANDATORY FLOSS and open hardware where anything is developed from zero in a public manner to been able to check what's up via public research made by public universities to make it hard slip agreements here and there.
No end-to-end encryption no claims of privacy allowed.
We pinky promise not to tell anyone is not 'privacy' feature.
If you need a proxy on steroid to watch netflix from another country well, use any commercial VPN, but ONLY for the needed purpose, not for the rest of your traffic.
Your ISP can snoop on you LESS than a commercial VPN vendor, especially if such vendor is based in exotic places without privacy laws, while obviously claiming the contrary in advertisements. There is NO PRIVACY PURPOSE for using commercial VPNs.
Let's say you are in countries where porn is forbidden, from Saudi Arabia to South Korea, and you want to hide from locals, ok, you knows your porn habits are known by an offshore unknown company but formally not to the local government, formally, because they might have agreements you do not know and typically VPN providers exists in countries with zero customer protections.
The only VPN you can trust is a FLOSS one, like WireGuard, OpenVPN etc, between hosts you own, and they just guarantee the channel, meaning if you have an Android/iOS device with a VPN link between the phone and you home, the phone itself is not trustable since it's a proprietary device remotely handled by it's OEM/third parties, some you might not even know.
A simple example: let's say you have a secure messaging system, your messages will travel hidden from third parties, but you type them with a virtual keyboard, witch is a typically connected application, who talk aside with their creator: who care about your secure messages since they can snoop them as you type them?
The whole point is the level of secrecy you want. Just downloading pirated materials (like most people do, even if formally it's illegal nearly everywhere) appearing from another country to avoid local laws like Hadopi well, essentially nobody care for real so you might feel safe enough. Being an activist in a dictatorship well, it's a far different thing and in that case the top security is not using integrated electronics at all, like exchanging manually encrypted and hand-sewn in some peer dress (an old but still valid WWII technique), when that's not an option you could trust a bit OLD desktop iron (little firmware's inside) running a FLOSS OS in fully FLOSS stack, like messaging via I2P.
For all evil things Google does, at least it isn't booby trapping consumer electronics with explosives and putting them in the market yet, as far as I know.
Israel is defending against war crimes that went on for months. The wining about Hezbollah infrastructure and leaders being targeted is pretty rich.
However the idea that this was a precisely targeted operation is pure fiction. Mossad understands perfectly well that Hezbollah is a "horizontal" organization, widely permeated in Lebanese society. And though the pagers themselves seem to have wound up in mostly in the intended hands, Mossad knew also that, at the time of their detonation, they would be located would be be wherever the operatives were: in homes, taxis, grocery stores, cafes, hospitals, on street corners, and apparently (per news reports) at at least one funeral.
That's how we ended up with a large if not yet precisely known proportion of civilian deaths and maimings (the latter category being vastly larger of course -- including a staggering 300 cases of persons losing one or both eyes). Unfortunately we're still lacking in reliable reports, as world attention has moved onto other atrocities. But according to the Lebanese Health Ministry the deaths included 2 children and 4 health workers (one Hezbollah-affiliated), among some 42 total. From this it seems reasonable to extrapolate a "non-affiliated" ratio of at least 20 percent, likely higher.
None of which would have been accidental from Mossad's point of view. If anything, we can be entirely sure these numbers (and the fact that they would surely include children), along with all the horrifying scenes reported in hospital rooms in the immediate aftermath, are in close agreement with the thoughtful, meticulous predictions they made when they decided to sit down and press the buttons for these attacks.
Finally:
I don't believe anyone can name a more targeted military operation.
This is just silly of course, as every large war (including the current one in Ukraine) includes countless incidents of military installations being precisely targeted with 100+ entirely military KIA, and so forth.
Of course hitting an air field will likely not kill civilians, but that is not a sensible comparison.
Wars can have up to 90% civilian casualty rate, 60%-70% in most modern conflicts.
Their operation was impressive and targeted and it crippled the enemy that launched rockets into Israel for months.
On Sept. 17, just before 3:30 p.m., the small waiting room of Dr. Nour’s three-room pediatrics clinic in southern Beirut was packed. A mother was waiting to get preschool checkups for her three children. Two elderly patients were booked in for cataract treatments at the ophthalmologist office next door. Sitting next to them was a young couple whom Nour, whose name has been changed for security reasons, had not met before. The father bounced a 10-day-old baby on his lap. Clipped to his belt was a Gold Apollo Rugged Pager.
Nour brought the young couple into her examination room. She pulled out a blank file for the newborn and wrote his name: Aiman. She placed him on the scales: a little over 7 pounds. She lay Aiman on his back on an examination table and began to record his weight. As she did so, the man’s pager beeped twice.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached down to silence it.
As he did so, about an ounce of explosives concealed within the pager detonated, sending shards of metal and fragments of its thick plastic casing out in all directions. The shrapnel tore deep wounds in the man’s abdomen, lodged in the ceiling of the clinic and lacerated the face of the baby as he lay on his back. Nour was thrown backward as the room filled with dust. She could not see through the smoke, but she could hear the woman’s voice shouting: “Aiman!”
Nour did not know that scenes like these were being repeated all over Lebanon. Simultaneously, some 4,000 booby-trapped pagers that had been handed out to members of Hezbollah began beeping and then exploded. In shops, in houses and on sidewalks across the country, pagers blasted their users as well as anyone in their vicinity with small clouds of shrapnel.
It is unfortunate that innocents do get hurt by military action, but the point remains.
I read it / fact checked and it wasn’t obviously inaccurate.
A simple example
"Unit 8200, for example, has been the source of much of the world’s most infamous spying software, including Cellebrite and Pegasus"
Cellebrite and Pegasus aren't products of Unit 8200. They are not the source of them. At best one can say that alumni of 8200 created them (or if one wants to get the closest the source, "products" (i.e. alumni) of 8200 created them).
The language they use is not accurate and they do it purposefully to be inflammatory.
If they wanted to write Unit 8200 has trained a pipeline of people that these companies can gobble up, that would be accurate. But how is that fundamentally different than MIT, Stanford et al training a pipeline of people that go to big tech firms that also arguably violate privacy? Would we blame the schools for the privacy violations or simply blame the companies their alumni work for?
> But how is that fundamentally different than MIT, Stanford et al training a pipeline of people that go to big tech firms that also arguably violate privacy?
Unit 8200 is a military intelligence unit focused on online spying and hacking right?
Isn’t the implied fundamental difference clear?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Affiliated_Research...
https://ras.mit.edu/grant-and-contract-administration/sponso...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Lincoln_Laboratory?useskin...
you should also consider how much of different research about cybersecurity/hacking comes from universities.
The point of comparing alumni of 8200 to a university was to give the more favorable reading to the concept of "product" of, but why I also dont think its a fair reading.
MintPress News supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and the governments of Russia, Iran, and Syria. In one contentious article, MintPress News asserted that the Ghouta chemical attack in Syria was perpetrated by rebel groups rather than by the Syrian government, a claim pushed by the Russian and Syrian governments and rejected by much of the international community.
Because of the former's highly Kool-aidy and ideological slant, and the nonsense conspiracy theories it regularly peddles. You don't notice that stuff?
Hardly any news outlets are trying anymore, so I can see why you think that.
That seems to be the conventional wisdom. I sometimes get on newspapers.com (not free, unfortunately) for my articles, and for the Pullman Strike series I used the NYT for excerpts. This was 1894-95.
So no, it's not futile; it's just difficult. They were doing it, and that's part of what made them the "newspaper of record" (a rep which they're busy squandering now).
I'll refrain from the shameless self-promotion for a change and not include links, but I posted all of them to HN. Or of course you could use the 7-day free trial on newspapers.com.
As for your last, sentence: no, the adjective "genocidal" is not OK. "Unbiased" would be a description of what the army is doing, with another story "Does this qualify as genocide?" Or quotes from organizations calling it genocide.
a) Giving one side a favorable treatment
b) not presenting the full argument of the other
c) missing the viewpoint of a third, fourth, etc. side
d) when one side is just plain wrong, not presenting it as wrong, but of equal merit.
e) etc.
The bias can be as simple as who you present as the subject in your headline.
As for the Pullman strikes, I don‘t know much about the subject but when the New York Times called it: a struggle between the greatest and most important labor organization and the entire railroad capital. (quote I got from Wikipedia) they were definitely showing a bias, theirs just happened be judged better by history than the rest of the journalistic world at the time who had a different and much worse bias (and as such much more obvious in hindsight).
"Unbiased" means presenting the facts: what actually happened. You're right; it's not the same as "presenting both sides."
Nowadays, "bothsideism" is considered a mortal sin in journalism and only the facts that support a particular viewpoint should be transmitted. Any other facts are d/misinformation and should be censored.
Exactly. As Edward R. Murrow used to say,
"Don't tell me what you think. Tell me what you know."
I’m also not sure this is actually an Edward R. Murrow quote. I went looking but couldn’t find the source. The closes I found was:
> American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.
https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1084314
Which actually place more into what I’m saying, that a good journalist will tell a truthful story with the aim of persuading people of their viewpoint (which hopefully is a worthy one; not e.g. denying a genocide)
The quote you presented I only found one instance of on the web which was here:
> I learned from my first daily newspaper editor, when I was pitching a story about improper personal favors dispensed by local government to a prominent landowner, that my suspicions meant nothing until I could prove it. “Don’t tell me what you think, tell me what you know,” the late Joe Ellis, editor and publisher of the Clarksdale (Mississippi) Press-Register, admonished me.
https://virginiamercury.com/2021/02/01/dont-tell-me-what-you...
And even here the context around the quote is advocating for using true stories to persuade the readers of a certain viewpoint, that corrupt politicians are bad actually.
The context here of Mintpress News being a heavily biased journal—which they undoubtedly are—presenting a true story while trying to persuade readers that a genocidal army is doing other bad things. This is good journalism actually.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/12/gaza-d...
[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/4/18/satellite-...
[4] https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/...
[5] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-07-29/ty-article/.p...
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SLwaodt_Rw
[7] https://www.fao.org/newsroom/detail/gaza-geospatial-data-sho...
How many of those killed were actually Hamas fighters?