EU funds are flowing into spyware companies and politicians demanding answers | Hacker News Reader

EU funds are flowing into spyware companies and politicians demanding answers

theregister.com

214 pointsBender72 comments

It's good they look into this, but if we're talking about spyware, I'd like to see more MEPs urging the Council to oppose ChatControl.

If that passes that's not just EU funds being misused but the EU directly mandating spyware on a continental scale!

Which would, of course, primarily benefit… spyware companies.

What the MEPs in SEDE mean by spyware in this case is exploit and root kits being deployed by member states Interior/Home Affairs ministries and targeted at MEPs - not "mass surveillance" (which SEDE is largely indifferent about).

Spyware in EP parlance means rootkits and zero-day exploits.

This is largely a result of Predator which was co-developed in Czechia and Israel.

Chat Control is being heavily lobbied for by a… spyware company. Cof, sorry, cof, a for-the-good-of-the-children company.

The only error in your post is this "by a… spyware company". There are, unfortunately, more than one company (paying for) lobbying this.

> I'd like to see more MEPs urging the Council to oppose ChatControl

They are exempt, but exemption won't help if they get hit by spyware.

While at the same time we still do not have von der Leyen's FOI dodging SMS messages.

Chat control is not for little dogs. /s

This saga has been going on for a couple years now [0]. A number of CEE and Southern European countries like Spain, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Romania, and others heavily leverage this kind of tooling [1] and continue to have extremely strong interior ministries and weak democratic controls.

It's also helped create a boom in the cybersecurity industry, and helped build the hiring pipeline most American and Israeli cybersecurity firms are using in the CEE today.

[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/parliament-defense-subcommit...

[1] - https://vsquare.org/pegasus-spyware-poland-hungary-slovakia-...

> It's also helped create a boom in the cybersecurity industry, and helped build the hiring pipeline most American and Israeli cybersecurity firms are using in the CEE today.

Huge part of my decades long IT career is linked with Polish IT industry and I have no idea what are you talking about. Poland is most likely spending heavy millions on Israeli and American spyware mostly used to consolidate power internally.

Poland isn't the only country in the CEE.

Try visiting Czechia sometime. That's where exploit dev is largely consolidated thanks to the OS dev teams MS and RedHat offshored there decades ago plus Avast which developed a OS dev and detections engineering pipeline, and the Israeli FDI boom that started a decade ago to take advantage of that.

Poland's scene is mostly Incident Response and SOC, but the Polish talent pool has started climbing up the ladder.

> Try visiting Czechia sometime

Linked with US and Israel even tighter, now because of let's call it "a family connection".

> OS dev teams MS and RedHat offshored

Their pinnacle achievement is antivirus for Windows and MS Teams.

I don't know what your point it.

Denying the role a number of CEE countries play in detection engineering and exploit development isn't helping if you actually care about reducing this kind of erosion.

And I have always used CEE to denote all of Central and Eastern Europe, not just Poland.

Poland specifically bought Pegasus from Israelis. There is a parliamentary commission investigating this, everything is public so you can google it. Poland does not develop its own exploits or have domestic spyware firms that target journalists. Unless you have proof to the contrary, what you wrote is not true.

Re-read what I wrote.

Since the beginning of time wealthy people spy on poor people. They hunger for the power, burning in their heart eternally. There is no stopping it.

This is not related to wealth. And I am not sure than the EU leaders are that "wealthy".

This has all to do with the authoritarian tendencies of Europeist movements/ideology.

The EU leaders serve the wealthy. Obviously.

But up to now they didn't ?

I don’t doubt this is the case in modern times but I doubt they have spied on the poor since the beginning of time since there was little reason to spy on powerless illiterates. They spied on known enemies or rivals sure but not on the masses since there was little reason to do so. It was also costly to do so.

Maybe not "spying" per se, but oppressors have always kept enough tabs on the oppressed to keep them oppressed for as long as possible, often without the oppressed knowing exactly how. Maybe "spying" after all.

I think it helped that things were more tribal back then. Enemies could sack and pillage if opportunity presented itself. That presented peasants/commoners/etc. a disincentive to defect. It's not like an outsider would be friendly to a defector in most cases. This provided a bond to the local warlord/chieftain/etc. Essentially it was a fear-factor to not defect because things would be worse. Plus, these people had few possessions. They basically only had their labor and the clothes on their backs. They had very little power. A population that had tenuous leadership would soon be easy pickings for a neighboring rival to swoop in and potentially make things worse.

I agree with a sibling poster that it's not necessarily about wealth. I think it's about power.

Those who attain power are corrupted enough to seek to hold on to it; and spying on those you govern is one of the ways to hold on to that power. “What are they up to? Scheming? Against me?”

It's ironic because if politicians do a good job, and don't have much to hide, we'll trust them more and re-elect them.

>I agree with a sibling poster that it's not necessarily about wealth. I think it's about power.

You can't have wealth without power, because then I can come over and take your wealth from you. Power through violence (monopolized by the state), is what guarantees your rights to your wealth.

The wider the wealth inequality increases, the wider the gap between the haves and the have-nots becomes, the more threatened the wealthy feel and so the more draconical surveillance and speech law enforcement crackdowns becomes on the masses. See modern day UK, EU, etc.

In my EU country the government increased the budget and drill training frequency for riot police this year even if they've been no major events to necessitate that. They know what's coming, since more and more people are poorer from government actions, and they're preparing already to crack down on what's to come. I assume Pegasus and other such spyware to spy on us to prevent descent, is part of that budget too.

> You can't have wealth without power, because then I can come over and take your wealth from you.

So power beats wealth. Easy to see these days with today’s wealthiest people on the planet cowering and paying tributes to Trump.

Also, power is convertible into wealth, as countless politicians have proven, while wealth is not necessarily convertible into power (like Bloomberg’s failed presidential bid has shown).

In conclusion - it’s about power, specifically political power, and the individuals yielding it: the politicians.

Wealth and power are indistinguishable in modern capitalist nations.

Power is just the ability to make more choices, and make bigger choices. Power is, really, the exercise of decision.

The more money you have, the more choices you can make. You can choose to buy a yacht. I can't, the decision is made for me - no.

Since the end of breakfast I have been growing hungry, there is no stopping it

Therefore constant vigilance and effort against it is required.

This isn't good, but it's not uncommon. My concern is if this behavior has led the European Union into the digital ID fiasco. All of this data monitoring can be used to manipulate politicians into supporting.

What is the EU digital ID fiasco?

Apologies, Britain is forcing digital ID for all citizens for Internet access. This is also been discussed at the European Parliament level, and there's a significant amount of public black lash. That's the fiasco, I should've been more specific.

AFAIK the digital ID will also be required when getting a new job.

In the UK's case, ID has been required to get a new job or rent a house for a decade.

ok so why the need for the digital one if we already have one

Because requiring an ID to register for eg. a facebook account is hard... how do you input your physical card into a computer? There's potential for abuse when taking a photo of it, and as soon as one photo of an ID appears online, everyone can use that.

By having people get digital IDs, you can require them to use it when registering for social network accounts, etc., because it's already in their phones and requires just one tap to 'sign' the account with your real identity. Want to complain about a local politician on r/uk on reddit? You'll need a valid UK account to even post there, and it'll be tied to your real name. Want to join a discord? You need UK ID and your real identity tied to it. Organizing a protest? Well, your real name is there, the police will be visiting soon.

Very good question, isn't it. The point of the policy is to make headlines. Implementation is a messy detail for the future.

Easier to store more information while preventing any non authorized to access them, like signing keys and biometrics ?

You're still conflating a few things. The UK government wants to require digital ID for employment, with housing etc to follow. People on HN suspect the plan is to combine that with the Online Safety Act internet identification requirements, but no such plans have been announced as far as I'm aware.

When Starmer announced digital ID he also talked about the regulation of social media. Sure, nobody has confirmed the plan, but the two things are clearly connected in the prime minister's thinking.

On the other hand, according to The Times yesterday the cabinet isn't happy with digital ID. It's as obvious to them as it is to everyone else that digital ID won't make a jot of difference to illegal working. And may well lose them votes.

Yes the idea is to get ahead of things you are opposed to instead of waiting for it to be law already, so you can try to prevent or shape it

The UK is also shortly going to require all children to have a digital identifier to be used across government services. That also clears a path to a digital ID.

The government has also talked about making drivings licences digital (i.e. apps)

People suspect a lot more than it being used in conjunction with the OSA. it can be extended in all sorts of ways. Once available it will be used for more and more.

It is not necessary for employment and housing as there are already documents that can be checked on the rare occasions people rent housing or get a new job. It is only worth doing if it is something people will use daily. Essentially people will be coerced into carrying a Google or Apple smartphone with the ID app on it.

> The UK is also shortly going to require all children to have a digital identifier to be used across government services.

I hadn't heard about that one. Source?

Section four of the awful Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/62773/documents/708...

Edit: I somehow completely skipped the bad bit, right at the beginning.

> 16LB (1) The Secretary of State may by regulations specify a description of consistent identifier for the purposes of this section.

Such provisions are ripe for abuse – somewhat tempered by 16LB(6), but that relies on the designated person's discretion (which itself is constrained by 16LB(12), and my experience with educational folk suggests they take such guidance seriously, even when they profoundly disagree with it), and having a database in the first place is the major issue. Ignore the rest of this comment.

---

That doesn't seem to say that? It says:

> 16LB (2) “Consistent identifier” means any identifier (such as, for example, a number or code used for identification purposes) that—

> (a) relates to a child, and

> (b) forms part of a set of similar identifiers that is of general application.

School ID plus some school-specific identifier would suffice, if I'm reading this right.

That said, I'm not sure why you'd write this into a law under my interpretation, since it's already current practice to take actions that are "likely to facilitate the exercise by any person of a function of that person that relates to safeguarding or promoting the welfare of children", and to avoid actions that "would be more detrimental to the child than not including it", so maybe this is one of the things that you need to be a legal expert to understand.

In case you missed it, the UK is no longer part of the EU. It is doing this under its own steam, or perhaps that of lobbyists.

The current UK PM campaigned to remain in the EU and I doubt he has ever done anything under his own steam. The lobbyists in this case are led by the Tony Blair Institute - Mr Blair tried to introduce id cards when he was PM.

I sometimes wonder what people think who previously would have verbally accosted and ridiculed others who warned of this very state of things coming about, being made identifiable online in a country/society where the government has already also rolled out a panopticon of surveillance and clandestine perception and thought control, where privacy does not exist in public either anymore.

It doesn’t really matter either way because the tyranny and authoritarian control will descend upon people regardless; but do they at least have some kind of guilt, maybe shame, or even realize they are also guilty, not just in basically helping their own enemy, the people in charge of the government implementing these things?

Or do they simply in a somewhat typical narcissistic way just hand wave it away and generously absolve themselves of any guilt and responsibility for the misery they are/will be responsible for?

Turns out the “…fools, and even the ambitious…” were also the “…traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely…”. It was a stroke of genius to psychologically and emotionally manipulate and wage war on the minds of the folks who were fools, i.e., the majority in a “democracy” who gleefully voted themselves into a trap under influence of the created reward system that had them getting feedback that told them they are the good people.

> tyranny and authoritarian control

Care to explain how a state providing an official way to allow its citizen to prove they are who they say they are and avoid identity usurpation on the internet is somehow tyrannical and authoritarian?

That seems like a valuable public service to me.

I have come across people arguing that it is fine because a lot of European countries have ID cards and its not a problem because "no one is suffering" (to quote one person).

EU's digital ID depends on EU citizens having either a Google account, or an Apple account https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic...

To be clear, the digital wallet app is just a way to manage your government issued eID. Both the wallet app you link to and eID are based on the EIDAS spec. The wallet doesn't supersede or replace your country's apps unless the country opts for that. For example in Belgium, we have a robust selection of apps and the non-phone approach using a USB card reader.

The use-case for age verification is not a law yet, the EC has only produced a blueprint which means that this will probably not be adopted by everyone before EIDAS is fully implemented.

This has to be one of the funniest things I read. People who approved this have to be soft in the head.

Also saw some of my countries government’s webpages have google analytics scripts. I’m guessing they didn’t even get a bribe for that, it is really ..

I think that presenting this as "fait accompli" is incorrect. I don't think actual development even started on anything.

Another way to manipulate politicians:

"Gee, dat dere shore is a nice marriage ya gots dere. It'd shore be a shame, if da wifey wuz t' find out about ya mistress..."

That was pretty much how J. Edgar Hoover was able to grab Congress by the short hairs for years.

Lets get rid of Microsoft abos/subscriptions directly financing spyware! Away with all the shitty Outlook and MS Teams! Yes! Finally! Oh wait ... That's not what the article is about ...

Exactly.

European politicians are great at pretending to do stuff, not newsworthy.

“One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses.”

—- the late venerable Prime Minister Jim Hacker

This is at least a bit understandable... if something bad happens, a (trade, or a 'classic') war, some large catastrophe somewhere, you want local farmers with all the equipment, knowledge, fields and warehouses ready to take over. Yeah, sure, today maybe you have a surplus of potatos, more than your people want to eat, and still more expensive from imported ones from some other country, but subsidizing the farmers means that in such extreme cases, you at least have the infrastructure to grow potatos to feed the people at home.

The New Deal used this tactic to (a very simplified description) raise prices on farm products and let farmers get out of poverty during The Great Depression: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Farm_and_rural_progra...

Now we use the opposite tactic! Brilliant times ahead.

The EU also used to have wine surpluses like this. I suppose you could make a witty argument that wine will be needed in a crisis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com