The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself | Hacker News Reader

The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself

ahmedeldin.substack.com

288 points0x54MUR41336 comments

What stands out to me here is the pipeline. Israel has built an unusually tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups, and global markets. When that ecosystem scales internationally, it’s fair to ask whether partners are buying technology or importing unilateral leverage that only benefits Israel here.

Recently for obvious reasons I’ve started questioning everything. I imagine I’m not alone.

Let’s just say I’m even more of a fan of EU digital infrastructure moving to strictly EU countries, no outside traffic allowed.

I'd be super surprised if EU doesn't have similar "dashboards".

Don't underestimate the incompetence of our governments.

They are usually incompetent on things that are not important, like keeping infrastructure from falling off the cliff, maintaining a good economy, or in general serving the people. They are pretty competent on things that are really important, like hacking into people's phones, killing other people.

After all you have to admit that getting killed is more serious than getting starved...

The German foreign intelligence service (BND) played the PR of incompetence for a very long time.

Well until press found out that they had tapped into Obamas encrypted phone calls while flying in the AF1 for a long time.

> Well until press found out that they had tapped into Obamas encrypted phone calls while flying in the AF1 for a long time.

As per the article linked above (https://archive.ph/kCxNw)

"The intelligence agency, called the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) discovered that some calls on Air Force One were unencrypted and it was able to tap into radio frequencies that were used for those calls, according to the book, "

No hacking or deployment of listening devices, just passive listening. Unless you have other sources?

I did not know - here's a link to Washington Post reporting: https://archive.ph/kCxNw

Appear weak when you are strong, and all of that

hope for the best, expect the worst...

EU member states do and often with collaboration with Israeli vendors - especially in the CEE and Southern Europe. It even became an ongoing scandal in the EU [0][1].

Northern and Western European states tend to use American products, but the difference between "American", "Israeli", "Czech", and "Indian" blurs because of how much overlap the industry has transnationally.

Italy, Czechia, Poland, and Netherlands all have significant domestic capacity in the space as well, but a large portion of it is via American and Israeli tech.

[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-spyware-probe-slams-gover...

[1] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-national-secur...

EU law enforcement agencies regularly buy this kind of software, even if illegal!

The Italian Carabinieri bought Paragon even though they can't legally use it, because mass surveillance is obviously illegal and against our constitution.

And yet, nothing's being done.

but its not mass surveillance, its targeted at a large but finite number of people

Balkanization of the internet. It was foretold.

Don't get me wrong, I get why they want to and it is probably a justified security concern, but it's also things like that which will probably cause Europe's economy to continue to stagnate while the US's will probably continue to soar even with Trump (and perhaps, later, Vance) completely destroying our international reputation and credibility and our most important political and scientific institutions.

The fact that the US can continue to economically do so well relative to others despite currently being run by some of the stupidest and most abhorrent people possible is... sad.

Europe could be more competitive but then they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just in the past week they're meddling with the infinite scroll feature and then the unrealized taxes in the Netherlands. Why would a tech company wanna operate in such an environment?

Why would we care about competivity where it doesn't benefit society? Addictive social media and wealth accumulation actively harm society

Obviously one cannot simply accept any potential societal trade-off in favor of benefitting the economy, but going too far in the opposite direction eventually manifests as worse living standards for the average person, which is not beneficial to society.

How does banning intentionally addictive media-feed apps (they are not social media, they are parasocial at best) make society worse?

"How does banning unhealthy food make society worse?" "How does banning unhealthy habits make society worse?" "How does banning harmful/hateful speech make society worse?" "How does banning things and, as a result, our economy stagnating, make society worse?"

Pam Bondi suggested that it would be impossible to prosecute the pedophiles, because the economy would collapse. To which many people reacted: then let it collapse. You remind me of Pam Bondi.

Except Bondi was wrong and I am right, and also letting the economy collapse actually would be really, really bad and saying things like that is something only children and economically illiterate people do.

Also, most of the things I listed in my previous post had absolutely nothing to do with the economy. It's just that it's unethical and tyrannical for the government to dictate people's behavior in this way. "How is it unhealthy for the government to ban alcohol?" These statements would apply whether in a socialistic or fully neoliberal country.

You have fun with that. Lemme know how it goes.

What for an answer is that?

It's not like it's going real well here in the U.S.

Infinite scroll? Just ban social media algorithms you buffoons. Then u can even let kids use it.

> The fact that the US can continue to economically do so well relative to others despite currently being run by some of the stupidest and most abhorrent people possible is... sad.

It's not sad, it's strong evidence (I hesitate to call it proof, but...) that a federated model of governance with limited regulation is the most resilient and successful form of government.

All the EU states need to do is learn that regulation is not the solution to every theoretical problem any bureaucrat can imagine, and they too can experience meaningful economic growth.

I agree that if you want to pursue economic growth laissez-faire is possibly the best course of action, but economic growth isn't the only metric worth pursuing.

> economic growth isn't the only metric worth pursuing

It's not, but the absence of it makes it much harder to pursue the many other worthy goals. Which again, is a lesson the EU seems to refuse to accept.

I have no idea where you got that idea from. If anything the EU has been focused way too much on the economy, hoping trade and economic growth will solve all problems.

I got it from two places:

1. Watching the standard of living in the US outpace the EU for decades and comparing their economic systems.

2. Basic common sense tells you that you need resources in order to fund a welfare state, a long list of positive human rights, and all the other things that the EU states want to do. Money buys resources, especially when you don't have direct access to them (which is the case for most EU states).

Probably one of these scissor statements where economic leftists think that obviously the problem is focusing way too much on [X] and the others saying the problem is focusing far too little on [X].

To some extent yes, but the issue the leftists have in this case is that X = money (or the equivalent in resources) which is absolutely required in large quantities to enact their political agenda.

Is it? When the political agenda is "no infinite scrolling" it seems they can just ban infinite scrolling, and that doesn't cost any money.

It is probably in their blood because as someone surrounded by enemies you gotta be pragmatic and on your toe all the time. No wonder they are pretty good at intelligence collection. One of my previous bosses told me that people with highest scores join the intelligence staffs. Not sure if it is true, though.

Surrounded by enemies of their own creation. It’s a beautiful cycle of aggression and self-victimization; a true ouroboros.

On the intelligence front, Mossad does a wonderful job performing extra-judicial killings using the dirtiest tricks you could think of. They’re also very good partners: almost every counter-intelligence outfit sings their praises.

> Surrounded by enemies of their own creation.

Step 1: Get 6 million of you systematically eradicated in Europe and hundreds of thousands more booted from their homes in the Middle East for "reasons".

Step 2: Build yourself a country so no one can throw you out again.

Step 3: Get attacked by the countries who threw you out for "reasons".

Step 4: Get accused of "aggression".

People's continued downplay and revisionism of Jewish and Israeli history is truly something to behold.

Step 1: A Holocaust perpetrated by Germany, not Palestine.

Step 2: Build a country out of Lego- I mean, gradually settle an existing, populated area of the Levant - Palestine - and then have daddy Britain and later big daddy USA forcibly carve out a chunk of the land without input from the natives. And no, it was not a UN partition plan because most of the world was still colonized at the time.

Step 3: Take advantage of the obvious discontent with this move by the natives and activate Plan Dalet to take even more of the land. After all, the land granted by the partition plan is not enough.

Step 4: War starts with neighboring countries, partly to disrupt the ethnic cleansing campaign against a mostly defenseless population, but also to satisfy their own expansionist aims (esp. Transjordan).

> War starts with neighboring countries, partly to disrupt the ethnic cleansing campaign against a mostly defenseless population

Did you made this all up?

There is zero evidence that the war started because the Jews were ethnically cleansing “defenseless population”. It is enough to go to the library and read newspapers from the time where Arabs openly stated that they do no accept Jewish state for the sake of it being Jewish.

Step 1: Lie.

The people who fled Europe or forced out of the Middle East purchased empty lands, dried marshes, planted forests, installed infrastructure, sown fields, built cities and created a democracy to govern themselves. Incidentally, some purchased lands had squatters from Syria, Jordan, Arabia, etc., who lived on lands they did not own. Bye bye and boo hoo.

Seven different armies invaded Israel on its day of foundation. Seven armies got wrecked. Entire countries with billions of people keep crying about it, going so far as making the destruction of Israel an official goal, in some countries even actual laws! No conspiracy theories, no "Plan Dalet" and other bullshit your Hamas friends told you about, their real, actual goals stated right in your face.

I mean, Israeli historians corroborated Plan Dalet, but sure, let’s call it a conspiracy. I am going to stop responding here.

Are you saying that the Jews didn’t buy land in the Ottoman Empire and the early British mandate times?

I know that the pro-Palestinian side attempts to erase any link of Jewish people to the area, but there are documents that are not even 100 years old.

This is frankly, completely ahistorical. The British famously backed the Palestinians in the 1948 war (only barely, they mostly didn't care, but still did back them) and didn't like the idea of Israel so much so that they withdrew from the UN committee over it. Palestinians famously collaborated with Hitler as well. The USA only started being allied with Israel in the late 60s.

> And no, it was not a UN partition plan because most of the world was still colonized at the time.

And I can't even begin to fathom what this means.

As you noted in an another comment, Plan Dalet was corroborated by Israeli historians. Which is false. It was corroborated by one Israeli historian, who retracted his findings after finding out his source for the writings of Ben-Gurion were edited posthumously.

And "war starts" is a very nice and PG way to phrase "attempted to genocide Jews".

Yes, it is completely ahistorical - if you buy in to the blessed Zionist narrative, that is.

> The British famously backed the Palestinians

No, the British backed the Jordanians, not the Palestinians. Jordan had its own goals as I alluded to elsewhere. I would recommend reading a bit further on the subtleties and limits to that backing, as well as the strategic reasons for said backing. But I wasn’t talking about the war at all here.

They withdrew because they did not know how to balance the two sides. It was a hot potato, so they threw into the lap of the US.

> And I can't even begin to fathom what this means.

How many seats were there at the UNGA at the time? And how many of those seats belonged to countries who could make sovereign decisions without fear of repercussion from the newly emerged world powers? Keep in mind that WWII ended less than two years ago at this point.

> As you noted in an another comment, Plan Dalet was corroborated by Israeli historians. Which is false.

So there was no ethnic cleansing at all? I suppose 700k or so Palestinians just oopsied their way out of their homes and villages.

> And "war starts" is a very nice and PG way to phrase "attempted to genocide Jews".

Oh boy, not this again..

> No, the British backed the Jordanians, not the Palestinians.

What is the difference between Jordanians and Palestinians given that the line that separates them is drown by the Brits?

> So there was no ethnic cleansing at all? I suppose 700k or so Palestinians just oopsied their way out of their homes and villages.

So they all left because Israel kicked them all out? What about the interviews and news articles from the time where Arabs themselves said that Jordan Army asked them to leave for the duration of the fights?

And you are the one talking about narratives?

I find it interesting that all of your arguments rely on emotion, not fact.

I think you need to dive into more detail of what "build yourself a country" entails.

Zionism existed since the late 19th century. It cannot be considered solely a response to the Holocaust. It was an outgrowth of the many nationalist movements that were occurring in Europe at the time, and even as far back as the 1920s the consensus was that the establishment of a Jewish state required a Jewish majority. This is clearly evident in the writings of people like Jabrotinsky and Herzl himself. I don't think any native population would take kindly to what exactly this implied.

You're a little off on the history. Zionism as a political movement (as opposed to the cultural idea which has existed for 3000 or so years) dates back to the late 18th century, as one of the responses to both antisemitism and the emerging nationalist ideas in Europe. The deciding philosophy in this case is the idea that antisemitism cannot be fought, that it is a universal constant of sorts. This was originally a fringe left-wing idea, with the response being to stop being Jews (the Reform branch was borne out of this and is the reason many Jews, including me, still dislike it, even if it is a bit unfair). After the Holocaust, however, this idea transformed from a left-wing one to a right-wing one, where the solution became to take up arms and defend ourselves from those who would wish to kill us. I don't know about Jabrotinsky but your claim on Herzl is very hotly debated[0]. Not that I imagine many Arabs can read German. The claim also heavily erases Jewish presence in the Levant.

[0] https://tikvah.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Hazony-Did-Her...

How dare the Israelis not let themselves get genocided. The audacity.

At what point in its history was Israel ever in actual danger of being “genocided”?

This rhetoric circles back to the self-victimization complex btw.

Every day since its first day as a state. There are several countries with billions of people whose stated, official objective is the destruction of Israel. Iran has giant countdown clocks and advertisements for the destruction of Israel. They have laws against peace with Israel. The Houthis literally have "Death to Israel" (and America) on their flag.

Internet arguments are entirely irrelevant.

This women is in a trench just for fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#...

Apparently at the beginning and throughout the Cold War, IMO. Not to say that I want to blame on just one side, though.

No, Israel has never been seriously threatened with elimination. Even in 1948, they were militarily superior and more organized than all of their neighbors. They in fact proved this in 1967.

But they sure love to claim that they were at the cusp of elimination at various points - again, the self-victimization complex in action :)

> Even in 1948, they were militarily superior and more organized than all of their neighbors.

Yeah I think that's why they were not wiped out, not that their neighbours were super good heart. They were and still are less competent.

I don't disagree with you, but this is the reality already and I don't see how they can get out of it. I wouldn't hope for any long-term peace between IL and surrounding country without IL holding a very big stick which the US gives to them.

I think actually they are in a bit of panic mode because the US might want to get out from the ME and focus on China. They want a guarantee that Iran won't be able to come on its foot again in at least 10 years. That's all my guess, though.

I think also everyone needs to understand that Israel are a wedge in the operations of rival Islamic terrorist factions. If they went poof and ceased to exist suddenly then it'd switch straight to Darfur mode out there. It wouldn't suddenly be kumbaya and holding hands.

> I don't disagree with you, but this is the reality already and I don't see how they can get out of it.

Maybe by starting to behave as if the Palestinian population that live on the territory they control have equal rights? Like stopping West Bank colonization projects?

2006 Gaza was left to their own independent rule. Shortly after that Hamas killed the PLO, assumed control, and started fire rockets into Israel. And you’re saying that we need to try that again with the West Bank?

That’s not what happened. You (unintentionally I am sure) glossed over the elections being overruled by the US and Israel, the attempted coup by Fatah in Gaza, and the subsequent blockade.

The blockade started after the rockets. And how can US and Israel overrule elections in Gaza? Fatah wanted a coup because they lost to Hamas. That’s why there’s no election in the West Bank.

Read up on the election here, tired of responding in this thread: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_e...

On rocket attacks, Hamas was sticking relatively well to the ceasefire (again, talking about Hamas, not other groups). The blockade was tightened by Israel post-takeover, which then lead to a resumption of rocket attacks.

This is not an argument for illegal occupation and expansion into West Bank. Israel should follow international law and agreements they themselves signed.

Palestinians too. Unfortunately, they are not sticking to their side of the bargain as well.

Oh yeah, I'm sure stopping the "West Bank colonization projects" will make Iran be peaceful.

At least that'd improve the chance of having peaceful neighbours, instead of ones who'll listen to any envoy from Iran saying that bombing Israel is the best solution for living in peace.

It really wouldn't make a difference. A country that is already so radicalized that it thinks bombing Israel is the best solution for living in peace would not change its mind for the Palestinians.

I think this article explains it well: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/how-trump-proved-foreign-po...

Question: why do Palestinians do not take a unilateral step of declaring “no more armed resistance”? If basks can, why Palestinians can’t?

So the solution is for Israel to get an even bigger “stick” than nuclear weapons? How about a just solution for the Palestinians instead?

Who is going to do that? Obviously not in anyone's interests. That is, anyone who can push the situation towards that direction.

You’re either missing my point or deflecting. Let me expand one last time.

Israel claims to be threatened by its neighbors. Israel claims to want peace with countries in the region. Neighboring countries have repeatedly stated that a precondition to normalization is a just solution for Palestinians. But Israel does not want a just solution.

In other words, the problem is entirely self-inflicted. Israel wants peace, but without making any concessions on the issue of Palestine. So instead it pursues a system of “peace through violence” - just like it does in the West Bank and Gaza.

There peace with Jordan and Egypt. 2 countries that were at war with Israel, Egypt got Sinai back, Jordan did not want the West Bank back.

What do you mean by “back”? The West Bank was never legitimately part of Jordan - they forcibly annexed it in 1948.

As for the peace treaties:

Jordan simply did not have the ability to fight Israel any longer, or to deal with Palestinian factions operating in its territory.

Egypt wanted its land back after failing to reclaim it in 1973.

> What do you mean by “back”?

> Egypt wanted its land back after failing to reclaim it in 1973.

It seems you are aware that peace deal with Egypt is what got Sinai back to Egypt.

This is bullshit. Between 1948 and 1967 the entire West Bank and Gaza were under control of neighbouring Arab countries. They could’ve set up a Palestinian state within “the 1967 borders”, but nobody did. Instead they went to war to try and take the rest.

Besides, Israel has since made peace with Egypt and Jordan.

Okay, and? Do you think the fact that neighbors having their own expansionist ambitions is somehow a “gotcha”? And given the whole Greater Israel plan, do you seriously think that Israel would have even allowed this to happen?

Now, back to the present day. Palestinians live under a system of occupation and blockade and recently genocide. This is not a just situation. It is also not sustainable without continued repression and use of force. There is no way that Israel will be welcomed into the wider ME under this regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War

Start here, and then work your way both forwards and backwards if you have any interest in learning.

Wow thanks for the pointer, I had no idea! Eye opening stuff!

You apparently need it, given your illogical and inaccurate statements in this thread, but I won't hold my breath while waiting for you to accept that.

Feel free to respond where you disagree for the benefit of those reading the thread.

Btw, linking to a wiki page does not reflect any knowledge on your part. By not engaging with your own words, it is fair to default to assuming that you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Others have already done so since my initial comment and your response was either "nah" or to disengage, so I'm not going to waste my time arguing with someone who is clearly personally invested in a very specific narrative.

Oh, I was never interested in arguing with you at all given how you decided to start off this conversation.

I was just pointing out that you can always respond and demonstrate your brilliance to readers of the thread.

> One of my previous bosses told me that people with highest scores join the intelligence staffs.

Certainly the common practice of looting civilian homes and posting about it on social media implies something about their infantry.

At least they didn't rape and behead them on camera like the opposition.

And they were punished for it rather than celebrated and their families paid a wage for life...

As always, experience breeds competence. Much like Ukraine are good at drone warfare, Israel are good at missile defence etc etc...

> Israel has built an unusually tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups, and global markets.

How's that different from the US? half of the big players started as three letters agency side projects

Why is everyone surprised that a country of less than 10 million has a tech sector where everyone effectively knows each other?

I would put the upper bound on the population relevant to _the_ tech sector at 28000.

Impressive how effective they are with such a small foot print. The rest of us should be taking notes.

Amazing what you can achieve with the kind of kompromat Epstein gathered.

Do you believe everything else Holocaust deniers[0] say?

[0] https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/02/08/2026/semafor-media-... (paragraph 5)

His connections to mossad have been documented well before then https://electronicintifada.net/content/us-media-barely-touch...

You might as well have cited 4chan with that link but whatever. No, it isn't known. What is known is that he had contacts who in turn had contacts in Mossad. And seeing both Epstein's vocal dislike of Israel and his vocal like for some of Israel's enemies (Russia in particular), I seriously doubt those contacts went any deeper than that.

Paragon co-founded by former Unit-8200 commander Ehud Schneorson and former Israeli Prime-minister and defence-chief, Ehud Barak who tapped his long-time friend Jeffrey Epstein (a wealthy American financier and eccentric) to find him clients for his ventures in the US and across the world. That certainly is some tight-integration!

https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-ehud-barak-le...

The thing is everyone goes into the IDF. The smart ones get put into unit 8200 where they hone their persistent, iterative, troubleshooting skills. Then their service is over they leave and they've basically been trained in innovation and leadership.

Then they go about solving problems. Some of those problems are people dont have a good trustworthy pornsite. Some of them are their buddies that stayed in the military have a military related or adjacent problem.

Darknet diaries did a great podcast on unit 8200.

> tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups

It's just friends buying from friends.

They're just too busy repackaging the same spying tech on different channels and then selling that for billions in the US stock market. Also knowing that US regulators won't say a single word, because how could they ever say something bad about these companies... It must be a very good business.

You should look at Israel deal for the F-35. They got the only F-35 unlocked and non dependent on the US software lock. They were never part of the development program like Norway, Denmark, Italy or the Netherlands so did not have to bear those costs. Norway, Denmark, Italy or the Netherlands, still had to pay for their F-35...

Israel paid 2.3 Billion for their F-35, but the US committed to buy 4 Billion from Israel defense firms, so concluding with a net positive of +1.25 Billion for Israel economy....all at the cost to the US tax payer. :-)

"F-35I Adir: Israel’s Custom F-35 That No Other Nation Has" - https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/04/f-35i-adir-israels-custo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

So the US basically got billions and billions worth of F-35 R&D for the price of 2B?

Sounds like a decent deal to me.

You completely misunderstood the money flow....

You completely miss the fact that the same R&D Israel has done would have cost 100x more if it were done by US based companies.

The US gains massive cheap R&D and real world tested capabilities for a fraction of the price it would pay domestically.

Now you could argue about the moral implications, but money wise it's a great deal.

Except that is not what is happening:

"...To sweeten the deal, Lockheed Martin said it would buy parts and systems for the F-35 from Israeli companies at a cost of $4 billion..."

What is funny thing to say, since Israel, unlike the other nations, never supported the development costs of the F-35 program :-)

This net positive argument is asinine.

You aren't burning money, you're getting services and technologies.

I pay you 2 dollars and you buy 4 dollars from me. In the meanwhile I also get 20 F-35...

90% of startups coming out of Israel seem to be some dodgy 'security' or spyware startups. This in addition to them boasting of having 'field tested' their stuff on Palestinians, which is also why U.S. cops go there for training. I suppose to learn from the 'real experts' how to suppress the masses.

This is not true. It's just "dodgy security/spyware" startups are more open coming from Israel that they exist than the myriad of hidden companies that you never heard about because they focus on tailored exploits.

Israel is the British colonialism foreign base where the Brits and the US can dodge their own laws while developing their own "defence" hardware, software, tactics, and ideology.

>where the Brits and the US can dodge their own laws while developing their own [...]

Source that a large proportion of founders/employees are actually American/British? The more believable claim is that such Israeli startups are US/UK backed, but that's not as damning as it sounds, because US/UK is the finance hub, so thats where you expect funding to come from, rather than "colonialism foreign base" or whatever.

Meh, imho it's much simpler: Israel has had insane security needs since it's birth, thus naturally security firms concentrated where there was an immediate market and testing possibility.

Which makes the failure of October 7th even more striking. It's insane Israeli leadership hasn't paid for this.

> the failure of October 7th

you would be wise to reconsider what it actually was

I think they got tired after doing that Pager supply chain attack and went to celebrate on some private island.

Nope. I see it completely differently. We know for a fact that all CEOs of big tech are either Jewish zios (Israeli citizens by birth) or have spouses who are such or are in that zios link.

They also establish the so called “R&D” offices in Israel which is code-word for free software export.

Then the same country that has access to the source code of the major American tech firms, combobulates the “best” in class spyware doesn’t come as a surprise.

We keep crying wolf to Chinese tech spies when the real wolf are these. That’s a tiny nation living off of 300MM large nation and its allies make that another 400MM.

IIRC there were attempts to impeach the government (as well as multiple probes) but they all fell through. Same as 9/11, really. Plus, Israel hasn't had an election since.

> British colonialism

So the Palestinians and Arabs thought a hundred years ago. It served them badly.

It’s not that US/UK and others don’t get anything out of the relationship, as you note. But the arrows have been mostly pointing the other way for a long time. Trump and his background, as well as Epstein/Mandelson/McSweeney/Labour are just the latest, blatant examples of how this works.

That is some nasty garbage right there. The Israeli tech startup scene is very large and dynamic with including basic software development tools, wireless infrastructure, and so on. If anything it is more like 90% either consumer infrastructure or non-LLM developer tools. Whether it is politically advantageous to talk about or not, a very large fraction of all economic activity is still down the chain near the child needs bowl of rice level. Grandiose claims without support only obfuscate the situation instead of focusing on what needs to be done to protect people.

> 90% of startups coming out of Israel seem to be ...

Not to claim that Israel is the land of saintly virtues - but if your news sources are inclined toward tech or polarized left/right politic, they make sure that's what you see. Wouldn't matter if 99.9% of actual Israeli startups were working to build better home bagel-makers, or gene-engineering perfect breeds of salmon for lox.

To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?

Israel being founded with the help of terrorist groups like Irgun and Lehi and their current prime minister as well as former defense minister being wanted for war crimes, excuse me if I don't take their word as to whom they're fighting for granted. Especially not after what they did in Gaza.

I heard many bizarre conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But this one, I can't even understand what you mean.

To be clear, do you deny that there are multiple terrorist groups targeting civilians in Israel such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and multiple individuals who attacked civilians indiscriminately with bombs, knives and guns?

Do you deny that Israel uses its intelligence services to detect and stop these terrorist attacks?

Textbook definition of bad faith arguments, go back to X with this slop.

The original comment was "To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?", and the reply said he wouldn't "take their word as to whom they're fighting".

I asked if the person was denying that Israel intelligence seeks to detect and stop terrorism from those major terrorist groups and from individual terrorists. How on earth is this a "bad faith argument"?

No, the original argument was that Israel - spelled out for you, because you are pretending you missed it - is using these technologies for the brutal suppression of the whole of the of the Palestinian people and that the overt motive of "fighting terrorism" is used as a fig-leaf to hide the ulterior motive of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians from their lands.

Your question, which was really an assertion, asking if "it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism" is in bad faith, because you know very precisely that the person you were replying to does not think it's bad to "use technology to detect and stop terrorism", but instead you were using that question as a rhetorical device to assert that all Israel is doing is the overt action "detect and stop terrorism" in an effort to deny that Israel is also doing the ulterior ethnically cleaning.

Whether that is true or not can be debated, but the way you are asking the question is pre-supposing that it cannot be debated, because your assertion by asking that question is that the ulterior motive does not exist and you are trying to create a "gotcha".

You then went on to call the claim that Irgun and Lehi were terrorist organizations and/or the claim that two members of the Israeli government ware wanted for war crimes and/or the claim that the Israeli government might have overt as well as ulterior motives and therefore they might not be trusted on what they overtly say alone, a "bizzare conspiracy theory" about Jewish people in an effort to undermine these claims without judging them based on factfulness or truth.

I hope I cleared that up for you.

I tried to ask an LLM to be an impartial judge and give your comment a hasbara score, but it immediately banned me.

food for thought.

You are wrong. My question was not "in bad faith". It is unfortunate but multiple people really do believe that it is bad that Israel is able to detect and stop terrorism through technology. There are multiple comments even in this post that openly support terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Instead of assuming you can read my mind and falsely accuse me of saying stuff in bad faith, it would be better if you weren't so arrogant.

To your other point, I called it a bizarre conspiracy theory because it is in fact a quite bizarre conspiracy theory! The comment didn't say that Israel was using the facial recognition for doing X in addition to stopping terrorism. It simply denied that it was even being used to stop terrorism at all ("would not take their word as to whom they're fighting").

Again, that's a completely bizarre conspiracy theory. There has been an immense amount of terrorism against Israel (and it would have been much more without Israeli intelligence). If that happened in any country there would be a huge intelligence effort to stop that terrorism and it would be natural and justified. Compare to e.g. what the US did when it suffered 9/11 (why do we need to take our shoes off at airport security?). Yet for the case of Israel the comment implies that somehow all the terrorism doesn't matter, the Israeli people don't care about suffering terrorist attacks multiple times larger than 9/11 and a constant threat to be genocided if another October 7th turns into a full war. What the Israeli Jews really did, according to that comment, is to just pretend to fight terrorism ("would not take their word as to whom they're fighting"), to fight some mysterious thing instead! Do you not realize how that's absurd?

If you are arguing in good faith, why are you not reading what you are arguing about.

The full quote is:

> excuse me if I don't take their word as to whom they're fighting for granted. Especially not after what they did in Gaza.

That claim is not as as absolute as you make it out. It does not mean "Israel is lying about everything". "Not taking for granted" just means not to assume everything is true without questioning it. It just means, as I put it earlier: there is an overt thing being said, but there is also the suspicion of an ulterior motive.

The comment then goes on to give you a reason to be suspicious which in this case is the destruction of Gaza along with the atrocities the Israelis committed and the well documented dehumanizing rhetoric that points to a hatred against Palestinians as a whole that exists in Israeli society.

That comment doesn't argue that "somehow all the terrorism doesn't matter" - it says, there is more to it than just terrorism.

I am not sure why you are calling this a "mysterious thing" or "absurd" or "bizarre" - if you read any zionist literature or follow any zionist discussions, online or offline, then that viewpoint is regularly being expressed.

Or if you need another clue that technology is used for oppression and not just defense, go look at the West Bank and the land theft that is taking place there and how that is implemented.

Look, if you want to have a good faith political argument you need to consider that the people who you are arguing against are not all just crazy and stupid and that you somehow are in possession of some information that they somehow are not. People have different reasons for arguing different positions.

If you do not in fact actually believe that another person is arguing something crazy and bizarre, but instead you are using this as a rhetorical trick, then that is the almost the definition if arguing in bad faith.

But if you do actually believe someone's claim is crazy, mysterious or absurd, simply because you are refusing to understand their argument, then you are not contributing to discussion, and you need to go back and try to understand how it is possible that someone could come to a different understanding of a situation than you. You don't have to agree with it, you just need to understand it's possible.

Edit: Check how apropos the news is today

> “Destroy the idea of an Arab terror state; finally, formally and practically cancel the cursed Oslo Accords and get on the path of sovereignty, while encouraging migration both from Gaza and from Judea and Samaria,” said Smotrich, using the biblical term for the West Bank. “There is no other long-term solution.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-next-government-shoul...

> If you are arguing in good faith, why are you not reading what you are arguing about

I literally just rebuked you for falsely accusing me of arguing in bad faith. You now falsely accuse me of failing to read.

I obviously read the comment. I literally quoted the comment in my reply.

> I literally quoted the comment in my reply.

You selectively quoted the comment in your reply, leaving out some crucial information in order to set up a straw man argument.

I just helpfully pointed this out to you, because you were asking why someone was accusing you of arguing in bad faith. You can do with that whatever you wish.

If you are interested in why it's easy to recognize your way or arguing ( and I just want to note that it was not me who accused you of 'bad faith' argumentation in the first place), I can recommend Schopenhauer's "Die Kunst Recht zu behalten"[0] - your original

> To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?

shows up there as Chapter 7 "Yield Admissions Through Questions" among others.

You will note that I gave you an entire explanation to your specific assertions instead of just pointing to some book.

The thing about that is, though, that it's a bit boring sometimes because It often seems like every thought has already been though before. We humans seem to like to go in a circle. Just like the two us are doing right now.

I hope you have great rest of the week.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

Or maybe that's the ones you know about because it's what gets fearmongering articles written about in English and the rest is in Hebrew?

Except the English articles are not generally fearmongering, more praising of the 'bursting' Israeli tech scene. It's only when you look at what the startups do you realize what's up.

It makes sense in a way, most Israelis probably acquire a fair bit of skills and contacts as part of being in the military there. And because the military 'needs' to surveil millions of people it rules over without any mandate whatsoever, what better way to get a contract than to enhance the surveillance capabilities of the army once you get back into civilian life?

You are either plainly lying or have an incredibly strange media consumption landscape. The plurality tech startups coming out of Israel are in biological sciences and medicine.

I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free.

It has been trained on decades of Palestinians crossing check points, some being Hamas camouflaging with beards, glasses and what not.

Also the data it's fed for third party customers is as flawless as it can be: if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world.

If you're walking in a random mall on the other end of the world, even if you have no phone, you have covered your tracks and you're wearing a hat and glasses, etc, you are going to be recognized by the software if a camera gets even a mediocre shot at you.

Compound this with all the information people put online on their own on socials, you're gonna be tracked and recognized, whether you want it or no.

>> I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free.

What does "virtually error free" mean? There's no "error free" in facial recognition, or any other application of machine learning.

More to the point, who says all this, besides yourself in this thread? Why should anyone believe that "virtually error free" is a factual description of real technological capabilities rather than state propaganda?

Those are private companies, so it's not state propaganda.

By the way, UK, South Wales especially claims an 89%+ success rate and 1 in 6'000 false positives, you can read it on UK's official website.

The company between Oosto claims 99%.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...

That is not even close to error free. 89% is really bad actually.

Those are numbers claimed by the UK, the company behind it claims an order of magnitude over it with proper data (airport-level full face scans).

Even 89% isn't that bad imho, recognizing the overabundant majority of a population with random cameras that don't require the user to pose or assume specific positions is..quite something.

Its kinda of bad when factoring in the consequences for being misidentified. Getting misidentified can cost you your life. It can cause you months of time and legal fees to disprove. It can waste police resources and erode public trust.

And I trust the UK police data far far more than the company. Every company says they are 99% accurate.

It's the other number. 89% of queries result in a match, and of those the error rate is 0.02%

I don't know which has more lies: state propaganda or marketing materials from private company.

Claim that China will pay tariffs to the US or claim of full unsupervised autonomy driving by the end of 2016.

Imagine the utility of only 99% accurate OCR.

Now apply that to something that can drastically alter someone's life

Thanks for the link. Quoting from it:

* The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) tested the algorithm South Wales Police and the Metropolitan Police Service have been using for LFR.

* At the settings police use, the NPL found that for LFR there were no statistically significant differences in performance based on age, gender or ethnicity.

* There was an 89% chance of identifying someone on the specific watchlist of people wanted by the police, and at worst a 1 in 6,000 chance of incorrectly identifying someone on a watchlist with 10,000 images (known as a false alert). In practice, the false alert rate has been far better than this.

It looks like this is the report by the NPL:

science.police.uk/site/assets/files/3396/frt-equitability-study_mar2023.pdf

It's a big report and it'd take some time to go through it but it's clear that laboratory testing of a system deployed in the wild is not going to give accurate results, meaning the "89%" claimed is going to be significantly worse in reality. Anyway there's obvious limitations to the testing e.g. (from the report):

Large demographically balanced datasets: The testing of low error rates in a statistically significant manner requires large datasets. To achieve the required scale, the evaluation uses a supplementary reference image dataset of 178,000 face images (Filler dataset). This is an order of magnitude larger than the typical watchlist size of an operational Live Facial Recognition deployment. To avoid introducing a demographic bias due to reference dataset composition, a demographically balanced reference dataset was used, with equal numbers in each demographic category. For assessment of equitability under operational settings, the results from the large dataset are appropriately scaled to the size and composition of watchlist or reference image database of the operational deployment.

I'd say "uh-oh" to that. Unbalanced classes is a perenial source of error in evaluations. "Equal numbers in each demographic category" is an obvious source of unrealistic bias.

Anyway, I don't have the time to go through that with a fine toothed comb, but just the fact that they report a 100 False Positive Rate for "operator initiated facial recognition" is another big, hot, red flag.

Also, from the UK gov link above:

* The 10 LFR vans rolled out in August 2025 are using the same algorithm that was tested by the NPL.

There's a bit of ambiguity there. The police are using "the same algorithm" tested by the NPL, but are they using the same settings? The report uses specific settings to come up with its conclusions (e.g. a "face match" setting of 0.6 for LFR), but there's nothing to say the police stick to the same. Lots of room for manoeuvering left there, I'd say.

>> The company between Oosto claims 99%.

We can easily dismiss this just by looking at the two digits preceding the "%".

I doubt whatever facial recognition trained over 6 million odd Palestinians (plus 2 million Israeli Palestinians) would trump similar offerings from competitors like Hikvision trained on data of 1.4 billion Chinese.

edit : i think their tech is overhyped. Remember the signal-chats debacle last year where the National Security Advisor was photographed using a modified client of Signal by Israeli company TeleMessage. And immediately after, TeleMessage was hacked, and it was revealed that all the chats were transmitted and stored in plain-text. They still managed to get their backup-spyware installed at the highest levels of the US government and military. It looks like they have great sales teams.

https://archive.is/0qjVI

A facial recognition model trained on one genotype will behave poorly on another genotype. For detecting e.g. white and middle eastern faces, this Israeli model should perform better than the one trained on Chinese people

I believe that most of what you said is true, but I don't think the tracking of people around the world is as efficient as your post suggests. If a single face scan were enough to track people anywhere like that, American government agencies (I'm thinking ICE, the FBI, etc.) wouldn’t have as much trouble as they do arresting people. That’s just my impression of course, maybe for some reason they choose not to use these technologies.

They need recall, not precision. It’s conceivably fine if you tag 100 people as long as one of them is your guy.

Also I mean you and I can recognize people we know. A surveillance camera has millions of sensors sampling every ~50 ms. It’s plausible.

> if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world

Approximately what year did this start?

I have no clue because my first extra EU flight has been in 2022 and I definitely got a full face scan.

The part I'm skeptical about is "available to virtually every agency in the world". I think every immigration checkpoint I've been to have some sort of camera setup, but the extent of data sharing is unclear. Is China sharing data with the US? Or US sharing with Canada? US with Germany? etc.

Except for a handful of countries like China, you can very reasonably assume all of the others' is both available to Israel as well as the US.

Is the Israeli intelligence facial recognition system in the room with us now?

Oosto, Corsight AI.

i have doubts on accuracy of face recognition. There is already nancy guthrie case going on and if it is so accurate why are suspects still not recognized?

You mean the the case where he came to her door dressed like death with his face almost completely covered?

Pretty extreme bar your setting. I would think most people would agree it could still have extremely (and surprisingly) potent accuracy and still fail in this case. I wouldn't expect facial recognition to work in a case when there is little to no face to work with... if that guy came dressed like that to any airport or mall he would've been detained immediately.

I used to think that the scenes of the TV series “Person of Interest” were exaggerated for storytelling purposes. Maybe not and it was accurate prescience.

I mean, it's objectively true that they can do this, especially when even mildly filtered down by incoming external data.

It's why you no longer need to speak with a person when reentering your home country in a lot of different places (israel being one of them, but also the EU, trusted travelers in the US through global entry, ect).

I'm sorry this sounds like hyperbole to say the least.

idk about their accuracy but "error free"?

Also do you understand the amount of compute and network bandwidth necessary to index and track billions of people by processing exabytes of streaming footage constantly with heavy computer vision models. who's integrating all these different camera systems to start with?

These claims sound like they come from someone who hasn't done these things in real life.

Tangentially, it seems like Israel tech scene has so many players involved in spyware/malware and surveillance.

I think these sort of claims of excessive competence are challenged by the October 7th attacks. Think about the massive amount of planning and organization that went into that attack over a period of years. There were thousands of forces engaging in some specialized and unusual strategies. Hamas even released a propaganda video more or less showing their plan with paragliders and everything. And they carried it out the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. And somehow this all caught Israel completely by surprise. So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole, or accept that these claims of excessive competence are, at the minimum, exaggerated.

Similarly this would make things like evading law enforcement pretty much impossible, while in reality there are countless people, at least thousands, who have been photographed in relation to e.g. a crime, but never found, and never identified.

> So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole

So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? Knowing about Mossad operations? With Bibi on the record saying

> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank

With most of the world's spyware, including Pegasus and NSO group, having hailed from Israel?

It's not "going down a very dark rabbit hole", it's the by far most likely option and therefore your whole comment makes no sense, presuming the much less likely option.

If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god..

> If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god.

That is a naive statement given that 75% of the world's population identifies with an established religion, and each of those have evidence free beliefs such as virgin birth, reincarnation, the existence of hell, etc.

You either have no context for that quote or have intentionally misrepresented it. Hamas started out as an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, with both being charities at the beginning. They both became political arms a little later, with Hamas being far, far less radical than the PLO at the time. The idea behind funding Hamas was to either cause a civil war between them and the PLO or to have the less radical Hamas faction take over the PLO. Obviously, it didn't work but that doesn't mean the idea doesn't have merit and has been used elsewhere successfully (Israel didn't come up with this tactic).

> So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim?

That may be a little exaggerated [1].

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ap-review-on-what-the-ep...

So the elites were flying in on the Lolita Express to an island filled with underage sex workers, to a venue with luridity abounds, hosted by a convicted pedophile, to discuss philanthropy?

Or might it be that the entire political class is filled with moral degenerates devoid of ethics, to nobody's surprise. And so consequently you are effectively having suspects investigate themselves only to conclude 'nah, nobody did anything wrong except the dead guy, but he's dead so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ '

Even that report notes at least 4 or 5 victims stated they were abused by other men and women besides Epstein. So it's gone from #MeToo to #Only4or5. If you are ever curious what creates cynics like me...

Top notch work. I assume the person picture is a test account, but it still shows how deep these companies can get.

This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated. I know its too convenient and useful for government/big companies so it'll never happen...but it should

This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated.

The other thing is that people willingly buy phones full of spyware. E.g. quite many Samsung models have the Israeli AppCloud installed (supposedly to recommend applications):

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/budget-samsun...

Even though AppCloud itself may be for recommendations it apparently mines a lot of data and each such background application, it is another potential attack vector, and I suppose that the Isreali government can compel the company to use their software for different purposes (not sure).

In contrast to what some news articles state, some Samsung models sold in Europe also have it and nobody seems to really care about it (nor the persistent Meta services, etc.).

Or maybe, you know, we should stop writing security-critical software in memory-unsafe languages. Mobile devices not treating their owner as an adversary would also be nice.

That's only part of it. That all security issues would be gone after writing code in a memory-safe language is a fairytale (though it does help a lot).

The other parts layered defense, reducing the number of privileged/non-sandboxed applications/processes, not shipping spyware/adware, etc.

Only Apple/GrapheneOS and to a slightly lesser extend Google Pixel are good at this. Many phone manufacturers still use the TrustZone TEE on the main CPU (rather than a separate security processor), isolated radios, hardware memory tagging, and dozens of other defense-in-depth features.

How do you defend against supply chain attacks??? The problem is that Israelis and their firms have access to the full chain due to their influence.

If you mean the software supply chain, minimize third-party dependencies and carefully review any updates. I mean read and understand code diffs before you bump versions.

If you mean the hardware supply chain, has that ever actually happened? I've only ever seen it mentioned as a theoretical possibility so far.

Could you elaborate more on this?

"Regulated" in reality basically means your messages are not only read by private companies that collect them, intelligence agencies that access them, but also by people sitting in the regulation panels. When officials say regulation they basically mean "I want a piece of action, too, dumbass, otherwise I'm gonna shut you down!".

Yes, that's exactly how regulation works and is why everyone with a drivers licence are always complaining when the gu the government sent to hold the steering wheel that morning is late. /s

Regulated by whom exactly? Since you can't even read, the spyware is being exclusively used by all govts of the world. Regulation never works, if you need a secure phone use GrapheneOS.

There's always a comment for "regulation" by an ignorant HN normie under anything related to surveillance. I feel like it's mostly bots at this point.

> Regulation never works

Woah there cowboy, sure you want such a broad and strong claim? Maybe you've eaten too much asbestos, breathed too much lead-gasoline fumes or otherwise inhaled something strange, because I'm sure there are countless of examples of regulation working just fine. Not to say it isn't without problems, but come on, "never"?

Regulation never works in the interwebs*

I don't see WeChat, which is weird, considering it has been out for decades and not particularly famous for being secure. Maybe it is rarely used by people in Western countries, I guess. But anyway the Chinese government can conveniently read your WeChat messages. Congratulations to all tech brothers and sisters who bring upon the love of governments to us.

The example is from a Czech citizen, unlikely that they use WeChat (Line neither though).

Maybe it's just me being old, but it generally seems unlikely that 5 or 6 messaging apps. I can understand having both TikTok and Snapchat (plus a number of other social media apps).

My take is that this is probably a test account.

Yeah, it is probably a test account, but a test account that is somewhat plausible. I don't find 5 or 6 messaging apps unlikely and I see people with a lot of them, because there is little perceived cost of installing more and it improves reachability.

Like, I have Threema installed, even though none of my contacts use it. But if one does happen to use it in the future, I'm reachable if necessary.

Yeah my thought, too. I'm also wondering whether they hire in-house engineers or mostly just buy it from some other places. Maybe they also hire people straight out from intelligence?

If the Chinese government can read WeChat but not the actual government, which has unlimited access to our body parts, I guess we should all be switching to WeChat.

I'm fine with not criticizing China or Chi, as long as EU and US governments don't have access to my messages.

I think you need to be invited by a Chinese citizen to use WeChat, and they're penalised (in the real world!) for inviting people who don't comply with Chinese law.

Stuff like that is wild to me. At least in the US, we have internal laws democratically elected that can force things to happen (Epstein transparency act for example).

In China, it can be illegal to even talk about changing the status quo.

When I see people on the internet saying things like: "Yeah screw the US, we just made a deal with China!" I wonder how oblivious they are to the domestic conditions in China.

It's funny you use the Epstein transparency act as an example of a law forcing things to happen, when the government is not complyibg with the Epstein transparency act.

I don't really think there is a lot of differences between the two. China does have a heavy hand in regulating the chats, e.g. you could have your account auto-banned for whatever the reason, if the AI finds something. Sometimes it could as trivial as mentioning e.g. 8964 in a completely different context.

But I think this is more about China wasting resources on trivial things while the US wisely focuses on more important things /s.

>I don't really think there is a lot of differences between the two.

Did your sarcasm include that sentence?

If not, I suggest you stop doom scrolling. You don't really believe this? That would be wild.

Nope. Both countries are ruled by elites who don't give a fuck about ordinary people. In that perspective the Chinese one actually cares a bit more -- you can't imagine what would happen if the Chinese elites really don't care about ordinary people if guns are legal. Historically speaking, the peasants would just kill, rape and destroy every elite family.

Wow, I feel bad for you.

(I'm in a third country)

Yeah that's pretty scary when it happened every 200 years. I'd say right now both sides probably feel they get a slightly better bargain, but scroll back 20 years definitely a lot would agree that the ordinary people of the US got a better deal, given how many Chinese wanted to go abroad at the time.

Wait so in the US you can talk against Palestine and still have a job, bank accounts not froze and police trying to arrest you for being Islamophobe?

It's really unbelievable how much data most people put online about themselves. "Valentina" has probably shared all the information about here the alleged system dashboard showed. Any interested party would only have to search the open internet (and some walled gardens like Facebook) and aggregate the information found in there.

Spy agencies and spyware companies don't have some magickal tech nobody else knows anything about. They take advantage of peoples' careless style of interacting online.

I've known people who were manually stalked through just information they posted to the internet. It really doesn't take anything more than a name and a few usernames.

this is an Advertisement.

those companies have very little technical know how. they are just money movers. they buy zero days and package them in a (likely insecure) dashboard.

now with PE and growth demand, they have to advertise something that is hard to advertise. hence these "slip ups" and articles.

Interesting marketing idea.

But yeah I don't think its anything too surprising about buying exploits and packaging them.

I think the article is more of a commentary on how these companies can exist in the open, where as a teenage hacker goes to jail for stuff like this.

Wow. your threshold for a literal crime and imoral behavior is extremely low. I do hope you realizes that is weird and not normal.

Keep your devices always up to date and limit the number of apps you use (lower attack surface).

If paranoid, use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it.

How do we know it is not rigged with an explosive like the Pagers?

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763674

"Cohen (former head of Mossad) insisted that the publicly recognized success against Hezbollah was merely one element of a far wider, systematic deployment of sophisticated devices worldwide, although notably abscent in the Gaza Strip."

His claim there did not necessarily imply rigged explosives, but supply chain attacks either for surveillance or assassination purposes.

And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.

But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)

Or just standing next to someone in the line at the supermarket.

Also, lets be clear and admit that if your notion of "target" is "anyone close to a device I sold years ago", you're not the type of person that cares if the balled up paper made it to the trash can: so long as it left your hand you would be satisfied.

The pager operation has been one of the most targeted ones in history for its size. The ratio of civilian by Hezbollah member casualties was very low compared to other military operations or a war.

The perpetrators of pager attack had no way at all to know who would be closest to the pagers when they exploded, nor any way to know that the nominal owner of a particular pager were a combatant in the first place.

So the perpetrators did not know they would actually hurt a lawful target, they just hoped it might.

Anyway, stop supporting the genocide dude.

Oh yeah, just random chance that the Hezbollah combatants would have their military pagers close to them rather than with some random civilian. What an incredible coincidence!

Go get some life. I believe Hitler had the same mentality. Reducing casualty. He asked everyone to wear their stars if they had had circumcision and targeted them systematically. He could have bombed them all but decided to be more deliberate. Yes yes, flipping the script is antisemitism. Of course it is.

Completely bizarre how you are equating killing Hezbollah combatants (a terrorist group known for indiscriminately firing tens of thousands of rockets targeting civilians) with the Nazis exterminating millions of (obviously peaceful) Jewish people simply for being Jews.

You keep repeating than an operation, functionally equivalent to poisoning the water in an area you have seen combatants, is "targeted". It simply isn't, and you are just lying to yourself to feel better about the war crimes you support.

By your own definition that same civilian population is 1) actively sponsoring genocide through their vote and their taxes, 2) actively supporting it through military service. Aren’t Israelis using the same language for Palestinian these days?

Btw, y’all called the old Mandela terrorist too. No one cares who you call terrorist.

Also, it's interesting you think the comment about Hitler being more careful in his targeting than the IDF is persuasive enough you need to reply to it.

>And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.

Except we don't know. "virtually every potential theater" is intentionally very vague language that could mean anything.

When Roman legions weren’t out killing others, they were in Rome doing a coup. What y’all armies do outside, they also do inside.

Take it with you on an international trip or three. Surely those airport scanners will pick it up.

That's actually a great point. Out of the hundreds of pagers that were out in the wild you'd think one of them went through an airport check at some point and got flagged.

Why would it get flagged? Weren't they just slightly modified pagers essentially rigged to overheat, rather than they actually put explosives in them?

Besides, if I was in a terrorist cell, had a pager for communicating, and was taking a vacation flight, I think I might leave that pager behind for a week.

No.

They weren't flagged because they went into Lebanon which has very little import security, and because it was a supply chain attack.

The batteries were swapped for a combination battery / explosive charge. The follow-up attack where Hezbollah moved to using walkie-talkies that were also rigged to explode was the real shocker, though.

> Weren't they just slightly modified pagers essentially rigged to overheat, rather than they actually put explosives in them?

Lol no. They had actual explosives in them. Small but enough to kill and maim.

You mean the security theater complex?

Yeah, I mean surely that would catch it, right... right?

We know because we're not shooting rockets at them.

Today they are targeting people shooting rockets, tomorrow they will target people commenting on these posts, the day after they will target specific group of people.

So you may be safe today, what happens when they don't like your opinion ?

If only things were that simple and they weren't also helping ICE terrorise civilians.

> limit the number of apps ... lower attack surface ... If paranoid

While true in general, super apps that do too many things and used by billions (WhatsApp, Chrome, TikTok, Instagram, CleanMaster etc) are big enough of an attack surface already.

Defenses (compile-time / runtime memory safety & control flow integrity, media coders/decoders, sandboxes, for example) are getting better & so exploits are getting expensive.

> use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it

While using different devices is good enough, it requires the end user to maintain strict isolation (and sometimes may require appropriate features from the OS). Using burners is an extreme version of this practice.

>super apps that do too many things and used by billions (WhatsApp, Chrome, TikTok, Instagram, CleanMaster etc)

One of these are not like the others...

Burners seem extreme, but old used hardware still seems the best and only way you can sort of prove isolation on your own.

You can't trust software not to be buggy and both, hardware, and software not to be purposely compromised because "think of the children" (that the EFs proved to be BS).

And if you use iPhones and have reason to be really paranoid, consider using lockdown mode.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120

Has android been hacked?

I only know pegasus broke iOS.

I find it interesting that Apple has spun Lockdown mode from a 'we are terrible at security' into a feature for marketing.

Now when someone gets hacked Apple can say: "Well they weren't in lockdown mode, its their own fault."

Gosh I wish I was as good at marketing as Apple. They really need to sell their marketing team as a service. If they did that, I'd buy their stock outright.

Every phone is hackable but Pixel with GrapheneOS generally seems the hardest. See e.g. the leaked Cellebrite support matrix:

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-ju...

iOS generally seems harder than non-GrapheneOS Android, taking a few months for Cellebrite to catch up with. All the other Android phones/variants should make people cry because device security is so bad.

>Has android been hacked?

Yes, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46989612

With GrapheneOS you can physically switch off the USB while locked.

two last attacks from paragon for pixel devices uses the modem firmware. these things doesn't help much.

iPhone 17's and later offer the highest level of security in a smartphone: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...

> Paragon’s founding team not includes the former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, it also includes former Unit 8200 commander Ehud Schneorson, exposing how Israeli intelligence expertise metastisizes into private markets.

Interestingly enough, turns out Ehud Barak was close to Epstein as well, frequently mentioned in the "newly" released files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehud_Barak#Relationship_with_J...

Questions:

Why hasnt this been used for stealing Crypto?

Is there evidence Android OS has been compromised? (I know Samsung phones had an issue)

Is there any evidence a Fedora, Debian-family, or linux has been compromised?

> Why hasnt this been used for stealing Crypto?

Because the information obtained is much more valuable than imaginary tokens.

> Is there evidence Android OS has been compromised? (I know Samsung phones had an issue)

I assume every OS can be compromised by a determined adversary.

> Is there any evidence a Fedora, Debian-family, or linux has been compromised?

I'm not sure what evidence you would need, but see above.

Android and Linux's source code is available. So its easy to find flaws and report them. Linux has live a long time and hasn't had major security issues. (Sometimes you get a compromised vendor down the chain in a single distro)

But also, imaginary tokens are really really valuable. I'm sure there are normal-ish people with ~100-1000 bitcoin, let alone a few of the outspoken people who are bitcoin billionaires.

"Valuable" is a relative term, and I am confident that the intelligence gathered using these tools is much more valuable to nations that coins that are primarily used for money laundering and other scams.

Is this company a candidate for being "Jia Tan"?

Jia Tan wouldn't be interested in secret spyware firms. They hide their code in plain sight.

No need, they have plenty of 0-day exploits that don't leave discoverable traces.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46979819

How are they intercepting Signal?

They are attacking the end-point app on your device.

Pretending like this some gotcha is pretty funny. The effectiveness of the software hasn't changed. In fact the targets don't even know it's there.

> Palestinians have long lived under one of the most extensively documented surveillance regimes in the world. The deployment of facial recognition systems, predictive analytics, and device monitoring technologies in the occupied Palestinian territories are widely documented by human-rights organizations and digital researchers.

At the same time Israel has world renowned success of thwarting terrorist plots, and best in class intelligence shared with other countries (like the many, many, terrorist attacks stopped in European capitals thanks to Israeli intelligence).

You can choose either surveillance, or terrorism.

When you choose build an apartheid, you choose surveillance, because how else would you enforce a top to bottom racial order on the populace?

When you end apartheid, you end 'terrorism' (legal and ethical resistance against having your life, land, and water stolen). History shows this to be possible, preferable, and moral.

> When you end apartheid, you end 'terrorism'

Your theory has really not been borne out by reality.

Somehow Hamas committed October 7th and has fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israel since Gaza was given in its entirety to the arabs.

Somehow Iran has been financing and arming multiple terrorist groups even though it obviously is its own country far away from Israel.

Somehow Hezbollah has fired tens of thousands of rockets at civilians as well.

Somehow the Houthis have been committing terrorism sa well and their flag is literally "God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel".

Yeah, I'm sure if Israel just stopped all the security measures on the West Bank, all terrorism would stop!

If you could press a button and kill every man, woman, and child in Gaza, would you press that button?

If you could execute every Yemeni, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian tomorrow, gifting you a 'clean', and 'pure' world for Greater Israel to flourish for 1000 years, would you do it?

If your answer is yes. Then anything I say about the right of the invaded and occupied to resist occupation under international law will land on deaf ears.

This is a common bit of hate propaganda.

Do yourself a favor; go on to google maps and zoom out until you can see all these countries. Isreal is a tiny sliver on that scale and has not expanded in the last 50 years.

What has happened, is that the large Jewish populations of Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon have gone to 0. So you got yourself a large “clean” and “pure” area. But it’s that remaining sliver that you are obsessed with trying to wipe out.

Is your argument that because these territorial incursions have not been successful to the degree the the Israeli government desired, that those incursions are unacceptable to resist?

> Isreal[sic] is a tiny sliver on that scale and has not expanded in the last 50 years.

My sibling in [your preferred Deity], you cannot spell Israel?? What are we doing?

Do you acknowledge that expanding militarily is always illegal, or not? You can't make an argument like "Israel is just a smol bean that needs lebensraum" and make it sound normal in 2026.

I want middle-aged Jewish people that have 'purchased' stolen land in the West Bank to move back home to the States and be my neighbors again! That isn't 'wiping them out', quite the contrary!

Forestalling that, I want integration and democracy and an accounting of what was stolen, along with reparations. I want the children of that land to grow up and not understand why their parents were in conflict. To barely comprehend how it could have been so bad.

This is what I want for the United States as well. An accounting and reparations for both the decedents of the enslaved and those we committed genocide against, within our borders and without. We never completed reconstruction and we are all poorer for it.

This is why the current administration is tearing down monuments that remember our past, they'd rather live in a muscular fantasy of restoration forgotten 'white' greatness than acknowledge what we owe to each other. That we must find solidarity and love in shared humanity to resist the forces that divide us.

They have not expanded in 50 years because they have no desire to expand. It’s a scary bedtime story told to kids in certain cultures.

Do you also think that non-whites should leave Europe? Do you think that South Americans should be deported from North America. You think that lands belongs to races?

Your siblings in ideology are actively working to make Jews in America and around the world feel hated so that they are motivated to migrate to Isreal.

It’s the antisemitism of “anti-Zionists” that is boosting Zionism.

> Then anything I say about the right of the invaded and occupied to resist occupation under international law will land on deaf ears.

There is absolutely no part of international law that allows terrorism from Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, or Houthis to "resist occupation".

And it is really quite worrisome how you are openly supporting terrorism.

While I don't agree with terrorism, this is incorrect. International law is quite deliberate in allowing the victims of aggression to do almost anything against the aggressors to get control of their land back, including terrorism. Those who wrote the law hoped this would be a sufficient deterrent against invasions.

> victims of aggression

There is no such notion in IHL. IHL has a notion of self-defense, but that's only relevant to jus ad bellum. Once a conflict exists, there are no carveouts whatsoever for those who claim self-defense, or consider themselves victims, or claim that the other side violated international laws. Customary IHL doesn't care about such claims.

And Israel is an aggressor who is occupying the land of Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Houthis? Are you even reading what you write?

Also love the refusal to even agree that words have meaning. You put scare quotes around 'terrorism'. Are you saying that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a series of small terrorist groups, and a series of individuals did not commit terrorists attacks in Israel?

Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." - are you saying exploding bombs, knife attacks, and firing rockets indiscriminately against civilians is not terrorism?

> Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims."

Now take a long look in the mirror.

Israel performs precise attacks on valid military targets and with multiple measures to reduce the number of collateral damage to civilians. You are trying to equate this with terrorist attacks literally targeting civilians.

The carnage was too documented for too long of a period of time for those words of yours to warrant a serious response. I know that the only way to possibly attempt to repair your image is to relentlessly repeat the bullet points over and over again and hope that the new generations hear more of your words and less of actual documented reporting, but there is no reason for the rest of us to dignify such attempts of yours with a serious discussion about what are now established facts. While you're staring at that mirror, try to find a semblance of a soul somewhere deep if any still exists there. Collectively.

If the "carnage" was so well "documented", then it'll be quite easy for you to provide proof. Do you have any proof at all that Israel engages in systematic *terrorism* (i.e. "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims")?

Again, I'm not talking about collateral casualties in valid military strikes. I'm talking about sustained, deliberate attacks against civilians with the objective of killing as many civilians as possible. Do you have any evidence at all that Israel did this?

This "apartheid" claim never made sense to me. Are people completely ignorant to South African history? Israeli Palestinians are equal citizens. Black people in South Africa couldn't own property, couldn't vote, and often couldn't even live in the same building as white people.

IIRC Israel maintains apartheid by insisting the oppressed class are not their citizens. They call them Palestinians, and keep them in a small area called Gaza, rather than the South African approach of making them South Africans with lesser rights and the ability to access the whole country.

There are two million Arabs in Israel with full citizenship and equal rights. They are in the parliament, in the Supreme Court, in the IDF, in all professions, and in 2022 were in the government coalition.

The Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are not citizens of Israel, and it would be against international law for Israel to give them citizenship.

So you want Israel to annex Gaza?

History has also shown that whenever Jews are in a minority of the population something bad tends to a happen to them.

So a two state solution makes much more sense.

I disagree. Limiting your understanding of 'can people coexist' down to purely ethnic terms is colonial apartheid thinking.

"History has also shown that whenever Mizrahi Jews are a minority relative to Ashkenazi Jews something bad tends to a happen to them"

What now mupuff? Is it because they tainted by their Arab blood?

I could do this all day with random minorities, but it's not a refutation of my argument.

'Single supreme race' states are evil. The Antebellum South was one of the most evil places ever to exist and functioned on the exact same terms. There was a civil war, and we settled on a one state solution. The only mistake was not fully purging the slavers from positions of power and stopping reconstruction.

Racial/Ethnic/Religious caste systems are a race to the bottom. They are a suicidal purity cult.

I should note that you are factually wrong. Jews have very rarely been an ethnic majority, yet many cultures have managed to not genocide them throughout history. This includes middle eastern countries prior to the Nakba. Don't project out the utterly imperial eurocentric 'pograms are inevitiable' and 'arabs are all that same, and are savages' viewpoint out onto every civilizations.

European empires created or exacerbated divisions in peaceful populations as a means of colonial control. This is well documented and intentional. Zionism as a project is very very British, they wrote their plans down! Same as they did in South Africa. Same as they did in Ireland.

So Jews should just accept the ruler de jour! If he likes Jews everything’s honky dory, if he doesn’t, better luck with the next ruler! Just like the last 2000 years of exile, sometime it was nice for Jews, sometime it was pogroms. Such is life you say.

So easy for you when you’re not the one that billions of people around the world are taught to hate.

""" So [Black people in America] should just accept the [president] de jour! If he likes [Black people] everything’s honky dory, if he doesn’t, better luck with the next [president]! Just like the last 400 years of [chattel slavery, convict leasing, apartheid, and child incarceration], sometime it was nice for [Black people], sometime it was [lynchings].

Such is life you say. So easy for you when you’re not the one that billions of people around the world are taught to hate [Black people, sexual minorities, brown immigrants, Muslims, Jews, etc...]. """

I'm saying that apartheid is always wrong and I will always stand against it. It is not 'such is life' except in the particular sense that it is the obligation of all free peoples to stand against these moral atrocities where ever they appear, and they appear in every age.

It does not matter to me one whit the particulars of the race or caste of the people enacting apartheid and genocide and no amount of special pleading will change my mind.

what you think matters not in the real world. Jews are hated, and persecuted. In the past and present. The only place where Jews feel safe to be Jewish is Israel.

Jews who live in Germany don't have rockets fired at them every day. Isn't that safer?

Jews in Israel had rockets fired on them mainly from border town. And now the Israeli government finally put a stop to it, and no rockets are being fired on them.

https://amp.dw.com/en/berlins-young-jews-reveal-complex-expe...

> In December, for example, major security measures were implemented at the public candle-lighting ceremony for the Hanukkah holiday, held at Berlin's landmark Brandenburg Gate, while just a few years ago, passersby could watch the celebration up close.

> "In the past, I sometimes wore a Star of David necklace. At the moment, I don't," Sofer says. "Right now, anywhere in Berlin, you'd have to be crazy to wear one," in her view.

Yeah, sounds safe. Love the jewsplaining of telling me where I should feel safer.

Where in Berlin are the antisemitism police not patrolling? Brandenburg Gate? Get real, you'd be arrested in five seconds if you did an antisemitic attack there.

Factually untrue in two regards.

The USA is the safest place on Earth for Jewish people, both by the numbers and in measured attitudes.

Israel is by far more dangerous. If you can only feel safe there, this is your feelings lying to you about the real state of the world. Perhaps this fear is what allows you to avoid looking inward at your personal acceptance of apartheid as a necessary evil?

Feeling safe is nice, but it's not a human right to feel unsafe and then insist that it is [the whole 'real' word]'s problem. You can not create real safety at the expense of your neighbor's safety.

'safety' is an argument that justifies every act. It's identical a white lady in the park calling the cops because she saw [minority] and 'felt unsafe'. It's firing a tall stocky cis women because seeing her enter the stall made 'real women' feel unsafe about the tr*nny 'invading their spaces'.

It's being anti-integration [not because you are racist!!!, but] because schools would be made 'unsafe'. etc etc etc...

The USA is safest by attitude? I have Jewish friends there. Kids are harassed at schools because they are Jewish. Jews at universities hide their religion because they are being excluded from everywhere by the student body, professors are discriminating Jews. Synagogues are being fire bombed. Jewish places of business are being marked.

That does not happen in Israel.

You've implied you are neither Jewish, nor American and you are lecturing me with random anecdotes about what is 'really going on' in the USA???

I attended school in one of the most staunchly zionist synagogues in America for years. I was the designate שבת גוי for years during high school. I lived in a quiet, peaceful predominately orthodox neighborhood during those years. Those Jewish kids I grew up arguing with about politics helped me deconstruct the subtle bigotries [about black, brown, and arab people] I was raised in! My education on the Holocaust and then genocide generally is why I am writing what I am right now.

Only one of those kids grew up and remained a Zionist to this day, he moved to Israel; It had always been his dream... Then he moved to NJ to start a family, last I checked he's still a Rabbi and lecturer. Can you imagine the reasons why he didn't choose to start his family in the 'safest place' on Earth?

You are woefully misinformed about daily life here and you need to consume less news designed to terrify you.

You almost got the irony...

There has been recent academic research (+ book) about how it's the opposite - Israel relied on foreign intelligence (Club de Berne) for it's most famous operations.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/140/604-605/777/8140798

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/histor...

You didn't even try with this one

You can choose a secular government with equal rights and opportunities for all or found a theocracy.

That government, and its country, will be destroyed in three days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com