How Spy Tech Firms Let Governments See Everything on a Smartphone

I wrote some really effective data recovery software a decade ago. Before I knew it governments around the world were buying it up in droves. I then got pushed (not by the governments, but by my partner at the company I had) to write a special forensics edition, that does a byte-by-byte scan of the source disk rather than a block-by-block scan, which would extract embedded files out of a hard disk and basically ensure that nothing would be missed.<p>That code eventually got a big fancy &quot;forensics&quot; UI wrapped around it with a bunch of other functionality such as logging the process, and it got sold for $1k &#x2F; copy. It would sell upwards of 80 copies at a time in a single batch. It was very profitable (though I personally did not see much of that profit).<p>I always felt very uneasy about it and I stopped developing that line of software even though at this point I could get ~50% of the profit if I were to continue it. I had no idea what it was actually being used for all of the time and I had no way to find out. I do know however that some of the time it was used for good, to catch people distributing child pornography and so forth, however I don&#x27;t know what percentage of the time it was used for that kind of thing, and I&#x27;m also aware that that is the justification that is used for a lot of surveillance. Philosophically I believe in counter-survelliance more than surveillance, because I&#x27;m pro privacy and pro citizen empowerment rather than the other way around, I think the balance of power has gotten out of whack as this article nicely illustrates.

The moral issue aside, I can&#x27;t even begin to fathom how their software would even work. How do you stealth install software to a random phone out in the wild? Social engineering, or purely technical?

I you were high profile it would be a good reason for a dumb phone or a lesser known smartphone.

Sickening. This company doesn&#x27;t seem to have even a basic moral compass. Even when their tools are being used against human rights workers or journalist they have no qualms.

Is it me, or is the NYT suggesting that they have been victims of this Pegasus system?

We need protection against governments. They are the mafia of today&#x27;s world.