Israel police uses NSO’s Pegasus to spy on citizens

Once the method exists. i&#x27;d just assume its everywhere<p>We know about Pegasus&#x2F;NSO and its a fun subject to follow, but in all honesty, every engineer privy to the 0-day bank that powers it could build one of their own, or sell it to another group, and no one would know

&quot;In other cases, NSO’s spyware was installed in the phone of citizens to try to find and collect data and information that isn’t necessarily connected to an investigation or suspicions but simply for investigators to use this data later on as a means of pressure on people being interrogated.&quot;<p>aka Blackmail

Can we stop pretending like Pegasus is not virtually everywhere?If it&#x27;s not Pegasus is another tool, worse or better, foreign or domestic, from NSA,CIA,etc.Who exactly cares which entity does it as long as it&#x27;s happening and laws &amp; principles are being broken?<p>Vault7 was the first leak de facto proving these things existed, why the f#ck are we still surprised now, almost 5 years later, that these things are being used and there is a market here opened for politicians,private individuals, governments, etc.?<p>Awareness is good, but who(or better said: what institutions, what parties, etc) are you seeing advocating for more privacy, security, transparency in software and hardware, etc?<p>I will go one step further here beyond the simple &quot;more privacy, security,etc.&quot; rhetoric, which i&#x27;m sure every HN user has heard to the point of ears bleeding, and I hate to say this but one cannot fully understand something until either s&#x2F;he makes it, he hacks it(for the purpose of at least understanding) or becomes subject to the tool&#x27;s effects.Far too many times people use something without even reading the TOS, let alone understanding the mechanisms behind the technology.At this point i have little sympathy for people who do not take the time and putting in the work of understanding a technology &gt;for their own benefit&lt;.<p>Because nobody who is at least semi-literate in this field was born with the knowledge, and while arguably it&#x27;s our duty to point less knowledgeable people to inform themselves, we cannot tire ourselves to death by promoting (or allowing others who promote) this &quot;usable-first, hussle-free, happy jolly&quot; tech ecosystem and then also act surprised when the masses don&#x27;t have a f*cking clue what&#x27;s going on, because effectively we trained humans to become dumb monkeys with a smartphone, arguably worse.

In Poland there was a sort of similar story. Politicians from the opposition, lawyers, “difficult” prosecutors have been spied. A few days ago a special commission started investigation but it consists only from opposition politicians. The ruling far-right party pretends this topic does not exist. It’s a farce.

Comment from duplicate submission:<p>Some of the companies in the field, in contrast to NSO, do have ethics committees to filter out obviously bad clients. Once when guidelines were described to engineers a question was asked: Would Israel itself pass the ethics committee check?<p>The answer was &quot;No. But...&quot;

&gt;&quot;Israel is its own nation and it isn&#x27;t America&#x27;s business what it does to its own citizens.&quot;<p>Syria is its own nation and it isn&#x27;t America&#x27;s business what it does to its own citizens.

Whenever Israel is involved in anything unfortunately the discussion becomes about anti semitism (sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly). Maybe it helps if we imagined it was another nation and then see what we think about it. If it was Russia&#x2F;china or UK&#x2F;France&#x2F;Germany would you still think or feel the same?

In India it has been used extensively against social activist, victims of court cases, journalists etc. List goes on and on. It is prime example of how power and money corrupts a system.<p>Shame on the engineers who developed it.

It&#x27;s interesting to me why spying on citizens is like this foundational goal of all modern nation states. I get why a state might want to do this but its not clear to me why it seems to be the only stable path for modern democracies.

The Darknet Diaries podcast episode about NSO was eye opening.

Can Israelis take the matter to court?

Of cooouuurrrssse.

This should surprise no one since the spyware was developed by Israeli intelligence agencies.

People used to quip that Prussia is an army with a country rather than the other way around, it seems like if you add the modern intelligence sector that describes Israel. With all the concerns about &#x27;Military-civil fusion &#x27; as it&#x27;s called in China or Russia I always found it funny that Israel might as well be the country that has merged both spheres most successfully but nobody really seems to care at all.

Israel is its own nation and it isn&#x27;t America&#x27;s business what it does to its own citizens. However, their tools are used on American without warrants. It would be in our interests as citizens to flag all employees of NSO as spies and try them.

The Israeli government and former government ministers also fund propaganda orgs on American soil, CAMERA and Hasbara Fellowships to name two. You could even say that every US election has been compromised by well-funded, successful foreign propaganda operations since at least 1982!