> The agents said the Israelis’ technology, which helped carriers troubleshoot their customers’ smartphones by sending them an SMS link that enabled the carrier to access the phone remotely, could be useful for saving people’s lives.
A decade later:
> Saudi Arabia, using “Pegasus,” hacked the phones of Jamal Khashoggi’s ex-wife, and of his fiancée, and used the information gleaned to prepare for his monstrous killing and its subsequent cover-up.
People who are trusted to do "dirty work" are usually licensed or otherwise tested by a credible organization of similarly-employed professionals to make sure each individual is morally and legally accountable for their own actions.
Guess it's finally time for software engineers to be licensed in order to legally write code that affects human lives (just like every other professional engineer). The ethics oversight boards that come with the territory can then laugh off the next "Pegasus" that anyone tries to work on.
Not like this will stop people from trying, but at least they won't have a professional engineer writing their code :^)
"And all we hear is this campaign that we are violating human rights, and it’s very upsetting. Because I know how much life has been saved globally because of our technology."
Oh, pity poor NSO. Give me a break.
Even if their goals were good (and I honestly have no reason to think otherwise), the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And everything they're saying boils down to "trust us". We have no reason to believe they can be trusted, and we have several reasons to think they can't.
I also don't doubt that lives have been saved. But that doesn't excuse everything. There are costs that are too high to pay to accomplish the laudable goal of saving lives.
Exactly. There is a certain logic to "Somebody will do this and I am somebody." But anybody taking the money also has to take the moral burden that comes with the work.
> There is a certain logic to "Somebody will do this and I am somebody."
Yep. But the logic is deeply flawed. I am always disappointed when this pitiful excuse gets trotted out. Just because someone else will inevitably do evil things is not a justification for you to do evil things.
I've seen it used quite a few times in HN discussions of unethical business practices. My favorite is when the meme "corporation's sole responsibility is maximize profit to the shareholder" gets mixed in and folks argue that it's a moral imperative to take the dirty money
I wouldn't be surprised if all this bruhaha is to kick them out from a lucrative market. Just curious if it's an American company or Russians trying to find jobs for their hacking forces, now that the US elections are over.
What I find hard to believe is that NSO are the only ones doing this (or by extension Israel). Are there other US based or UK based companies doing the same but we just don't hear about them?
Big nation-state security agencies do it in-house, like NSA's TAO. Israel itself wouldn't rely on NSO, quite the opposite: NSO is alums from Israel's Unit 8200 (IDF signals intelligence) repackaging a dumbed-down version the know-how they learned in the military for retail sale to tier 2 and 3 countries that don't have the capability, or to police departments that don't have access to national-security-grade spyware.
I know some Unit 8200 alums, and they are scathing about the ethics of their former colleagues who went on to work for NSO.
8200 alumni have much better options than NSO...
But yeah, every IT personnel who was installing Microsoft Sharepoint in army and their grandma suddenly become ex-8200 and every grunt becomes a navy seal.
Sure, someone has to do the dirty work. I get that.
But in that same vein, there always has to be someone to take the fall.
NSO — you knew this when you started doing the dirty work. You knew this when you were in the Israeli military.
You don’t get to complain now that you’re being made the scapegoat, when you knew damn good and well what might happen to you when you started doing the dirty work.
The dirty work of helping dictators get away with murder. Of preventing countless people from organizing and taking back their lives from genocidal maniacs. Of aiding human rights abuses all around the world and helping to cover them up.
What these people are doing should be a crime against humanity and they should end up in jail over it.
I'm not sure if anybody an Nuremberg adopted the defense of, "Look, they kept shipping in prisoners but expected that none of them leave. We didn't have food or facilities for them all! We had to make room for them somehow!" but this feels along that same track.
The fact that this is an Israeli company makes it a very bitter irony. Then again, many current Israeli policies would make their grandparents blush with shame.
Both sides? The public vs NSO clients or what? Debate? It’s more like an exposé, hopefully followed by investigations and criminal trials or at least mega class action lawsuits. Their spyware was used for murdering countless humans. The list of target phone numbers was heavy on cartel victims etc, in case you hadn’t heard.
A decade later:
> Saudi Arabia, using “Pegasus,” hacked the phones of Jamal Khashoggi’s ex-wife, and of his fiancée, and used the information gleaned to prepare for his monstrous killing and its subsequent cover-up.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-nso-group-peg... [2] https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-l...