Middle East Dictators Buy Spy Tech from Company Linked to IBM and Google | Hacker News Reader

Middle East Dictators Buy Spy Tech from Company Linked to IBM and Google

theintercept.com

37 pointsnotlukesky8 comments

> The Chinese firm is a member of an American organization called the OpenPower Foundation, which was founded by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation.”

So the link is all three happen to be members of an open consortium? That has to be one of the most tenuous 'links' imaginable, on par with "have employees who attended the same conference once".

OpenPower is such a nice ominous name that the writer conveniently avoided explaining that it refers to the instruction set architecture descended from PowerPC (although that means they missed a chance to also "link" them to Apple).

I doubt that the particular instruction set architecture used by those chips has a large influence on their use for surveillance applications. In a few years, we'll probably get to read similar articles about RISC-V, complete with "risky" puns.

The Falcon tool sounds very similar to the stingray device manufactured by Harris Corporation. The same company that strong armed law enforcement with NDAs on the tools itself and releasing any information about how the law enforcement officers actually gathered the evidence.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180120/06352239048/harri...

Saudi Interior Ministry (secret police) buy a ton of Oracle/SUN as well.

The Saudis have deep pockets and Oracle us very happy to aid them in human rights violations

Would be nice if default apps and settings in purism's phone use end to end encryption for reasons like this.

This is not unusual behavior for firms that are defense contractors.

They wanted tried and tested solutions.

>Aegis, Semptian’s flagship system, is designed to be installed inside phone and internet networks, where it is used to secretly collect people’s email records, phone calls, text messages, cellphone locations, and web browsing histories.

Other than government involvement, how is this different than the capabilities deployed by Google and the permissions granted various apps in their store?

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