> Within the Israeli cyberweapons industry, the totemic name is NSO Group. Its Pegasus technology can purportedly hack a phone without the target even clicking a link. It’s been used to track dissidents, activists, and journalists from Mexico to Morocco. Most infamously, according to a 2018 lawsuit, the Saudi government is alleged to have used Pegasus to hack the phone of a friend of Jamal Khashoggi’s in order to monitor the journalist before his murder.
> Behind NSO Group, there are many more. Cellebrite offers services to reconstruct data deleted from devices. NSO’s sister company Circles sells the ability to locate a person’s physical location using only their phone number.
Terrifying stuff. All this makes me wonder: nowadays, how are citizens living under oppressive governments ever to conceivably organise any kind of resistance? Such pervasive and all-encompassing surveillance makes it impossible that any kind of opposition can ever be mounted, if citizens can be monitored everywhere at all times. Absolutely depressing stuff.