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Comment by rickspencer3 | Hacker News Reader

I just recently listened to 2 great of Darknet Diaries covered Citizenlab, NSO, and Pegasus.

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/99/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/

The gist is that the NSO group is a company that sells malware which they claim is only ever used to catch bad guys, but the podcast makes a pretty compelling case that they know that repressive governments and even companies use it to target journalists and activists.

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No need to make a compelling case at this point, it is widely known. Israel has a large tech sector, much of which is directly or indirectly related to "security" and "defense", aka military and surveillance. Not much unlike the US either, but companies like NSO are at the top of their game and seem to have little restraint about whom their products are sold to.

> compelling case that they know that repressive governments and even companies use it to target journalists and activists.

Poland's "Law and Justice" regime has apparently used Pegasus to spy on opposition senator Krzysztof Brejza[1] and other opposition politicians[2]

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/ap-exclusive-polish-opposition-senato...

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/europe-pegasus-investigati...

https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/27/22855390/poland-pegasus-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/17/more-polish-op...

https://democratic-europe.eu/2022/01/18/citizen-lab-there-is...

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 doesn't apply to NSO because fuck logic.

If you are NSO, you can openly commit computer fraud/abuse and even sell it as a product/service.

Is NSO affiliated with The Israel Lobby? That may explain it.

Well, the CFAA can only be enforced against territories under United States jurisdiction.

The US could say “tighten controls on your defense contractors or lose our support” and then do that if they don’t listen. That’ll never happen though. I’m sure plenty of TLAs use NSO software.

That doesn’t stop the DoJ from extraditing foreign nationals who never set foot on US soil before.

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