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Comment by rasz | Hacker News Reader

1 Over 7000 licenses for Pegasus alone. Both opposition and own party surveilled.

2 Usage of Pegasus means all intercepts are on the servers in Israel. All Government secrets and potential kompromat transferred to foreign power.

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3. And most importantly: all of that funded by the taxpayer, to satisfy one man's paranoia.

Even worse. Pegasus was all paid from the 'Justice Fund', which was intended to help crime victims.

https://www.funduszsprawiedliwosci.gov.pl

"The Justice Fund provides immediate and free emergency assistance to crime victims, witnesses and their closest relatives, including victims of armed aggression in Ukraine.

You can use the free:

legal aid, psychological help, material assistance"

Quite fitting considering previous corrupt regime was ran by PIS, which doesnt stand for piss but 'Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc' - Law and Justice.

>Usage of Pegasus means all intercepts are on the servers in Israel

Wait, seriously? Any sources on that? I find it hard to believe that any government would spend $$$ on a security tool that doesn't allow on-prem installation and instead beams all your surveillance to another country.

You have a lot to catch up on, then.

I’m curious about this statement too, seems there’s evidence that they don’t and the customer is the data handler: https://www.edps.europa.eu/system/files_en?file=2023-01/0221... top of page 4.

I guess this is all according to NSO claims. I’d like to see evidence otherwise!

Why would you trust anything a spyware company says? This is not a tongue-in-cheek question.

No honour among the thieves

It is a lot of money lost if it comes out that you lied to some of your biggest clients.

Not if your customers are reticent to even admit being a customer in the first place.

Your other customers will see every major headline that you lied and kept confidential documents.

That was one of the claims during parliamentary committee investigating it.

S(pyware)aaS

a) it's not a security tool but spyware b) this spyware is meant to spy on the government so this job is better outsourced to another government

this was meant to be used for spying terrorists and such, so should not be big deal

from what I heard about Pegasus: noone could get that malware for themselves to not compromise it, so it's you wanted to hijack some phone you would send them phone number so they could resend exploit again (spyware was not persistent across reboots, so you needed to rehack it every time)

NATO countries' governments and military use phones with encrypted communications to which the US has the keys. This fact was made available during investigation into the Polish government plane crash in Smolensk. The US authorities have access to the recordings of the calls made by the late president of Poland, but said they would not make them available.

source: https://www.money.pl/archiwum/wiadomosci/artykul/usa;nie;uja...

Indirectly, all software vulnerability tools that send source code and other artefacts to servers outside government's control give third parties access to information about potential attack vectors, software vulnerabilities, and infrastructure layout.

>NATO countries' governments and military use phones with encrypted communications to which the US has the keys.

What do these phones look like and who manufactures them?

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