Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner's phone
twitter.com
twitter.com
In any case, Kushner - and rightfully so - could not obtain a security clearance the first time around, due to massive debt. But it was overruled / waived by higher ups.
I've worked in intel, and Kushner seems like the textbook example - a cautionary tale - on the type of person you do not want to grant anything of importance.
Honestly it sort of blows my mind that the US has a system decisions by security professionals can simply be overruled.
America will need a number of constitutional amendments to counter the last 40+ years, which I hope is peaking this administration.
However, this isn't the case with Palestine, which is why Netanyahu has problems - and obviously Putin as well.
The current American regime is hardly friendly to the ICC. Are they fair game too? (I'd likely say yes, they would strongly disagree!)
Somebody must have a very thin skin!
So… the President is in pretty hot water if any senators decide to ask a few questions here.
Seriously, there is absolutely nothing the current US president could do that could constitute a "hot water" situation for him give the willingness of the Republican party and the SCOTUS to support him unconditionally.
Came across it here [1]: "Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using "Super Intelligence" (SI) in place of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition."
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/09/inau...
It's like trying to make "fetch" happen by executive order.
And copy paste of the above for Trump.
Isn't that kinda bad for their health? Polonium intake is unhealthy.
I'm not an American so don't take this the wrong way, but Jared's response to the tweet, that the story is fabricated because of how complicated it is and VanityFair disclosed no evidences, should be considered as well.
I believe the current modus operandi is to offer a window.
On a serious note: plenty of people were surprised that Navalny returned to Russia. I suspect that after his poisoning it became clear Putin and his cronies wanted him dead, so he chose to give them the judicial spectacle they wanted so that they would at least spare his family.
Why return only after being poisoned and not earlier?
> Russian politics over the last decades has so inculcated society with cynicism and conspiracy theory that people fundamentally do not believe in simple motives.
He was poisoned inside Russia in late 2020, and was extracted (by his family, he was in a coma) to Germany for treatment. He returned immediately after recovering in early 2021.
You are right that it has nonzero value, but appropriate bayesian priors should take into account Vanity Fair being a reliable source, and Jared being a historically unreliable, untransparent source.
tl;dr: VF > JK absent further evidence in either direction
I'm not saying VF is lying in this case, it could all be true, but extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence.
Yeah, but it's more likely they will continue their reputation as a reliable source, and that someone with a track record of dishonesty and non-transparency will continue being dishonest and non-transparent. So those two things combined result in no net effect on the bayesian priors, and we are again left with `VF > JK`, absent further evidence.
> I'm not saying VF is lying in this case, it could all be true, but extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence.
Given the bayesian priors, VF's claim doesn't seem all that extraordinary, whereas JK's claim of innocence in comparison seems rather extraordinary. From there I apply the same heuristic of extraordinary claims.
Honestly I doubt Jared has even read the book, so I don't see how he could even be an informed source on the matter of his denials.
Personally the article reads to me like a international spy thriller short story, so until they disclose some evidence I'll just file this under "Americans flinging shit at each other" directory lol.
Dutch intel can think that happened, or not. It is independent from if that is true. The whole thing equally sounds like a setup using the Dutch to launder the story.
Which is also entirely independent from any stories of this sort in the media being true one way or another.
Also a problem in the UK (Boris Johnson with Lord Lebedev).
Unfortunately I think it does have to sit somewhere on the elected side. A situation where the permanent state can overrule elected representatives unconditionally isn't great. But what really ought to happen is an open court case; you cannot have public policy decisions made on the basis of secret intel in a democracy. That gives you the Iraq war.
That is the direct consequence of what you said right before. You don't want decisions made by unelected officials non-overridable in a democracy, but for that democratic process to work effectively, the information needs to be in the open. Anything not in the open can just as well stay beyond the reach of elected folks.
The GRU double-agent proved that the GRU had compromised Kushner's phone. Subsequently, Dutch intelligence themselves independently attempted to hack Kushner's phone.
"In The Hague, the MIVD hacking team tried to reverse engineer the Russian penetration of Kushner’s iPhone." [...]
"The Dutch team had been trying to pick the phone’s door lock, so to speak, when it occurred to them that the Russians may have found an unlocked window to gain entry instead. Their hypothesis was correct. By early 2018, the MIVD had found a vulnerability in the iPhone that gave them access." [...]
"when Kushner used the phone, they could see his screen. Almost as soon as they got inside, the intelligence service began capturing every image of Kushner’s screen as he used it, filing their own cache of surveillance on their internal computer servers."
Also (edit):
The part of the story I actually care about is two governments hoarding an iphone zero day, and using it to secretly hack iphones. I condemn it.
Digital privacy is important to me. I think that all humans should have it. Feel free to disagree. Jared Kushner is a human.
So again, I condemn this extrajudicial activity, which undermines the digital security and privacy of everyone.
This isn't about the privacy of one individual human. This is about the security practices of a politically exposed person and the information they have access to.
Any high profile, high security clearance individual must have top-notch security. Any information gleaned or stolen from them can have enormous repercussions.
It also creates a scenario where people remain on the bench long after their competence has likely faded. RBG, for instance, was 87 years old when she 'retired.' Her final wish is to not be replaced until a new President had been sworn in, which was predictably not granted. She had 30 years to choose that presidency herself, but simply refused to do so.
This assumption was destroyed during the first Trump administration and continued being eroded in his second. They do not practice good opsec. (See Signal app usage) Nobody is enforcing policies, and nobody tells the bosses that they can’t do something because [reason].
The U.S. spent years explaining to the world that nothing is extrajudicial that happens to non-Americans outside of the United States. So please explain how this activity of the MIVD broke any Dutch laws.
Kushner's behavior undermined the world far more than this phone hack.
Compare to courtly politics in post-Renaissance Europe. All sorts of intrigue and backstabbing, largely only governed by two cardinal rules. First, never conduct yourself in an unseemly manner. Second, don't get caught.
It's blanket surveillance, unauthorised surveillance that crosses the line.
Not conducive for trust though, which I assume had long vanished anyway.
Have the moral courage to do the right thing for the right reasons, regardless of everyone else doing the wrong thing. Take responsibility for your own actions, instead of offloading it to the actions of others. Act according to what you think is right instead of failing to think altogether.
Deciding your own version of what is right instead of adopting the beliefs of others, and acting according to what you believe instead of blindly following, is an expression of free will and dignity.
To whoever said that Jared Kushner is a bad person, so it's ok (double standard fallacy):
If you stop applying the law equally, your country is lawless. If you do not grant human rights to those who you justifiably hate, you no longer have human rights. When you bring before a court evidence obtained by crime, you are the criminal.
If you believe that arbitrary surveillance is wrong, as I do, you can either defend Jared Kushner's right to to privacy, or endorse arbitrary and unequal justice.
Would you accept anonymous men and women, secretly recording sexually explicit photos of you? If no, you have a double standard or some mental gymnastics to prove that Kushner is guilty of a crime without a trial. Or, you can assert that 'the ends justify the means', which is the death of civility.
In 2014, Christopher Brannan among others, leaked sexual photos of female celebrities from icloud. He was charged with unauthorized access and imprisoned for 38 months. Should he have been allowed to do the same thing because he was paid to do it? No, and the Dutch intelligence officers are his equal; equally disgusting people. If you hack someone's phone, you are repulsive, because the ends do not justify the means.
So I will defend Kushner's privacy, as I would my own, and demand that if someone wants to search his iphone, they can go to the judge and get a warrant instead of taking screenshots like a little creep.
Moreover, I defend without exception, Kushner's immunity to anything on his phone, because whatever derives from hacking the phone is illegitimate.
I don't see why the dutch have any obligation to avoid monitoring a compromised phone that the US lets happen. The dutch have every right to know what the russians are getting from that phone.
You are picking the wrong case for your cause.
Sorry, but the US threw this out of the window starting with the Patriot Act. Many tech companies were in the NSA PRISM program and the program probably still exists today. Common US E2E encrypted messengers can be read out by US services through weak defaults (e.g. iMessage in iCloud is encrypted at-rest unless ADP is enabled both sides of the chat, similarly, WhatsApp only encrypts backups at-rest by default).
The US can grab all that data from US companies, regardless whether the person regardless of whether the person is inside or outside the US thanks to the CLOUD Act.
there are branches of govt in the US system, not a single entity. Even the almighty secret police have been curtailed many times.
Believe me, not everyone is onboard with this approach to surveillance
It goes a lot deeper than that..
All the counter-arguments I've read to this comment so far have been along the lines of, "well they started it."
And well they did. But if your response to the U.S.'s brand of dehumanization is more dehumanization then you've actually helped them achieve their goal. The people who run the U.S. want a world where respect for privacy (among so many other things) is thrown away because they believe they have the guns and resources to gain the most from that kind of world.
It's part of why I'm getting out of the USA. Key norms of decency we had are broken now, and in our social system you can bet that the next powers who come in will do little more than make a show of repairing them. They now see what's possible and they'll use it for their own ends. It's a spiral.
Sort of how the police should keep tabs on violent criminals.
There is no "dehumanising".
First they came for the oligarchs, and I did not speak out -- because I was not an oligarch.
Then they came for the political cronies, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a political crony.
Then they came for the tech bros, and I did not speak out -- because I was not a tech bro.
Then they came for me -- and actually it was okay because now we live in a civil society, we were able to clear up the misunderstanding and everybody's doing fine.
:)
Also, what the Dutch did by following what the Russians did is exactly why government approved backdoors will not work. As soon as someone else finds out that there is a way, they will use it form themselves.
Well, problem solved. He certainly used his new position to get rid of his debt.
Without commenting on the merits of Kushner, I don’t understand your comment about “professionals.” Security professionals, like lawyers or accountants or any other professional, are advisors, not final decision makers. Obviously the civilian government retains the final say.
I can’t imagine it’s any different in any European country. I’m fully willing to believe that in say the Netherlands, the civilian government is smart enough to listen to the advice of professionals. But surely there is no special legal status that makes professional judgments final decisions over that of elected or appointed officials?
But my point is: The one experience EVERYONE share (those that work there, or have worked), from the sanitary workers to the directors, is that they've gone through the security clearance process. A hefty enough credit card debt could jeopardize the clearance to any one of those.
we crossed that line like a decade ago. the entire administration is 100% compromised, and has been since the jump.
that Americans are not rioting in the streets a la the French is a sign that American democracy is over. all those guns and all that self-righteousness and for what?
Did you see the one* about Lindsay Graham today? Virulently anti-LGBT 5-time republican senator having sex with multiple male escorts. Some of it on tape (allegedly). Some of it involving minors. He had to be compromised by foreign and domestic intelligence agencies (It sounds quite odd for a South-Carolina Senator to make biweekly trips to Israel). He was the biggest war hawk in Washington serving at the highest levels and with the highest clearance - At his funeral, his buddy Trump said that Lindsay "never saw a war he didn't like". Yet he served more than 20 years as a senator - Never impeached, never indicted, never investigated. Not by his democrats, the media, journalists, the agencies, nobody. Everyone already heard the rumours already, it had become an internet meme. Hunter Biden casually mentioned alluded to him and the 'closetocracy' that secretly ruled washington. Why didn't anyone speak out before he died? He was staunch supporter of NATO so i guess Europeans weren't too interested to look to deeply.
Of course there will be no justice served, they're above that. But a sliver of hope for the public is that the richest biggest criminals are visibly falling apart from generations of coddled degeneracy, all the power in the world cannot save them from their own idiocy. How do you become such losers that badly when you run a rigged game.
“Kushner’s counsel, however, said Kushner did not make any agreements or arrangements with leaders or officials in foreign countries that were not agreed to by the President of the United States and in the best interests of the United States.”
The Dutch intelligence services are world class.
is one of the reasons the president hasn't been able to push harder to fracture the alliance.
it's A-#-1 priority for Putin, and the Canada/Greenland pushes were to, in part, make that happen.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-ku...
every president since regean has been pushed to bomb iran. but only this one did.
they ain't invaded cuba
My understanding is that the current crop of politicians is terrified of FOIA requests, and so pushes as much to their phones as possible. You can't FOIA many of the apps on there.
This is a cowardly practice. These officials are either overtly cowards, or they are too stupid to understand that their phones are targets for foreign intelligence agencies.
HN, SV, it's so gross now.
The reason you can't find it is that it has been flagged...
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50208921 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50201259
Only a couple of states actually have their own militia that is independent of federal government.
That is wrong, see DC v. Heller, """ the “militia” in colonial America consisted of a subset of “the people”—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to “keep and bear Arms” in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as “the people.” """
I'm on the ground and the conversations are changing. There is significant damage that will take decades to repair, but I do not think it impossible.
We broke the trust with allies on so many levels and you should continue to hedge, because America might not be peaking on absurdity yet...
And if the Democrats don't do an absolutely stellar job of trying to fix things, and making life at least seem better for most of the US voting public, then an entirely chaotic Republican party could still get back in.
... and that's saying nothing of the possibilities for repeats of Jan 6th come midterm results or the 2028 election.
Pessimistically, this is my expectation. The Oligarchy has become so out of hand, i.e. corporate-government-media collusion. The Dems are doing the same "Win at all Costs" so we can "Dominate those who think differently" thing. We The People have to take the reins back.
And yet having enough reach to be on their radar.
They're easily convinced by simplistic causality arguments that, on the surface, satisfy what they feel is an injustice.
They're not even necessarily wrong about the injustices they feel, but they're too easily convinced about what may be the causes, and how those causes may be solved.
The fact we're talking about militia types indicates a simplicity of thought: enough guns can solve it. So we're starting with a pretty self selected group.
It is some kind of magic that Trump, son of a billionaire, success by nepotism, can have any chance of reaching them.
Hmm, where have I heard that before, the last time the fascists took over and we had a world war about it.
I'm kind of curious if New Yorkers will try and do a tea party impression with the Russian diesel ship though.
I recall they helped the UK during the Falklands War with SIGINT/cryptanalytic stuff
In 2019, it was reported that an Iranian mole working for Dutch intelligence at the behest of Israel and the CIA inserted the Stuxnet virus with a USB flash drive or convinced another person working at the Natanz facility to do so.
This is so out of character for them that I think there is another level to this: it's a way to let Trump know that they may have more about Trump than they've let on so far. That's very obviously not something that can be proved so take it with a large helping of salt but there has to be a reason why they put their own name out there, it is totally against their normal MO.
Europeans should not trust any of that team: it is a compromised government.
The irony is that Yuri explained this already in the 1980s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5It1zarINv0
It was a literal prediction of the KGB seizing power. Putin is from the KGB clique. Gorbachev really should have neutered the KGB totally.
But they need kompromat to make them Krasnovs.
In my (probably naive) humble opinion, the entire population of the USA should benefit from knowing their leadership are corrupt and only interested in enriching themselves and their peers.
But having seen the huge amount of American citizens that spend their days justifying the actions of these corrupt politicians and bi/trillionaires where they apparently can do no wrong, I'm thinking that nobody will really benefit from this and it will be filed under "business as usual".
Our now former allies aren't making this public to smear some guy they met at a party they don't like. They are warning the world that the us is an oligarchy and rule of law is dead.
Seriously, how, with a straight face, can you even attempt to excuse these stains on history?
Hasn't that already been the case for a while now though? Seems like you get in trouble with the law, you gotta prove your innocence, and you're treated as guilty until you do (and suffer some consequences still even after proving your innocence, just for having been "in the system" in that way).
Worse yet, the "media" these days gets away with bloody murder compared to the way things used to be before the Internet. It's all about maximum outrage and division these days, because that "engagement" is what sells advertising space. Convicted by the media is almost as bad as convicted by the "Justice" system. Either one can totally ruin lives.
These are the people that gave us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarring_and_feathering after all.
It is strange though that you are lamenting this state of affairs for Jared Kushner, of all people. He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
100% not the case at all. Honestly, my comment is more an expression that I've lost all faith in the "Justice" system entirely. I have zero hopes that any truth or justice will come out of this situation, as I firmly believe that at this point that humans are far more anti-social than social creatures, and we've allowed the system of "civilized" society to break down to a dangerous degree. We're basically "cooked" as a species. Just haven't admitted it to ourselves because we're too busy playin' the game our overlords have set by the rules they made up. They want us divided and at each other's throats so that we aren't laser focused on them and the problems they created for us all.
> He will be pardoned, and will not lack for invites to New York soirees just because he took bribes from blood-soaked US allies.
Sadly, I'm just about 100% sure you're right about that.
> I mean this sincerely, what prompted you to comment on this case?
Honestly, what prompts me to comment on anything anymore. It's not as if my one voice has ever held any power. I've seen this mess coming for years and been ridiculed every time I try to say anything about any of it. It's wasted energy to even bother trying to talk about anything to anyone these days, yet for some stupid reason I keep opening my mouth. Guess I'm just an idiot. Bought into the whole "humans are social creatures" BS and now I'm pretty much broken, having discovered the hard way that "the law of the jungle" is the only law humans actually believe in.
We are social!
Violent Individualism, Solipsism, Alienation are (primarily) socially constructed and we can choose to live another way.
You can build solidarity and community in the US, despite the odds. But if your social skills and belief in others have atrophied; You'll have to be the change you want to see.
Strike up conversations with your neighbors, pick up new hobbies, volunteer, say yes to things, go outside your home every day, host events, even when it's weird and awkward. Set good boundaries, there will be setbacks, but decent people will stick around.
This kind of thing is harder around wealthy, workaholic adults, but it's still possible, and people are desperate for genuine connection, but their social habituation is atrophied too (COVID made everything worse).
> I keep opening my mouth.
You also might need to practice communicating differently if everyone misunderstands/rejects? you when you try to reach out. This might be something to work out in a safe environment. Also, if you are expecting another rejection, it can be easy to assume other people hate you when they don't think that (or don't think about you at all).
As to the justice system... well, it can be repaired or reformed, but that will take a sociopolitical movement. I recommend joining something.
A [free, or discounted] pardon awaits every member of the trump family.
This administration does not merit any presumption of regularity.
So usually in the USA the smarter move is just to wait for the thing to fall off from the news cycle instead of creating news fodder every day with a trial.
If he's telling the truth, then I would do the same.
If he's lying, then it might work, I would also probably do the same.
The interesting thing here is that two publications allowed the journalist to call Kushner "corrupt". This means that the lawyers would have seen compelling evidence that would mean one of two things:
1) Kushner wouldn't take them to court, because he would have to settle out of court in an expensive way
2) Kushner, if he were to take court action, would not win civil case.
This leads me to think that there is more than a shred of evidence, but an awful lot of evidence that he didn't declare what he was supposed to (at best) and at worse laundered foreign cash for his own purposes
In the civilised world, those caught abusing public office resigned.
"Deny, deny, deny" in the face of all evidence is a curioulsy Trumpian move.