[cf499]

"It really vindicates everything Snowden has said on the topic."

Did any of his statements really need vindication though? Have we not known about this forever? (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON) I suspect the real problem is, and always has been, our perceived inability to change any of it.

[_kbh_]

ECHELON is way worse then Pegasus though, cause ECHELON / PRISM / whatever you don't even need spyware on your phone or to be targeted to be scooped up in their net.

[toofy]

maybe. these are different problems existing in different scopes.

a modern echelon dragnet would get an absolute mass of encrypted data so your fear will depend on whether or not you believe governments can break that crypto, and if so, at what scale.

pegasus on the other hand is highly targeted, infects silently and completely takes over your device–the camera, the microphone, keyboard, etc… encryption will not help. nothing can save you.

echelon was dragnet, pegasus is targeted. both extremely dangerous yet i still find something about pegasus to be infinitely more frightening.

we’ve already seen very high profile journalists murdered from pegasus and i suspect we’re going to uncover more as it’s dug into further.

[Zak]

Mass interception over the wire affects more people, but it's easier to defend against using cryptography.

[aitchnyu]

India could have been outraged at the news two years ago but we had to reach this point.