What stands out to me here is the pipeline. Israel has built an unusually tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups, and global markets. When that ecosystem scales internationally, it’s fair to ask whether partners are buying technology or importing unilateral leverage that only benefits Israel here.
They are usually incompetent on things that are not important, like keeping infrastructure from falling off the cliff, maintaining a good economy, or in general serving the people. They are pretty competent on things that are really important, like hacking into people's phones, killing other people.
After all you have to admit that getting killed is more serious than getting starved...
"The intelligence agency, called the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) discovered that some calls on Air Force One were unencrypted and it was able to tap into radio frequencies that were used for those calls, according to the book, "
No hacking or deployment of listening devices, just passive listening. Unless you have other sources?
EU member states do and often with collaboration with Israeli vendors - especially in the CEE and Southern Europe. It even became an ongoing scandal in the EU [0][1].
Northern and Western European states tend to use American products, but the difference between "American", "Israeli", "Czech", and "Indian" blurs because of how much overlap the industry has transnationally.
Italy, Czechia, Poland, and Netherlands all have significant domestic capacity in the space as well, but a large portion of it is via American and Israeli tech.
EU law enforcement agencies regularly buy this kind of software, even if illegal!
The Italian Carabinieri bought Paragon even though they can't legally use it, because mass surveillance is obviously illegal and against our constitution.
Don't get me wrong, I get why they want to and it is probably a justified security concern, but it's also things like that which will probably cause Europe's economy to continue to stagnate while the US's will probably continue to soar even with Trump (and perhaps, later, Vance) completely destroying our international reputation and credibility and our most important political and scientific institutions.
The fact that the US can continue to economically do so well relative to others despite currently being run by some of the stupidest and most abhorrent people possible is... sad.
Europe could be more competitive but then they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just in the past week they're meddling with the infinite scroll feature and then the unrealized taxes in the Netherlands. Why would a tech company wanna operate in such an environment?
Obviously one cannot simply accept any potential societal trade-off in favor of benefitting the economy, but going too far in the opposite direction eventually manifests as worse living standards for the average person, which is not beneficial to society.
> The fact that the US can continue to economically do so well relative to others despite currently being run by some of the stupidest and most abhorrent people possible is... sad.
It's not sad, it's strong evidence (I hesitate to call it proof, but...) that a federated model of governance with limited regulation is the most resilient and successful form of government.
All the EU states need to do is learn that regulation is not the solution to every theoretical problem any bureaucrat can imagine, and they too can experience meaningful economic growth.
I agree that if you want to pursue economic growth laissez-faire is possibly the best course of action, but economic growth isn't the only metric worth pursuing.
It is probably in their blood because as someone surrounded by enemies you gotta be pragmatic and on your toe all the time. No wonder they are pretty good at intelligence collection. One of my previous bosses told me that people with highest scores join the intelligence staffs. Not sure if it is true, though.
Surrounded by enemies of their own creation. It’s a beautiful cycle of aggression and self-victimization; a true ouroboros.
On the intelligence front, Mossad does a wonderful job performing extra-judicial killings using the dirtiest tricks you could think of. They’re also very good partners: almost every counter-intelligence outfit sings their praises.
Step 1: Get 6 million of you systematically eradicated in Europe and hundreds of thousands more booted from their homes in the Middle East for "reasons".
Step 2: Build yourself a country so no one can throw you out again.
Step 3: Get attacked by the countries who threw you out for "reasons".
Step 4: Get accused of "aggression".
People's continued downplay and revisionism of Jewish and Israeli history is truly something to behold.
Step 1: A Holocaust perpetrated by Germany, not Palestine.
Step 2: Build a country out of Lego- I mean, gradually settle an existing, populated area of the Levant - Palestine - and then have daddy Britain and later big daddy USA forcibly carve out a chunk of the land without input from the natives. And no, it was not a UN partition plan because most of the world was still colonized at the time.
Step 3: Take advantage of the obvious discontent with this move by the natives and activate Plan Dalet to take even more of the land. After all, the land granted by the partition plan is not enough.
Step 4: War starts with neighboring countries, partly to disrupt the ethnic cleansing campaign against a mostly defenseless population, but also to satisfy their own expansionist aims (esp. Transjordan).
> War starts with neighboring countries, partly to disrupt the ethnic cleansing campaign against a mostly defenseless population
Did you made this all up?
There is zero evidence that the war started because the Jews were ethnically cleansing “defenseless population”. It is enough to go to the library and read newspapers from the time where Arabs openly stated that they do no accept Jewish state for the sake of it being Jewish.
The people who fled Europe or forced out of the Middle East purchased empty lands, dried marshes, planted forests, installed infrastructure, sown fields, built cities and created a democracy to govern themselves. Incidentally, some purchased lands had squatters from Syria, Jordan, Arabia, etc., who lived on lands they did not own. Bye bye and boo hoo.
Seven different armies invaded Israel on its day of foundation. Seven armies got wrecked. Entire countries with billions of people keep crying about it, going so far as making the destruction of Israel an official goal, in some countries even actual laws! No conspiracy theories, no "Plan Dalet" and other bullshit your Hamas friends told you about, their real, actual goals stated right in your face.
This is frankly, completely ahistorical. The British famously backed the Palestinians in the 1948 war (only barely, they mostly didn't care, but still did back them) and didn't like the idea of Israel so much so that they withdrew from the UN committee over it. Palestinians famously collaborated with Hitler as well. The USA only started being allied with Israel in the late 60s.
> And no, it was not a UN partition plan because most of the world was still colonized at the time.
And I can't even begin to fathom what this means.
As you noted in an another comment, Plan Dalet was corroborated by Israeli historians. Which is false. It was corroborated by one Israeli historian, who retracted his findings after finding out his source for the writings of Ben-Gurion were edited posthumously.
And "war starts" is a very nice and PG way to phrase "attempted to genocide Jews".
Zionism existed since the late 19th century. It cannot be considered solely a response to the Holocaust. It was an outgrowth of the many nationalist movements that were occurring in Europe at the time, and even as far back as the 1920s the consensus was that the establishment of a Jewish state required a Jewish majority. This is clearly evident in the writings of people like Jabrotinsky and Herzl himself. I don't think any native population would take kindly to what exactly this implied.
You're a little off on the history. Zionism as a political movement (as opposed to the cultural idea which has existed for 3000 or so years) dates back to the late 18th century, as one of the responses to both antisemitism and the emerging nationalist ideas in Europe. The deciding philosophy in this case is the idea that antisemitism cannot be fought, that it is a universal constant of sorts. This was originally a fringe left-wing idea, with the response being to stop being Jews (the Reform branch was borne out of this and is the reason many Jews, including me, still dislike it, even if it is a bit unfair). After the Holocaust, however, this idea transformed from a left-wing one to a right-wing one, where the solution became to take up arms and defend ourselves from those who would wish to kill us. I don't know about Jabrotinsky but your claim on Herzl is very hotly debated[0]. Not that I imagine many Arabs can read German. The claim also heavily erases Jewish presence in the Levant.
I don't disagree with you, but this is the reality already and I don't see how they can get out of it. I wouldn't hope for any long-term peace between IL and surrounding country without IL holding a very big stick which the US gives to them.
I think actually they are in a bit of panic mode because the US might want to get out from the ME and focus on China. They want a guarantee that Iran won't be able to come on its foot again in at least 10 years. That's all my guess, though.
I think also everyone needs to understand that Israel are a wedge in the operations of rival Islamic terrorist factions. If they went poof and ceased to exist suddenly then it'd switch straight to Darfur mode out there. It wouldn't suddenly be kumbaya and holding hands.
> I don't disagree with you, but this is the reality already and I don't see how they can get out of it.
Maybe by starting to behave as if the Palestinian population that live on the territory they control have equal rights? Like stopping West Bank colonization projects?
2006 Gaza was left to their own independent rule. Shortly after that Hamas killed the PLO, assumed control, and started fire rockets into Israel. And you’re saying that we need to try that again with the West Bank?
You apparently need it, given your illogical and inaccurate statements in this thread, but I won't hold my breath while waiting for you to accept that.
Paragon co-founded by former Unit-8200 commander Ehud Schneorson and former Israeli Prime-minister and defence-chief, Ehud Barak who tapped his long-time friend Jeffrey Epstein (a wealthy American financier and eccentric) to find him clients for his ventures in the US and across the world. That certainly is some tight-integration!
The thing is everyone goes into the IDF. The smart ones get put into unit 8200 where they hone their persistent, iterative, troubleshooting skills. Then their service is over they leave and they've basically been trained in innovation and leadership.
Then they go about solving problems. Some of those problems are people dont have a good trustworthy pornsite. Some of them are their buddies that stayed in the military have a military related or adjacent problem.
They're just too busy repackaging the same spying tech on different channels and then selling that for billions in the US stock market. Also knowing that US regulators won't say a single word, because how could they ever say something bad about these companies... It must be a very good business.
You should look at Israel deal for the F-35. They got the only F-35 unlocked and non dependent on the US software lock. They were never part of the development program like Norway, Denmark, Italy or the Netherlands so did not have to bear those costs. Norway, Denmark, Italy or the Netherlands, still had to pay for their F-35...
Israel paid 2.3 Billion for their F-35, but the US committed to buy 4 Billion from Israel defense firms, so concluding with a net positive of +1.25 Billion for Israel economy....all at the cost to the US tax payer. :-)
90% of startups coming out of Israel seem to be some dodgy 'security' or spyware startups.
This in addition to them boasting of having 'field tested' their stuff on Palestinians, which is also why U.S. cops go there for training. I suppose to learn from the 'real experts' how to suppress the masses.
This is not true. It's just "dodgy security/spyware" startups are more open coming from Israel that they exist than the myriad of hidden companies that you never heard about because they focus on tailored exploits.
Israel is the British colonialism foreign base where the Brits and the US can dodge their own laws while developing their own "defence" hardware, software, tactics, and ideology.
>where the Brits and the US can dodge their own laws while developing their own [...]
Source that a large proportion of founders/employees are actually American/British? The more believable claim is that such Israeli startups are US/UK backed, but that's not as damning as it sounds, because US/UK is the finance hub, so thats where you expect funding to come from, rather than "colonialism foreign base" or whatever.
Meh, imho it's much simpler: Israel has had insane security needs since it's birth, thus naturally security firms concentrated where there was an immediate market and testing possibility.
Which makes the failure of October 7th even more striking. It's insane Israeli leadership hasn't paid for this.
Nope. I see it completely differently. We know for a fact that all CEOs of big tech are either Jewish zios (Israeli citizens by birth) or have spouses who are such or are in that zios link.
They also establish the so called “R&D” offices in Israel which is code-word for free software export.
Then the same country that has access to the source code of the major American tech firms, combobulates the “best” in class spyware doesn’t come as a surprise.
We keep crying wolf to Chinese tech spies when the real wolf are these. That’s a tiny nation living off of 300MM large nation and its allies make that another 400MM.
IIRC there were attempts to impeach the government (as well as multiple probes) but they all fell through. Same as 9/11, really. Plus, Israel hasn't had an election since.
So the Palestinians and Arabs thought a hundred years ago. It served them badly.
It’s not that US/UK and others don’t get anything out of the relationship, as you note. But the arrows have been mostly pointing the other way for a long time. Trump and his background, as well as Epstein/Mandelson/McSweeney/Labour are just the latest, blatant examples of how this works.
That is some nasty garbage right there. The Israeli tech startup scene is very large and dynamic with including basic software development tools, wireless infrastructure, and so on. If anything it is more like 90% either consumer infrastructure or non-LLM developer tools. Whether it is politically advantageous to talk about or not, a very large fraction of all economic activity is still down the chain near the child needs bowl of rice level. Grandiose claims without support only obfuscate the situation instead of focusing on what needs to be done to protect people.
> 90% of startups coming out of Israel seem to be ...
Not to claim that Israel is the land of saintly virtues - but if your news sources are inclined toward tech or polarized left/right politic, they make sure that's what you see. Wouldn't matter if 99.9% of actual Israeli startups were working to build better home bagel-makers, or gene-engineering perfect breeds of salmon for lox.
Israel being founded with the help of terrorist groups like Irgun and Lehi and their current prime minister as well as former defense minister being wanted for war crimes, excuse me if I don't take their word as to whom they're fighting for granted. Especially not after what they did in Gaza.
I heard many bizarre conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But this one, I can't even understand what you mean.
To be clear, do you deny that there are multiple terrorist groups targeting civilians in Israel such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and multiple individuals who attacked civilians indiscriminately with bombs, knives and guns?
Do you deny that Israel uses its intelligence services to detect and stop these terrorist attacks?
The original comment was "To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?", and the reply said he wouldn't "take their word as to whom they're fighting".
I asked if the person was denying that Israel intelligence seeks to detect and stop terrorism from those major terrorist groups and from individual terrorists. How on earth is this a "bad faith argument"?
Except the English articles are not generally fearmongering, more praising of the 'bursting' Israeli tech scene. It's only when you look at what the startups do you realize what's up.
It makes sense in a way, most Israelis probably acquire a fair bit of skills and contacts as part of being in the military there. And because the military 'needs' to surveil millions of people it rules over without any mandate whatsoever, what better way to get a contract than to enhance the surveillance capabilities of the army once you get back into civilian life?
You are either plainly lying or have an incredibly strange media consumption landscape. The plurality tech startups coming out of Israel are in biological sciences and medicine.
I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free.
It has been trained on decades of Palestinians crossing check points, some being Hamas camouflaging with beards, glasses and what not.
Also the data it's fed for third party customers is as flawless as it can be: if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world.
If you're walking in a random mall on the other end of the world, even if you have no phone, you have covered your tracks and you're wearing a hat and glasses, etc, you are going to be recognized by the software if a camera gets even a mediocre shot at you.
Compound this with all the information people put online on their own on socials, you're gonna be tracked and recognized, whether you want it or no.
>> I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free.
What does "virtually error free" mean? There's no "error free" in facial recognition, or any other application of machine learning.
More to the point, who says all this, besides yourself in this thread? Why should anyone believe that "virtually error free" is a factual description of real technological capabilities rather than state propaganda?
Those are numbers claimed by the UK, the company behind it claims an order of magnitude over it with proper data (airport-level full face scans).
Even 89% isn't that bad imho, recognizing the overabundant majority of a population with random cameras that don't require the user to pose or assume specific positions is..quite something.
Its kinda of bad when factoring in the consequences for being misidentified. Getting misidentified can cost you your life. It can cause you months of time and legal fees to disprove. It can waste police resources and erode public trust.
And I trust the UK police data far far more than the company. Every company says they are 99% accurate.
* The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) tested the algorithm South Wales Police and the Metropolitan Police Service have been using for LFR.
* At the settings police use, the NPL found that for LFR there were no statistically significant differences in performance based on age, gender or ethnicity.
* There was an 89% chance of identifying someone on the specific watchlist of people wanted by the police, and at worst a 1 in 6,000 chance of incorrectly identifying someone on a watchlist with 10,000 images (known as a false alert). In practice, the false alert rate has been far better than this.
It's a big report and it'd take some time to go through it but it's clear that laboratory testing of a system deployed in the wild is not going to give accurate results, meaning the "89%" claimed is going to be significantly worse in reality. Anyway there's obvious limitations to the testing e.g. (from the report):
Large demographically balanced datasets: The testing of low error rates in a statistically
significant manner requires large datasets. To achieve the required scale, the
evaluation uses a supplementary reference image dataset of 178,000 face images
(Filler dataset). This is an order of magnitude larger than the typical watchlist size of
an operational Live Facial Recognition deployment. To avoid introducing a
demographic bias due to reference dataset composition, a demographically balanced
reference dataset was used, with equal numbers in each demographic category. For
assessment of equitability under operational settings, the results from the large
dataset are appropriately scaled to the size and composition of watchlist or reference
image database of the operational deployment.
I'd say "uh-oh" to that. Unbalanced classes is a perenial source of error in evaluations. "Equal numbers in each demographic category" is an obvious source of unrealistic bias.
Anyway, I don't have the time to go through that with a fine toothed comb, but just the fact that they report a 100 False Positive Rate for "operator initiated facial recognition" is another big, hot, red flag.
Also, from the UK gov link above:
* The 10 LFR vans rolled out in August 2025 are using the same algorithm that was tested by the NPL.
There's a bit of ambiguity there. The police are using "the same algorithm" tested by the NPL, but are they using the same settings? The report uses specific settings to come up with its conclusions (e.g. a "face match" setting of 0.6 for LFR), but there's nothing to say the police stick to the same. Lots of room for manoeuvering left there, I'd say.
>> The company between Oosto claims 99%.
We can easily dismiss this just by looking at the two digits preceding the "%".
I doubt whatever facial recognition trained over 6 million odd Palestinians (plus 2 million Israeli Palestinians) would trump similar offerings from competitors like Hikvision trained on data of 1.4 billion Chinese.
edit : i think their tech is overhyped. Remember the signal-chats debacle last year where the National Security Advisor was photographed using a modified client of Signal by Israeli company TeleMessage. And immediately after, TeleMessage was hacked, and it was revealed that all the chats were transmitted and stored in plain-text. They still managed to get their backup-spyware installed at the highest levels of the US government and military. It looks like they have great sales teams.
A facial recognition model trained on one genotype will behave poorly on another genotype. For detecting e.g. white and middle eastern faces, this Israeli model should perform better than the one trained on Chinese people
I believe that most of what you said is true, but I don't think the tracking of people around the world is as efficient as your post suggests. If a single face scan were enough to track people anywhere like that, American government agencies (I'm thinking ICE, the FBI, etc.) wouldn’t have as much trouble as they do arresting people. That’s just my impression of course, maybe for some reason they choose not to use these technologies.
The part I'm skeptical about is "available to virtually every agency in the world". I think every immigration checkpoint I've been to have some sort of camera setup, but the extent of data sharing is unclear. Is China sharing data with the US? Or US sharing with Canada? US with Germany? etc.
i have doubts on accuracy of face recognition. There is already nancy guthrie case going on and if it is so accurate why are suspects still not recognized?
You mean the the case where he came to her door dressed like death with his face almost completely covered?
Pretty extreme bar your setting. I would think most people would agree it could still have extremely (and surprisingly) potent accuracy and still fail in this case. I wouldn't expect facial recognition to work in a case when there is little to no face to work with... if that guy came dressed like that to any airport or mall he would've been detained immediately.
I used to think that the scenes of the TV series “Person of Interest” were exaggerated for storytelling purposes. Maybe not and it was accurate prescience.
I mean, it's objectively true that they can do this, especially when even mildly filtered down by incoming external data.
It's why you no longer need to speak with a person when reentering your home country in a lot of different places (israel being one of them, but also the EU, trusted travelers in the US through global entry, ect).
I'm sorry this sounds like hyperbole to say the least.
idk about their accuracy but "error free"?
Also do you understand the amount of compute and network bandwidth necessary to index and track billions of people by processing exabytes of streaming footage constantly with heavy computer vision models. who's integrating all these different camera systems to start with?
These claims sound like they come from someone who hasn't done these things in real life.
Tangentially, it seems like Israel tech scene has so many players involved in spyware/malware and surveillance.
I think these sort of claims of excessive competence are challenged by the October 7th attacks. Think about the massive amount of planning and organization that went into that attack over a period of years. There were thousands of forces engaging in some specialized and unusual strategies. Hamas even released a propaganda video more or less showing their plan with paragliders and everything. And they carried it out the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. And somehow this all caught Israel completely by surprise. So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole, or accept that these claims of excessive competence are, at the minimum, exaggerated.
Similarly this would make things like evading law enforcement pretty much impossible, while in reality there are countless people, at least thousands, who have been photographed in relation to e.g. a crime, but never found, and never identified.
> So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole
So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? Knowing about Mossad operations? With Bibi on the record saying
> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank
With most of the world's spyware, including Pegasus and NSO group, having hailed from Israel?
It's not "going down a very dark rabbit hole", it's the by far most likely option and therefore your whole comment makes no sense, presuming the much less likely option.
If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god..
> If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god.
That is a naive statement given that 75% of the world's population identifies with an established religion, and each of those have evidence free beliefs such as virgin birth, reincarnation, the existence of hell, etc.
You either have no context for that quote or have intentionally misrepresented it. Hamas started out as an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, with both being charities at the beginning. They both became political arms a little later, with Hamas being far, far less radical than the PLO at the time. The idea behind funding Hamas was to either cause a civil war between them and the PLO or to have the less radical Hamas faction take over the PLO. Obviously, it didn't work but that doesn't mean the idea doesn't have merit and has been used elsewhere successfully (Israel didn't come up with this tactic).
So the elites were flying in on the Lolita Express to an island filled with underage sex workers, to a venue with luridity abounds, hosted by a convicted pedophile, to discuss philanthropy?
Or might it be that the entire political class is filled with moral degenerates devoid of ethics, to nobody's surprise. And so consequently you are effectively having suspects investigate themselves only to conclude 'nah, nobody did anything wrong except the dead guy, but he's dead so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ '
Even that report notes at least 4 or 5 victims stated they were abused by other men and women besides Epstein. So it's gone from #MeToo to #Only4or5. If you are ever curious what creates cynics like me...
Top notch work. I assume the person picture is a test account, but it still shows how deep these companies can get.
This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated. I know its too convenient and useful for government/big companies so it'll never happen...but it should
This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated.
The other thing is that people willingly buy phones full of spyware. E.g. quite many Samsung models have the Israeli AppCloud installed (supposedly to recommend applications):
Even though AppCloud itself may be for recommendations it apparently mines a lot of data and each such background application, it is another potential attack vector, and I suppose that the Isreali government can compel the company to use their software for different purposes (not sure).
In contrast to what some news articles state, some Samsung models sold in Europe also have it and nobody seems to really care about it (nor the persistent Meta services, etc.).
Or maybe, you know, we should stop writing security-critical software in memory-unsafe languages. Mobile devices not treating their owner as an adversary would also be nice.
That's only part of it. That all security issues would be gone after writing code in a memory-safe language is a fairytale (though it does help a lot).
The other parts layered defense, reducing the number of privileged/non-sandboxed applications/processes, not shipping spyware/adware, etc.
Only Apple/GrapheneOS and to a slightly lesser extend Google Pixel are good at this. Many phone manufacturers still use the TrustZone TEE on the main CPU (rather than a separate security processor), isolated radios, hardware memory tagging, and dozens of other defense-in-depth features.
If you mean the software supply chain, minimize third-party dependencies and carefully review any updates. I mean read and understand code diffs before you bump versions.
If you mean the hardware supply chain, has that ever actually happened? I've only ever seen it mentioned as a theoretical possibility so far.
"Regulated" in reality basically means your messages are not only read by private companies that collect them, intelligence agencies that access them, but also by people sitting in the regulation panels. When officials say regulation they basically mean "I want a piece of action, too, dumbass, otherwise I'm gonna shut you down!".
Yes, that's exactly how regulation works and is why everyone with a drivers licence are always complaining when the gu the government sent to hold the steering wheel that morning is late. /s
Regulated by whom exactly? Since you can't even read, the spyware is being exclusively used by all govts of the world. Regulation never works, if you need a secure phone use GrapheneOS.
There's always a comment for "regulation" by an ignorant HN normie under anything related to surveillance. I feel like it's mostly bots at this point.
Woah there cowboy, sure you want such a broad and strong claim? Maybe you've eaten too much asbestos, breathed too much lead-gasoline fumes or otherwise inhaled something strange, because I'm sure there are countless of examples of regulation working just fine. Not to say it isn't without problems, but come on, "never"?
I don't see WeChat, which is weird, considering it has been out for decades and not particularly famous for being secure. Maybe it is rarely used by people in Western countries, I guess. But anyway the Chinese government can conveniently read your WeChat messages. Congratulations to all tech brothers and sisters who bring upon the love of governments to us.
Maybe it's just me being old, but it generally seems unlikely that 5 or 6 messaging apps. I can understand having both TikTok and Snapchat (plus a number of other social media apps).
Yeah, it is probably a test account, but a test account that is somewhat plausible. I don't find 5 or 6 messaging apps unlikely and I see people with a lot of them, because there is little perceived cost of installing more and it improves reachability.
Like, I have Threema installed, even though none of my contacts use it. But if one does happen to use it in the future, I'm reachable if necessary.
Yeah my thought, too. I'm also wondering whether they hire in-house engineers or mostly just buy it from some other places. Maybe they also hire people straight out from intelligence?
If the Chinese government can read WeChat but not the actual government, which has unlimited access to our body parts, I guess we should all be switching to WeChat.
I'm fine with not criticizing China or Chi, as long as EU and US governments don't have access to my messages.
I think you need to be invited by a Chinese citizen to use WeChat, and they're penalised (in the real world!) for inviting people who don't comply with Chinese law.
Stuff like that is wild to me. At least in the US, we have internal laws democratically elected that can force things to happen (Epstein transparency act for example).
In China, it can be illegal to even talk about changing the status quo.
When I see people on the internet saying things like: "Yeah screw the US, we just made a deal with China!" I wonder how oblivious they are to the domestic conditions in China.
It's funny you use the Epstein transparency act as an example of a law forcing things to happen, when the government is not complyibg with the Epstein transparency act.
I don't really think there is a lot of differences between the two. China does have a heavy hand in regulating the chats, e.g. you could have your account auto-banned for whatever the reason, if the AI finds something. Sometimes it could as trivial as mentioning e.g. 8964 in a completely different context.
But I think this is more about China wasting resources on trivial things while the US wisely focuses on more important things /s.
Nope. Both countries are ruled by elites who don't give a fuck about ordinary people. In that perspective the Chinese one actually cares a bit more -- you can't imagine what would happen if the Chinese elites really don't care about ordinary people if guns are legal. Historically speaking, the peasants would just kill, rape and destroy every elite family.
It's really unbelievable how much data most people put online about themselves. "Valentina" has probably shared all the information about here the alleged system dashboard showed. Any interested party would only have to search the open internet (and some walled gardens like Facebook) and aggregate the information found in there.
Spy agencies and spyware companies don't have some magickal tech nobody else knows anything about. They take advantage of peoples' careless style of interacting online.
I've known people who were manually stalked through just information they posted to the internet. It really doesn't take anything more than a name and a few usernames.
"Cohen (former head of Mossad) insisted that the publicly recognized success against Hezbollah was merely one element of a far wider, systematic deployment of sophisticated devices worldwide, although notably abscent in the Gaza Strip."
His claim there did not necessarily imply rigged explosives, but supply chain attacks either for surveillance or assassination purposes.
And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)
Or just standing next to someone in the line at the supermarket.
Also, lets be clear and admit that if your notion of "target" is "anyone close to a device I sold years ago", you're not the type of person that cares if the balled up paper made it to the trash can: so long as it left your hand you would be satisfied.
The pager operation has been one of the most targeted ones in history for its size. The ratio of civilian by Hezbollah member casualties was very low compared to other military operations or a war.
The perpetrators of pager attack had no way at all to know who would be closest to the pagers when they exploded, nor any way to know that the nominal owner of a particular pager were a combatant in the first place.
So the perpetrators did not know they would actually hurt a lawful target, they just hoped it might.
>And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
Except we don't know. "virtually every potential theater" is intentionally very vague language that could mean anything.
That's actually a great point. Out of the hundreds of pagers that were out in the wild you'd think one of them went through an airport check at some point and got flagged.
Why would it get flagged? Weren't they just slightly modified pagers essentially rigged to overheat, rather than they actually put explosives in them?
Besides, if I was in a terrorist cell, had a pager for communicating, and was taking a vacation flight, I think I might leave that pager behind for a week.
They weren't flagged because they went into Lebanon which has very little import security, and because it was a supply chain attack.
The batteries were swapped for a combination battery / explosive charge. The follow-up attack where Hezbollah moved to using walkie-talkies that were also rigged to explode was the real shocker, though.
Today they are targeting people shooting rockets, tomorrow they will target people commenting on these posts, the day after they will target specific group of people.
So you may be safe today, what happens when they don't like your opinion ?
> limit the number of apps ... lower attack surface ... If paranoid
While true in general, super apps that do too many things and used by billions (WhatsApp, Chrome, TikTok, Instagram, CleanMaster etc) are big enough of an attack surface already.
Defenses (compile-time / runtime memory safety & control flow integrity, media coders/decoders, sandboxes, for example) are getting better & so exploits are getting expensive.
> use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it
While using different devices is good enough, it requires the end user to maintain strict isolation (and sometimes may require appropriate features from the OS). Using burners is an extreme version of this practice.
Burners seem extreme, but old used hardware still seems the best and only way you can sort of prove isolation on your own.
You can't trust software not to be buggy and both, hardware, and software not to be purposely compromised because "think of the children" (that the EFs proved to be BS).
I find it interesting that Apple has spun Lockdown mode from a 'we are terrible at security' into a feature for marketing.
Now when someone gets hacked Apple can say: "Well they weren't in lockdown mode, its their own fault."
Gosh I wish I was as good at marketing as Apple. They really need to sell their marketing team as a service. If they did that, I'd buy their stock outright.
iOS generally seems harder than non-GrapheneOS Android, taking a few months for Cellebrite to catch up with. All the other Android phones/variants should make people cry because device security is so bad.
> Paragon’s founding team not includes the former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, it also includes former Unit 8200 commander Ehud Schneorson, exposing how Israeli intelligence expertise metastisizes into private markets.
Android and Linux's source code is available. So its easy to find flaws and report them. Linux has live a long time and hasn't had major security issues. (Sometimes you get a compromised vendor down the chain in a single distro)
But also, imaginary tokens are really really valuable. I'm sure there are normal-ish people with ~100-1000 bitcoin, let alone a few of the outspoken people who are bitcoin billionaires.
"Valuable" is a relative term, and I am confident that the intelligence gathered using these tools is much more valuable to nations that coins that are primarily used for money laundering and other scams.
> Palestinians have long lived under one of the most extensively documented surveillance regimes in the world. The deployment of facial recognition systems, predictive analytics, and device monitoring technologies in the occupied Palestinian territories are widely documented by human-rights organizations and digital researchers.
At the same time Israel has world renowned success of thwarting terrorist plots, and best in class intelligence shared with other countries (like the many, many, terrorist attacks stopped in European capitals thanks to Israeli intelligence).
When you choose build an apartheid, you choose surveillance, because how else would you enforce a top to bottom racial order on the populace?
When you end apartheid, you end 'terrorism' (legal and ethical resistance against having your life, land, and water stolen). History shows this to be possible, preferable, and moral.
Your theory has really not been borne out by reality.
Somehow Hamas committed October 7th and has fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israel since Gaza was given in its entirety to the arabs.
Somehow Iran has been financing and arming multiple terrorist groups even though it obviously is its own country far away from Israel.
Somehow Hezbollah has fired tens of thousands of rockets at civilians as well.
Somehow the Houthis have been committing terrorism sa well and their flag is literally "God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel".
Yeah, I'm sure if Israel just stopped all the security measures on the West Bank, all terrorism would stop!
If you could press a button and kill every man, woman, and child in Gaza, would you press that button?
If you could execute every Yemeni, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian tomorrow, gifting you a 'clean', and 'pure' world for Greater Israel to flourish for 1000 years, would you do it?
If your answer is yes. Then anything I say about the right of the invaded and occupied to resist occupation under international law will land on deaf ears.
Do yourself a favor; go on to google maps and zoom out until you can see all these countries. Isreal is a tiny sliver on that scale and has not expanded in the last 50 years.
What has happened, is that the large Jewish populations of Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon have gone to 0. So you got yourself a large “clean” and “pure” area. But it’s that remaining sliver that you are obsessed with trying to wipe out.
Is your argument that because these territorial incursions have not been successful to the degree the the Israeli government desired, that those incursions are unacceptable to resist?
> Isreal[sic] is a tiny sliver on that scale and has not expanded in the last 50 years.
My sibling in [your preferred Deity], you cannot spell Israel?? What are we doing?
Do you acknowledge that expanding militarily is always illegal, or not? You can't make an argument like "Israel is just a smol bean that needs lebensraum" and make it sound normal in 2026.
I want middle-aged Jewish people that have 'purchased' stolen land in the West Bank to move back home to the States and be my neighbors again! That isn't 'wiping them out', quite the contrary!
Forestalling that, I want integration and democracy and an accounting of what was stolen, along with reparations. I want the children of that land to grow up and not understand why their parents were in conflict. To barely comprehend how it could have been so bad.
This is what I want for the United States as well. An accounting and reparations for both the decedents of the enslaved and those we committed genocide against, within our borders and without. We never completed reconstruction and we are all poorer for it.
This is why the current administration is tearing down monuments that remember our past, they'd rather live in a muscular fantasy of restoration forgotten 'white' greatness than acknowledge what we owe to each other. That we must find solidarity and love in shared humanity to resist the forces that divide us.
While I don't agree with terrorism, this is incorrect. International law is quite deliberate in allowing the victims of aggression to do almost anything against the aggressors to get control of their land back, including terrorism. Those who wrote the law hoped this would be a sufficient deterrent against invasions.
Also love the refusal to even agree that words have meaning. You put scare quotes around 'terrorism'. Are you saying that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a series of small terrorist groups, and a series of individuals did not commit terrorists attacks in Israel?
Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." - are you saying exploding bombs, knife attacks, and firing rockets indiscriminately against civilians is not terrorism?
Israel performs precise attacks on valid military targets and with multiple measures to reduce the number of collateral damage to civilians. You are trying to equate this with terrorist attacks literally targeting civilians.
The carnage was too documented for too long of a period of time for those words of yours to warrant a serious response. I know that the only way to possibly attempt to repair your image is to relentlessly repeat the bullet points over and over again and hope that the new generations hear more of your words and less of actual documented reporting, but there is no reason for the rest of us to dignify such attempts of yours with a serious discussion about what are now established facts. While you're staring at that mirror, try to find a semblance of a soul somewhere deep if any still exists there. Collectively.
This "apartheid" claim never made sense to me. Are people completely ignorant to South African history? Israeli Palestinians are equal citizens. Black people in South Africa couldn't own property, couldn't vote, and often couldn't even live in the same building as white people.
IIRC Israel maintains apartheid by insisting the oppressed class are not their citizens. They call them Palestinians, and keep them in a small area called Gaza, rather than the South African approach of making them South Africans with lesser rights and the ability to access the whole country.
There are two million Arabs in Israel with full citizenship and equal rights. They are in the parliament, in the Supreme Court, in the IDF, in all professions, and in 2022 were in the government coalition.
The Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are not citizens of Israel, and it would be against international law for Israel to give them citizenship.
I disagree. Limiting your understanding of 'can people coexist' down to purely ethnic terms is colonial apartheid thinking.
"History has also shown that whenever Mizrahi Jews are a minority relative to Ashkenazi Jews something bad tends to a happen to them"
What now mupuff? Is it because they tainted by their Arab blood?
I could do this all day with random minorities, but it's not a refutation of my argument.
'Single supreme race' states are evil. The Antebellum South was one of the most evil places ever to exist and functioned on the exact same terms. There was a civil war, and we settled on a one state solution. The only mistake was not fully purging the slavers from positions of power and stopping reconstruction.
Racial/Ethnic/Religious caste systems are a race to the bottom. They are a suicidal purity cult.
I should note that you are factually wrong. Jews have very rarely been an ethnic majority, yet many cultures have managed to not genocide them throughout history. This includes middle eastern countries prior to the Nakba. Don't project out the utterly imperial eurocentric 'pograms are inevitiable' and 'arabs are all that same, and are savages' viewpoint out onto every civilizations.
European empires created or exacerbated divisions in peaceful populations as a means of colonial control. This is well documented and intentional. Zionism as a project is very very British, they wrote their plans down! Same as they did in South Africa. Same as they did in Ireland.
So Jews should just accept the ruler de jour! If he likes Jews everything’s honky dory, if he doesn’t, better luck with the next ruler! Just like the last 2000 years of exile, sometime it was nice for Jews, sometime it was pogroms. Such is life you say.
So easy for you when you’re not the one that billions of people around the world are taught to hate.
"""
So [Black people in America] should just accept the [president] de jour! If he likes [Black people] everything’s honky dory, if he doesn’t, better luck with the next [president]! Just like the last 400 years of [chattel slavery, convict leasing, apartheid, and child incarceration], sometime it was nice for [Black people], sometime it was [lynchings].
Such is life you say.
So easy for you when you’re not the one that billions of people around the world are taught to hate [Black people, sexual minorities, brown immigrants, Muslims, Jews, etc...].
"""
I'm saying that apartheid is always wrong and I will always stand against it. It is not 'such is life' except in the particular sense that it is the obligation of all free peoples to stand against these moral atrocities where ever they appear, and they appear in every age.
It does not matter to me one whit the particulars of the race or caste of the people enacting apartheid and genocide and no amount of special pleading will change my mind.
There has been recent academic research (+ book) about how it's the opposite - Israel relied on foreign intelligence (Club de Berne) for it's most famous operations.