Comment by markus_zhang

8 days ago

I'd be super surprised if EU doesn't have similar "dashboards".

Don't underestimate the incompetence of our governments.

  • 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 German foreign intelligence service (BND) played the PR of incompetence for a very long time.

    Well until press found out that they had tapped into Obamas encrypted phone calls while flying in the AF1 for a long time.

    • > Well until press found out that they had tapped into Obamas encrypted phone calls while flying in the AF1 for a long time.

      As per the article linked above (https://archive.ph/kCxNw)

      "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.

[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-spyware-probe-slams-gover...

[1] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-national-secur...