Comment by bhouston
4 days ago
It is standard that companies within a country act in the interests of its security services. Israel has a lot of ad-tech companies and thus it makes sense that they are roped into serving Israel's security services.
It is no different that Israel's location tracking of StarLink terminals worldwide: https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-tech-firms-can-locate-an...
This is the same issue that the US government has with Chinese networking companies, it is too easy for the Chinese government to pressure these Chinese networking companies to put in back doors in the interests of national security. The US likely knows this because it pressures its own companies in similar ways.
Difference being we're pretending that Israel is a democracy that values human rights, so nobody makes a real stink about it, unlike with China.
Only the national brass is pretending at this point.
Why Israel is not a Democracy?
Israel was created by ethnically cleansing Palestinians during the Nakba. That's not a democracy, ethnically cleansed Palestinians aren't even allowed to live on their land, let alone vote. That's not including all of the Palestinians that have been straight up murdered.
In addition Israel is an apartheid state with many undemocratic features:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/66a134337e960f229da81...
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Bills like the US CLOUD Act (there are similar ones in the EU and China) force service providers to illegally spy on people overseas (via unauthorized use of anything they can access—consider Microsoft’s Windows backdoors).
I think the only technical solution available to individuals is to boycott non-verifiably e2ee services and corporate operating systems (especially including android).
It's not "illegaly spy", it' just spy. National security laws make sure that these requests are all legal - from that particular country's point of view who is forcing the provider to supply the info... and illegal from all the other country's point of view. The root of this problem is that nation states have the final say in what they consider legal. But that difficulty is by design and is very difficult to fix.
A few weeks ago the FBI tipped the Argentinian police that some 15 year old kid from buenos aires province had asked chatgpt for ideas to plan a school massacre.
just to confirm your info... https://buenosairesherald.com/society/argentine-teenager-pla...
In the interest of balance, how many times did the FBI snoop into innocent people’s private lives with no warrant or worse, goaded some weak-minded individuals into planning crimes together in sting operations (i.e. people who needed convincing to commit the crime, so not quite clean but not the masterminds either)?
If you put out a fire how many are you allowed to set while people applaud selectively?
I don’t think they’re striking a good balance between how invasive they are compared to the real results they deliver.
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> I think the only technical solution available to individuals is to boycott non-verifiably e2ee services
If the world moved that way overnight, I wonder where digital spy budgets would go. Into traditional techniques, cracking encryption, banning encryption, or a more educated guess?
Banning encryption. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia!
This is abhorrent. Every government spying on everyone.. and who benefits from all of this?
Can we get an alien invasion already please, god
Except this isn't the security services they are serving it's a mercenary spyware vendor.