Comment by Ozzie_osman
4 days ago
Obviously not the first time an Israeli tech firm is responsible for these types of exploits, and at this point I'd go so far as saying that any Israeli-based tech company (especially cyber security ones, of which they have a strong industry) should be considered beholden to the government of Israel and hence, probably not trustworthy. How could you be sure whether they will act like a trustworthy independent entity, or compromise your data for the benefit of the state?
I would sooner trust a Chinese company than an Israeli company. Is there any country less trustworthy and more hostile to users?
This is a weird question and comment because a country doesn't generally make the software. But I suppose they seem to have a lot of influence on the companies. Like surveillance cameras in China.
If I was to say which countries do the most to restrict digital freedom, I'd say look at this table: https://eylenburg.github.io/countries.htm
If I was to say what companies have done the most to take the most privacy from the most people, it would be American big tech like Google and Meta.
There's some okayish software from Israel I can think of, like Zcash.
These Israeli ones are literal criminal companies. What Meta does should be illegal. Both are immoral.
A single spyware against a journalist is much worse than a single Facebook user, but for the total impact on society, they both destroy democracy and human rights significantly.
>I would sooner trust a Chinese company than an Israeli company
As for trust, with privacy I'm a big proponent of avoiding it. Use E2EE or self host if you have to. The country does not matter so much.
> as for trust, avoid it
We all end up running closed source code somewhere
If you do you'll be much better off avoiding Israeli tech
As a rule if you boycott everything Israeli it'll be smarter, more ethical, and safer
Zcash was created as an alternative to Monero. In Monero, every transaction is completely anonymous. In Zcash, transactions can be chosen as anonymous or not, so users can be pressured to avoid anonymous transactions, and to avoid associating or transacting with users who use anonymous transactions. This is apparently the main advantage and selling point of Zcash.
You wouldn’t put personal data and trust in a Chinese app.
Israel still have the reputation of being part of the ‘free world’ in the collective mind.
that is more dangerous.
> You wouldn’t put personal data and trust in a Chinese app.
At this point, I don’t agree. I’m an immigrant living in the US currently. From an infosec and real-world consequences perspective, I have much less reason to fear what the Chinese government or corporations could do with my information than what either the current US government or its major tech corporations might do.
> Israel still have the reputation of being part of the ‘free world’ in the collective mind.
That collective mind is cognitively challenged and extremely ignorant, but it doesn’t mean I have to be.
It comes down to trust them about what.
If I were engaged in anything hostile to Israel I utterly would not trust Israeli stuff. But Israel is normally quite careful about target selection, if I was not engaged in anything hostile to Israel I would expect anything they slip in to be secure and to not do any harm beyond it's existence. A scene from Lebanon not too long ago makes it very clear: A whole bunch of people milling about, setting up for selfies and the like--then we see the building behind destroyed by an airstrike. Clearly all those people around knew the building was going to be destroyed and they trusted Israeli accuracy enough to be standing not too far from where the bomb would land.
China, though, I would utterly not trust target selection or security against misuse.
wonder how long they'll be able to uphold this reputation, it's a bit puzzling to me that they still have one after three years of genocide in Palestine/Gaza and attacks on Lebanon, Iran, Qatar, Yemen and Syria. with the president having a warrant for war crimes and being investigated in his own country. and far-right government officials proudly saying that they want to eradicate their arab neighbors, and other heinous shit.
seems to me like lots of people are wary of ever criticizing or changing their mind about Israel, because their population once was the target of arguably the most heinous genocide in history, so far, which i'm of course very sorry for. must've caused some heavy, multi-generational trauma, other than that i can't explain why they're acting the way they do. don't make the mistake of translating official government statements or looking at population surveys, truly horrific, barbaric stuff. but of course the only terrorists in all of this are their neighbors which they keep in open-air prisons they at this point have bombed to rubble.
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That doesn't make any sense. China is a full dictatorship, Israel is not.
Vote me down all you want for saying something about Israel that's not super negative, but it's not a "which country do I dislike most" competition when it comes to facts.
China being a dictatorship means bad things for Chinese citizens but not necessary for the rest of the world.
Israel being a (disfunctional and rather illiberal at this point) democracy, means it's much better for it's own citizens (excluding Arabs ofc), but says nothing about the people outside. Same for the US BTW.
It's an ethnic supremacist theodicy, is that better or worse than a dictatorship?
Also, meta discussion about down votes is against him policy, yet magically you're exempt, typical of **
Define "hostile to users" a bit more. Chinese devices recklessly place rando back-doors into things, opening up them up to everyone and their mother. Average consumer router firmware? Compromised. They swallow up any and all information they can get their hands on and operate scam centers where they can utilize the info to blackmail people. Israel seems to have a more targeted approach, albeit there is definitely a blast radius. I'm not sure I can say any one country is worse than the other when it comes to cybersecurity. That includes: USA, Iran, North Korea, China, Israel, Russia etc. They all put consumers at risk; whether it's immediate or down the line when the exploits are revealed and other bad actors (scammers) are able to leverage them. It's a lose-lose for us either way.
> Define "hostile to users" a bit more.
They use this software to find and kill people. Which they then publicly brag about. How much more hostile do you want to be?
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> Define "hostile to users" a bit more
Exploding pagers. Israel literally killed people with consumer tech.
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I would also love this clarification, because not trusting an Israeli company is one thing, but with China, you're choosing to trust a government that is decades-old at being untrustworthy, not just a company. And whether or not the Israeli government can persuade a company to work with them notwithstanding, it's a known out truth that the Chinese government is in the business of its businesses.
Some multinationals have their R&D offices in Israel, there's a lot of pretty good research coming out. Russia would probably be worse in terms of trust and they are openly hostile to the West unlike Israel.
> openly hostile to the West unlike Israel
Israel has openly and publicly threatened western politicians and citizens that don't aid their agenda however, many times. Like Russia, they have also shot down commercial airliners.
Unlike Russia, they have killed American sailors whilst directly attacking American naval assets.
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> should be considered beholden to the government of Israel
Do we have evidence this is a state operation versus a criminal group?
Excellent question. It seems likely because:
* The state of Israel does authorize spyware sales (eg NSO Group has to get a license from the Ministry of Defense, and Israel's Defense Export Control Agency states that its decisions take national security / foreign policy into account).
* In the case of Pegasus, NYT had reported that Netanyahu intervened to make an exception allowing sale of Pegasus to Saudi Arabia (as political leverage). NSO group execs used Israeli diplomatic passports when they traveled and stayed at the Israeli embassy.
* The government doesn't crack down on these industries, which it would do if it really considered them criminal.
* In this particular case, one of the main targets was Al Jazeera, which seems unlikely that a criminal company would want to target vs. a state actor.
So yea, the government seems to allow these companies to engage in what other countries would consider criminal activity. You can then kind of choose your spot on the spectrum of: "I think this is some broad conspiracy the government purposefully designed for large-scale espionage" or just "The Israeli government thinks it would be good to have great cybersecurity skills in the country so they bend the rules a little".
A good well-researched read is The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein.
Exactly. There's plenty of public-private partnerships in Israel and there is zero chance that a spyware firm would go unnoticed. Israeli academia, defense industry, and government is tightly interconnected. See Unit 8200, for example, which basically works as an incubator for Israeli cyberspace fraudsters. Denying Israeli government involvement here is just as dumb as denying Russian government involvement in Fancy Bear.
Don't be antisemitic.
Jewish and Israeli are not identical. It's possible for someone to have negative views of the country without that being a stance on people who are Jewish.
Many, many, many Fortune 500 companies use Israeli cybersecurity services.
I guess that your concerns are not aligned with reality, or the benefits far outweigh whatever it is you think may happen.
(Talking as an Israeli working in cybersecurity)
Or maybe fortune 500 companies have different vulnerabilities, financial power, and concerns than individual humans.
> Many, many, many Fortune 500 companies use Israeli cybersecurity services.
It's possible for this to be true, and that they spy on said companies on behalf of the government of Israel. It makes it easier to do so.
I'm saying they shouldn't do that, because there is a decent chance those Israeli companies may do things at odds with their customers' best interests (because they cannot or would not say no to a government request).
A good chunk of the EU powergrid uses Israeli made embedded systems.
which is profoundly stupid from a digital sovereignty and security standpoint.
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Hopefully that will change soon.