Comment by JumpCrisscross
4 days ago
> should be considered beholden to the government of Israel
Do we have evidence this is a state operation versus a criminal group?
4 days ago
> 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.