

Pakistan is a FinFisher customer, leak confirms - rhu86
http://digitalrightsfoundation.pk/2014/08/pakistan-is-a-finfisher-customer-leak-confirms/

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billyhoffman
Does it honestly surprise anyone that Pakistan is a customer of FinFisher,
given the history of their ISI service?

I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm seriously.

State actors were a target customer for FinFisher, and it isn't that hard to
figure out probably customers. Saudi Arabia tried to get Moxie to help them
spy on its citizens, so I imagine they are a good bet too.

[http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-
surveillance/](http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/)

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4k
Its makes me sad to think a government of a nation with so little prosperity
somehow has money to spend on this kind of shit.

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phaus
Lots of countries are filthy rich when you consider the fact that a select few
get to spend all the money. Ghaddafi, for example, had over $200 billion
because he "owned" everything in Libya.

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yarou
Why is it that "professional" spyware seems to be written by a middle school
student with access to Visual Basic? I mean if you're going to spy on other
people, at least make it look good. These guys need a new design department

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abdullahkhalids
It is surprising that some entity in Pakistan is a customer of FinFisher.
There are only two internet cables out of the country, both monitored by the
state (which for example allows the continued blocking of YouTube. Therefore,
if you have the IP address of someone it is trivial for anyone in the
state/government to setup a system to access their unencrypted communication.
Indeed the government has tried to buy such systems in the past (I can dig up
the RFP if anyone asks).

This points to someone in the intelligence not wanting the other entities in
the country to know exactly what they are doing.

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jonaldomo
Later it will be revealed the user posting support tickets is actually a CIA
operative... Its going to get juicy!

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tptacek
We could have more political stories on HN, fewer of them knocked off the
front page by flagging, as they are today, if it wasn't for the people who
took every such story as an opportunity to inject substance-free snark into
the site.

Unfortunately, there's no real way to make that happen, so instead, we'll keep
doing what we do now: patrolling the front page and killing stories that
present too many opportunities for comments like yours.

It's too bad, that comment! Usually, when I read a comment like this, I click
through the profile looking for other terrible comments to flag, and usually
when I do that, I end up wading through a cistern of crap and malevolence. Not
in your case! Anybody who can write comments that start with "I work for an
EMR provider and..." has something to contribute to the site. Why muddy those
contributions with stuff like this?

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jonaldomo
"Snarky?"... "My account should be banned?" The CIA involvement in Pakistan is
widely known and is in the mainstream media. All the spy novels, documentaries
and movies in the past decade are around the secret war going on in Pakistan.

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tptacek
The CIA is so tight with the ISI that Osama bin Laden lived in a huge house
blocks away from the Pakistani equivalent of West Point. Or, wait...

