How come when we hear about this stuff it is always Israeli companies involved? Is ethics not taught in Israeli Computer Science curricula? Those who wrote this exploit are clearly "brilliant" and at least some of them are bound to be reading Hacker News. Is other countries' spyware firms just better at hiding their malware than Israel's is?
> How come when we hear about this stuff it is always Israeli companies involved?
Everyone seems to be focusing on the "always" in your statement, so i'll ignore that and give you a straight answer.
Strong investment in STEM education, after school programming and computer security programs, mandatory military service where they get a chance to evaluate everyone and funnel the smart technical folks in to Unit 8200, and heavy investment into security startups.
Israel also benefits from everyone else depending on their tools. Not only do they get to see the intelligence being collected by other countries and gain insights into their espionage operations, they also would be able to piggy back into any networks that were of particular interest.
It was a requirement for my Software Engineering degree (my university was in the US). When discussing with my coworkers in the past, I don't think many of them were required to take any ethics courses, unfortunately.
Ethics in software is something we should all probably talk about a little more often.
My alma mater treated CS more like "Applied Math", to the degree that I don't think that anyone in the department viewed Software Engineering as a major source of employment after the (Master's) degree.
Viewed from the lens of "CS is a researcher/PhD candidate mill", a lack of focus on ethics makes some sense to the cynic in me.
It was taught in mine. Lots of focus on stuff like gender issues, discrimination, and academic dishonesty (don't cheat or plagiarize, etc). The guy who held the ethic course also held the course in abstract computer science. He most definitely would've been displeased had his students used what he taught them to write malware targeting journalists!
It's no longer commonly taught, I think it was 10 years ago. It may have something to do with degree accreditation bodies but I'm not sure.
Knowing Ethics doesn't really mean much, given ethicists aren't more ethical than normal people [0].
As an aside, another consideration is this isn't some private corporation, it's every government, you've got to consider the number of people before someone like Snowden popped their faces out.
In order to understand that ethicists aren't more ethical than normal people you need a course in ontology. We sadly lack courses in ontology in most curriculum.
Israel has mandatory military service and part of it's military is an elite hacking group known as Unit 8200[0]. Members of this unit who leave the military have founded a huge number of information security and antivirus companies based in Israel (mostly in Tel Aviv)[1].
It's not always Israeli companies. For example we have seen attacks in journalists, NGO workers and activists from Hacking Team which is Italian, Finisher / Gamma International which is Germany or British (IIRC), then there are other hacking groups for hire from India. Of course then there is state stuff from Russia, China amongst others.
When HackingTeam was exposed, no one was asking to sanction Italy. Hating on Israel specifically is a very cool and woke thing to do. Has been for decades.
Oh come on. It's not like Italy has been bombing foreign scientists, sending assassins all around the world, or illegally occupying an entire country for seven decades.
Whataboutisming when people are justifiably calling out an Israeli company (shielded by Israeli courts) for continuing to be the reason why human rights activists and journalists are being jailed or murdered, is a very cool and contrarian thing to do.
Why does this shining light of democracy allow/encourage it's companies to perpetuate authoritarianism for their neighbors? Not a very democracy-loving thing to do.
> Hating on Israel specifically is a very cool and woke thing to do. Has been for decades.
And defenders of Israeli actions using the defense of people 'hating on Israel' instead of reflecting on the fact that people have genuine policy disagreements with what Israel does has been a popular deflection tactic for decades.
You can't divorce what Israel does on a daily basis from its image and then act surprised when it is being criticized.
Who was the last agent of the Italian state to infiltrate a foreign country and bomb and assassinate civilians in broad daylight? Israel did this last month.
I also don't remember Italy bulldozing people's homes while the occupants watch and then turning that land over to their preferred ethnic group, but you know my history isn't so great.
Specifically, Israel has a huge cybersecurity software business around selling oppressive regimes NSA-style tools of mass surveillance and spyware kits. This is a government-sanctioned industry (US intelligence is in this too), and doesn't seem to have any ethics. Here are some stories:
It’s called selection bias. It’s fun and always acceptable to hate on Israel. It’s also more memorable due to the sensationalization of it.
A few years ago bluecoat systems was caught providing deep packet inspection gear to the Syrian government. But that wasn’t Israel so no biggie and you either never heard about it or didn’t pay much attention because it wasn’t Israel.
American and European companies do this all the time but it’s not sensationalized to the same degree. That’s just business as usual.
Don't people routinely get called anti-semite for just criticizing the Israeli government? Except for some small circles, I don't think your statement is true, it's certainly not true for mainstream US politics.
I don't believe that happened the way you describe it. Blue Coat was illegally on-sold to Syria from a UAE-based distributor and that company received a 200% fine of the sale price.
You know what's even more acceptable? Dismissing any criticism of Israel as "anti-semitism", absolving them of any wrongdoing whatsoever. This happens every time like clockwork when talking about the Israeli defense industry and the horrible things they do.
Oh, that's such formal crap.
The Founders are Israeli, RND is Israeli, most employees are Israelis in israel. It's an Israeli company.
As an Israeli with very similar background to the people who work there I'm ashamed of our industry involvement in this disgusting business.
> How come when we hear about this stuff it is always Israeli companies involved? Is ethics not taught in Israeli Computer Science curricula?
Personal opinion, but I think the mandatory army service in Israel seems to teach that everything is 'defense' and Israel is always 'defending itself', no matter what, this sort of thinking then bleeds into the private sector as these guys leave the military and use the skills they learned there to establish businesses.
Having interacted with the Palestinians during their army service as 'the enemy', the victims of NSO undoubtedly fall into the same category, thus not worth loosing their sleep over.
There is the idea that being the stronger side in a constant state of conflict with a neighbour for decades suits Israel economically, despite the human cost on both sides. Combined with national service, it creates a highly credible testing ground for public and private development of defence products, technologies and services, which are extremely valuable exports.
A country of its size and only relative recent independence, is punching well above its weight being the 8th largest arms exporter in the world over the last decade.[1]
If I had to guess.... as a person who once did a fair amount of business in the middle east, but Egypt and not Israel...
I had a former customer there _go out of business_ when the Barack Hussein Obama (mmm mmm mmm!) administration supportd an attempted putsch by (in my customer's words) "The Retarded F___ing Nazis who killed Sadat for making peace with the Jews."
Israel and the non-Brotherhood Arab countries face the burdensome situation that their most reliable "ally" is a country that depending on the politics is going to support the Brotherhood _and_ the large wannabe-hegemonic Russian satellite state trying to develop nuclear weapons. (Oh, and funded said state's reconquest of Syria in the process). Said schizophrenic state also has a massive surveillance system of its own.
My guess: they all don't look at this as a violation of civil rights or ethics, they look at this as a means for the little countries like them to get a leg up on some of the insane intelligence agencies of the large countries that are funding enemies both domestic and foreign.
