Just bear in mind that this is the same Polish PM whose former government set World record making requests to Apple for data from 241 509 iPhones in 1H2015… (out of 300 thousand total request from the entire World)…
Quarter milion iPhones in 2015 in Poland was basically everyone who counts in public life.
KAS has very specific mandate though and doesn't share with other institutions - they tend to go after very specific things that they do know how to get.
Not that it's a crystal clear institution, but everything will go around taxes and customs with them, even when it's something rotten.
"The Justice Fund provides immediate and free emergency assistance to crime victims, witnesses and their closest relatives, including victims of armed aggression in Ukraine.
You can use the free:
legal aid, psychological help, material assistance"
Quite fitting considering previous corrupt regime was ran by PIS, which doesnt stand for piss but 'Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc' - Law and Justice.
>Usage of Pegasus means all intercepts are on the servers in Israel
Wait, seriously? Any sources on that? I find it hard to believe that any government would spend $$$ on a security tool that doesn't allow on-prem installation and instead beams all your surveillance to another country.
NATO countries' governments and military use phones with encrypted communications to which the US has the keys. This fact was made available during investigation into the Polish government plane crash in Smolensk. The US authorities have access to the recordings of the calls made by the late president of Poland, but said they would not make them available.
Indirectly, all software vulnerability tools that send source code and other artefacts to servers outside government's control give third parties access to information about potential attack vectors, software vulnerabilities, and infrastructure layout.
this was meant to be used for spying terrorists and such, so should not be big deal
from what I heard about Pegasus: noone could get that malware for themselves to not compromise it, so it's you wanted to hijack some phone you would send them phone number so they could resend exploit again (spyware was not persistent across reboots, so you needed to rehack it every time)
Pegasus is only the malware that has the spying capabilities (file upload, download and command execution...etc).
it usually infects the intended target using an exploit (0-day) that doesnt have a fix, if you're asking if there are 0days that can hack modern iPhones, the answer is most likely yes, given the most recent hack against the iPhone of one of the executives of the russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky [1].
NSO is just a strawman for the government of Israel. Surveillance technology is a very successful soft power tool, as the dictators crave its capabilities to stay in power. Pegasus is world class technology, so Israel could score a lot of brownie points by allowing these sales. Too bad they got too greedy and sloppy and allowed the phones of some US officials in Africa to be infected. Coincidentally there was a leak of 50000 phone numbers and NSO goes boom. Israeli "security diplomacy" rebuilt NSO and is still going strong, surprised i am not :-(
Why? It serves no purpose, if it wasn't them, it would be New NSO Group instead. So long as these vulnerabilities exist, they're going to be exploited. Every time they find an exploit it's a moment of pure genius. With every new baseband and every new OS update there's a good chance that they find they have no answer. I don't blame the hackers in the slightest. It's also not useful to blame governments.
More useful to blame the systemic issues that allow these things to take place: the one that pops to the front of my mind is that the FCC has such a high degree of standards with modems that it results in a severe lack of competition. Google and Apple choose to release phones without contractually demanding full source access to the entirety of it so that it can be audited by their security teams. Those are things that can and should change.
What? Pegasus is not enabled by modem vulnerabilities. The primary vulnerabilities used on iOS phones are in Apple designed and implemented components and the primary vulnerabilities used on Android phones are in Google designed and implemented components.
The problem is not that Google and Apple did not have the opportunity to secure the vulnerable components. The problem is that their best teams with thousands of people and billions of dollars are completely incapable of designing systems secure against moderately resourced attackers.
They openly admit that their systems are defenseless against attackers with resources. Every single time their security is completely invalidated they make press releases like: "It was a unprecedented attack using never-before-seen techniques by highly sophisticated attackers." implying that they can not be blamed because look, they were "highly sophisticated" and it was "unprecedented" there is no way we could stop that. Even though every single attack is described that way.
You would be hard pressed to find a single technically competent security developer in any of these organizations which would claim their systems could stop their systems being totally and utterly compromised and their security completely invalidated by a single, individual, lone competent hacker with a year to work on attacks. A team of 3, forget about it. That is only in the low millions of dollars to completely invalidate their entire security story for all hundreds of millions to billions of systems worldwide.
No, the problem is not a lack of accessibility, effort, resources, or focus. The problem is that all of these large companies have failed for literal decades to develop systems secure against competent attackers. And the entire time they have been intentionally deceiving the public into thinking they can even though they know and admit they can not.
The solution is to stop believing these perennial incompetents and liars until they present solid, auditable proof. At least then they can not suck all of the air out of the room from people who actually know what they are doing.
> The NSO is only supplying a product for which there is insatiable demand from every government.
There is also insatiable demand for nuclear weapons, but if a private company from the US started selling them to random dictatorships, yes, I would blame them.
Pegasus is notoriously sold to more than 40 countries worldwide, among them a fair share of dictatorships: Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, (Hungary?), Bahrain, Russia...
Nobody thinks that we can prevent everyone from doing something. The point of regulating (or making it illegal) and then enforcing those laws is to increase friction, increase costs, and thus making the thing difficult enough to obtain that the problems it causes become manageable. If there are 3 vendors of this sort of thing, then shutting down one of them definitely will make it more difficult for would-be customers by increasing costs and risks. Something does not have to be perfect to be good.
> They're kind of like arms manufacturers. Do you blame them if your government shoots you?
When Iran sells weapons to the Russians we definitely blame them, yes. And the Russians for using them, as well.
Is 80 still the hard limit? I see it warns if too long when typing in a new submission. However, HN guidelines don't provide guidance in what to do if the title is too long.
Worth pointing out that bribed* by PIS reporters have made the Polish "public" (in reality party owned) television into a meme by the sheer amount and ridiculousness of propaganda. What older people watched out of habit and inability to get their information online, was so bad that you could as well watch it as a monthy python episode. And one of the most shown topics was blaming literally anything on the PM that ruled 8 years ago (one who thrown then out now). They blamed from immigrants and war in Ukraine to bad weather and situation in health services. They even showed the guy with parts of his previous party logo as horns and with his face hued with red. I'm not making this stuff up.
*They were bribed with money taken from defunded children cancer treatments.
> What older people watched out of habit and inability to get their information online
The quality of "news" old people end up finding online isn't any better than on TV.
I know because unfortunately, my parents in their 60's, both with advanced degrees, are now more retarded and brainwashed than ever, by all the nasty shit that gets pushed to them on Facebook, Youtube and Tiktok.
I think those are even worse than the TV, because in the EU what gets shown on TV is at least mildly regulated, but what gets shown to you on social media isn't.
The article you've posted is engaging in mental gymnastics and misrepresentation that I've never considered possible.
To sum up the facts:
- PiS got into power several years ago
- PiS fired all the journalists of public broadcasters and replaced them with staff they selected. Major private media corporations in poland were already closely aligned with PiS, and independent media was shut down.
- As a result, for several years all media in poland was pro-government.
Regardless of your political ideals, that's not something that happens in a working democracy.
- In the most recent election, PiS lost.
- The new government fired the employees at public broadcasters that PiS had selected.
The actions of Donald Tusk's government lead to more opinions being represented in media. Which indicates that Tusk's government provides more freedom of the press than the previous one.
> that's not something that happens in a working democracy.
PiS winning their second term would also be a product of a working democracy. Their certain continuation of their power grab would be a contradiction to your statement.
> Major private media corporations in poland were already closely aligned with PiS
Actually... it was quite the opposite. The vast majority of private media were not pro-PiS. The problem only concerned public media, financed from the state budget
The Protected Society Foundation has received HUF 22 million from the Lajos Batthyány Foundation, which operates with billions of public funds, according to a report by the organisation that spreads far-right ideas https://telex.hu/belfold/2023/05/26/vedett-tarsadalom-alapit...
The Fidesz-affiliated The European Conservative aims to become a leading European news publication, and will receive the necessary support from the government through the Lajos Batthyány Foundation (BLA), worth more than HUF 1.6 billion https://index.hu/kulfold/2023/07/26/brusszel-batthyany-lajos...
No, he kicked previous party minions from Public TV station, politicians who somehow had private passes allowing them to roam free around Public Broadcaster facilities.
Previous regime in Poland was super close to becoming another Hungary with only Party aligned media being allowed to operate. They did try to shut down US owned TV station by using "anti russian media influence" law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_TVN
Politicians committing crimes end up in courts and then in prison, plain and simple. And this is plain propaganda, repeating many talking points of the PiS party (the party previously in power, who illegally used Pegasus).
> The former top European Union official’s party only won 30% of the vote compared to the 36% of his incumbent conservative, EU-skeptical rivals, the Law and Justice (PiS) party, but was nonetheless able to assemble a coalition of leftists to take power.
Just one party in this coalition is from the left. The rest is decidedly centre to centre-right.
The author seems to contradict themselves in many places… maybe they just really want it to be true. For example, “allegedly” and “convicted” in this case:
> He was convicted during Tusk’s previous regime (2007-2014) for allegedly abusing his power while pursuing government corruption with “excessive zeal,” but was officially pardoned by then-new President Andrzej Duda in 2015 – a long-standing point of displeasure for the Polish left.
Is anyone fooled by this drivel? Honest question. Because some things are pernicious: misleading but in a subtle way, sly and devious. This is just so in-your-face laughable.
Quarter milion iPhones in 2015 in Poland was basically everyone who counts in public life.
https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/pdf/requests-2015-H...