From this story:
"Facebook had been caught designing algorithms to identify stressed, overwhelmed, and anxious teenagers on its network, presumably to assist advertisers who might want to target them"
"But it wasn’t the looming disaster at Facebook that angered Ms. Sandberg. It was the social network’s security chief, Alex Stamos, who had informed company board members the day before that Facebook had yet to contain the Russian infestation……….She appeared to regard the admission as a betrayal.....“You threw us under the bus!” she yelled at Mr. Stamos………………Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic"
Can you please discuss the issue? because an Israeli company was involved we have the right to criticize it.
And you have no right to accuse us of not liking Israel or inventing stories.
If people with your reasoning are the only ones left to defend Israel, I worry about Israel...
Why would anyone assume that politicians phones weren’t hacked?
If anything this behavior, of invading privacy and trying to control people by blackmailing them, happened to the richest man in the world.
A lot of things mentioned in this article is similar to what happened with Alabama governer Robert Bentley.
Early 2016, a leaked recordering of his conversation with his mistress was leaked to media (unknown source)
Then a year later his wife screenshot his iMessage conversations with his mistress Rebekah! And everyone thinks it’s the wife.
Between 2016-2017 and before the wife screenshot these photos there was an organized campaign against Alabama governer. Who by the way:
- Supoorted Kasich to run for president
- took down a confederate flag
- was planning a settlement for Syrian refugee..
Just think of this, what if Trump was able to hack every congressman phone?
What gave national acquirer the confidence to black Bezos? Unless of course they’ve done it too many times to too many people.
The question who are these victims?
We need to know who is/was used as a tool to implement Trump and kushner agenda.
I quoted your line about executive branch spying on the members of the senate so I replied to that part. It wasn't just a theoretical possibility.
> The cia didn’t hack phones and blackmailed businessmen and politicians.
We know they hacked the devices of senators and even apologized for it later. Did the blackmail them? Could be. How do you know they didn't? Bezos was probably the rare case where he exposed their blackmail, in most cases, because of what it is, blackmail is something that is kept secret.
Thank you!
It’s widely accepted and known in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries that NSO is used by their dictators. Not sure why israel gov, the only democracy in that part of the world, is helping dictators by approving NSO to be sold to counties like Saudi Arabia, UAE and Mexico!!
It’s just shocking to see some people not only reject that its NSO but go beyond and above their ways to defend NSO, like the commentator we are relying to..
So many comments here are again insisting it’s the brother who leaked it when this article was SPECIFICALLY written by Gavin de Becker to say it’s the Saudis and not the brother...
please when you make a statement or reject an accusation cite a reputable source.
Check out this psygroup proposal to blackmail people name/shame by Psy-group.
It says in the proposal that these methods of blackmailing often work to silence target.
Worth mentioning that the smear campaign against Bezos on twitter is identical to what proposed to trumps son in his meeting at trump tower with George Nader
Here is psy group proposal
> Thank you! It’s widely accepted and known in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries that NSO is used by their dictators. Not sure why israel gov, the only democracy in that part of the world, is helping dictators by approving NSO to be sold to counties like Saudi Arabia, UAE and Mexico!
Dictatorial and royal Arab governments are much friendlier to Israel than any democratic government would be. They’re not willing to officially regularise relations because they know how much their populace hates Israel but they’re perfectly willing to work with Israel. Israel knows this. That’s why they’re willing to work with these governments; they’re the closest to friends and allies they’re ever going to get as neighbours.
Precisely that, although the irony is that while the regimes themselves, anywhere in the Sunni Arab world, are friendly and cooperative towards Israel, their educational textbooks still preach for hatred and rejection of Israel and often times straight antisemitism. It's how they prop a common enemy to blame for their troubles.
Israel is a highly pragmatic country, primarily concerned with the survival of the Jews instead of a set of principles. Allowing NSO to be sold to nearby dictatorships like the Saudis would allow the Saudis to more easily defeat their own enemies rather than go after Israel, a sort of dark diplomacy.
>Not sure why israel gov, the only democracy in that part of the world, is helping dictators by approving NSO to be sold to counties like Saudi Arabia, UAE and Mexico!!!
Not surprising. For example the US has a “special relationship” with Saudi Arabia and sells a lot more than software (jets, arms, etc)
But USA never helped Saudi to treat its people inhumanly.
The US didn’t help or remained silent when Saudi violeted human rights.
The US never EVER helped Saudi to spy on a journalist then advised its murderers on how to weather the storm, like Kushner did.
Even Lindsey Graham couldn’t tolerate this atrocity but it was fine with Kushner and Israeli PM Netanyahu https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-netanyahu-on-kh...
>The US never EVER helped Saudi to spy on a journalist...
Israel didn't help them either, it just didn't stop an Israeli company from selling certain products to the Saudis.
Do you think the US is stopping all companies from doing business with the Saudis, or even just stopping them from selling tools that can be used by the regime against the public?
because they aren't, they are however supposedly doing that with Iran and to a certain extent, with Russia, so it's not like it's something they can't do, it's just that they choose not to.
I'm by far not an expert, but I believe that This business (spyware for governments) works more similar to international weapons dealing. An Israeli company selling spyware to Saudi Arabia will likely at the same time work together with Mossad or another allied intelligence agency. Selling this software provides an obvious entry point, whether for human assets, piggy-backing on the eavesdropping software, or to map out future attack vectors.
They were former members in those organizations, like army vets, and as far as I understand they face a lot of criticism from the Israeli public, if not the government.
I think they are basically like those vets that go and work security for private contractors, and some of them end up working for some really bad people.
About the backdoors, I can't tell, on the one hand, I would assume you're correct, that they do provide access to the Mossad+friends, but on the other hand, if it was discovered, they would lose credibility, and all those basically bad people wouldn't work with them, and any normal entity probably aren't working with them already, so they would lose their entire business.
Your claims about what the US did and didn't do seem rather implausible to me, and in any case it seems unlikely that you're in a position to know what e.g. the NSA, the CIA, or any of the countless US military intelligence agencies did or did not do for Saudia Arabia. All we know is that the US makes massive weapons and oil deals with Saudi Arabia and has considered the Saudis one of the most important strategic partners in the region. Personally, I find it not hard to believe that the same cynics involved in these deals and cooperation wouldn't care all too much about some Saudi journalists, gay Saudi youtube channel dancers, or human rights activists, but of course I could also be wrong. The point is that we don't know.
> Thank you! It’s widely accepted and known in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries that NSO is used by their dictators. Not sure why israel gov, the only democracy in that part of the world, is helping dictators by approving NSO to be sold to counties like Saudi Arabia, UAE and Mexico!!
>
Let’s see
A) they are selling a product
B) they are helping propping the stable status quo
C) do you really help a country by selling oppression tools to its dictatorship, most democratic countries have overtaken dictatorships in all metrics with one exception
D) getting good will from the current rulers and establishing cooperative relationships within multiple levels of those countries
Yes there is. It’s been reported by many reporters. Citizen labs did an amazing job investigating NSO hacked phones.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/report-israel-authorized...
Then an ex mossad tried to get citizen labs to say antiemetic statement.
I had to edit my comment to add these two very important links from CNN and khashoggi twitter.
khashoggi funded a Saudi group (they called themselves the Bees) who were working to counterattack Saudi bots and trend manipulation. His conversation and planning with them was all intercepted by the Saudi using NSO software.
The group with khashoggi were able to push their hashtag and had it trending just 12 days before his murder
QUOTING GAVIN DE BECKER
“Bezos to sign would have required that I make a public statement, composed by them and then widely disseminated, saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process.”
Note here that I’d never publicly said anything about electronic eavesdropping or hacking—and they wanted to be sure I couldn’t”
——-
Looks like NSO doesn’t want us to know think it’s their software..
Bezos asked his security consultant Gavin De Becker, to conduct the investigation he did and published his oped in a month.
The brother bla bla bla is just a distraction deployed by those who want you to believe NSO wasn’t used on to hack the phone of an American citizen.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeff-bezos-investigation-finds...
We discussed it here as well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19532185