> Ciro Pellegrino, who heads the Naples newsroom of an investigative news outlet called Fanpage.it, received a notice on April 29 that his iPhone had been targeted. Last year, Fanpage secretly infiltrated the youth wing of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and filmed some of them making fascist and racist remarks.
It's never a good look going after journalists, but this seems especially petty.
Yes but one would have to exploit a similar vulnerability as was exploited in this story. Apple would patch it as soon as it became popular because it could be used for an attack like this one.
How does the exploit work, though? The article does some real handwaving around "now the device is yours and now it's not". They don't need to go too deep but isn't anyone reading that far into the article going to be curious?
On the “vulnerability” it could be considered a zero-day because there was a real exploit against it prior to the exploit being reported by security researchers. It could also be considered not a zero-day because the software vendor is aware of the vulnerability such that no other real exploit of it, regardless of it being patched, will occur on the same day that they learn of it.
It’s kinda moot that it’s been patched. Even if they somehow failed to patch it since the exploit, it is no longer a zero-day vulnerability. But, to your point, knowing that it has been patched is practically (obviously) the same as knowing that the software vendor is aware of the vulnerability.
(Funny enough, they could be aware of it and it still be a zero-day since the definition is how many days have past since the vendor learned of it prior to it being exploited. Though, it would need to be exploited after they learn about it but before they patch it, which is unlikely.)
There is now a rich history in outsourcing activities that would otherwise be illegal to other countries where it is legal. For example, the CIA's extreme rendition [1], knowingly sending prisoners to countries to be tortured and/or executed. This is how such countries make themselves useful to American empire.
Likewise, restrictions on the NSA spying on American citizens, for example, are bypassed by outsourcing that spying to, say, other Five Eyes countries.
Israel's role in this hacking phones of politicians, dissidents and now journalists on the behalf of the US and its allies, including Saudi Arabia [2].
The Israeli company NSO Group was sued by WhatsApp for their use of Pegasus [3], something Israel tried to intervene to block [4].
I honestly don't know how people work on things like Pegasus knowing it's being used to target and kill journalists and politicians.
Chomsky has supported "anti-imperialist" russia and ignored all warnings by the eastern European people, who dared to walk out on socialism in a freedom movement. Blood on the hands, blood on the quill, blood in the will..
Stuff like this will just keep happening unless a major jurisdiction goes after these digital mercinaries. The fact that we ignore all laws for no reason other than "our agencies really like spying on people" is laughable. Literally crime as a service, sanctioned by most governments. Should not be surprising that such criminal organizations use their tools to spy on people who don't deserve it.
Ignore all laws?? EU has officially recognized the utility of these criminal agencies. Of course under the all-time-classic umbrella of "legitimate use for law enforcement" which in common means "go ahead and use it freely, if you get caught we'll give you a slap on the wrist"
>“We’ve seen first-hand how commercial spyware can be weaponized to target journalists and civil society, and these companies must be held accountable,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp told AP in an email.
Is it just me or is this statement written in a way that implies they think spying on people is acceptable just not in this specific circumstance?
waay down, near the end of the article: "Paragon referred questions to a statement it gave to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which the company said that it stopped providing spyware to Italy after the government declined its offer to help investigate Cancellato’s case. "
This is my irritating reminder that there is a whole marketplace of implant/CNE products, most of which you have never heard of, produced in basically every jurisdiction in the world.
It used to be NSO Group that got all the press, now it's Paragon, and I think it's all for the good that the spotlight gets shone on these companies, but do keep in mind that this is not an "Israeli" phenomenon. There are American companies selling tooling that is more effective than "Graphite"; they're just more careful about publicity. Wherever it is you live that you feel is morally superior to America and Israel on commercialized CNE, you're likely to end up surprised.
The issue isn't the mere existence of spyware companies globally. The issue is that Israeli companies in particular have cornered the market on selling to the world's worst human rights abusers, with catastrophic consequences.
Let's be specific: NSO Group sold Pegasus to Saudi Arabia, who used it to track Jamal Khashoggi's inner circle before his assassination. They sold to Mexico, where it was used to target journalists' families within days of their murders. To Rwanda, to hunt dissidents abroad after imprisoning their family. The list goes on.
This isn't cherry-picking. When Citizen Lab analyzes global sypware operations, Israeli companies dominate: NSO, Candiru, Paragon, QuaDream, and arguably Cytrox (Macedonian, but Israeli leadership and investors). The common thread? Former Unit 8200 personnel, who've turned state cyber-warfare capabilities into a business model explicitly built on selling to authoritarians.
Your "but everyone does it" framing fundamentally misrepresents the issue. Yes, other countries have surveillance companies. But there's a massive difference between developing capabilities and systematically selling them to regimes that murder journalists. WHen was the last time a German or French company's tools were found on a murdered journalist's or imprisoned political dissident's phone?
The data shows Israeli companies don't just happen to have "bad PR" (or uniquely terrible luck in choosing their clients) - they actively court authoritarian clients because that's where the money is if you have no morals.
For some context: Israel has a population of less than 10 Million - less than 0.1% of the world's population. If you have a persuasive argument for why Israeli spyware is routinely found by organizations like Citizen Lab, why their products seem so uniquely popular and successful with fascists and authoritarians, I'd love to hear it. Because from where I'm standing, the clear and obvious explanation is that there is a deep, systemic issue in the Israeli private intelligence and cybersecurity sector that is entirely unconcerned with how their tools will be used, or by whom, as long as the money's right. All enabled by the Israeli authorities, who need to approve of these exports.
You're right that spyware companies exist elsewhere. But when researchers keep finding the same tiny country's products in the phones of murdered journalists and jailed activists, dismissing scrutiny as bias is itself a bias. The question isn't why Israeli companies get attention - it's why they keep selling to regimes that use their tools to crush dissent, and worse.
Unit 8200 is Israel's elite military intelligence cyber unit - think NSA but with mandatory military service. Israelis serve in their late teens/early twenties, the most tech-savvy and promising recruits land in Unit 8200 where they develop world-class offensive cyber capabilities on the state's dime.
When they finish their service, they take those skills directly to companies like NSO, Candiru and Paragon. It's not a secret - these companies are often funded, and actively recruit Unit 8200 alumni.
The talent isn't necessarily found, it's manufactured by the state and then handed off to the private sector.
That's why Israeli spyware is so effective. Arguably, it's not commercial R&D - it's military grade capabilities with a profit motive and little, if any, ethics oversight.
Just about every single Israeli citizen is required to complete mandatory military service. In effect this means that both the local baker and the stay-at-home programmer have likely worked for the IDF in some capacity.
> Wherever it is you live that you feel is morally superior to America and Israel on commercialized CNE
It's not the tech (or lack of it) that makes me feel morally superior. It's the choice to use that tech to defend literal facists that I would find embarassing.
Exactly. As somebody with a past in security, I've often thought about the ethics of my actions. Where is the ethics of government?
If you think that sounds naive, I think you get my point. Those in power can not show worse ethics and morals than those they rule, at least not if you want to uphold the illusion of democracy and its values.
It's not a question of illusion. Classical political philosophy makes it clear that leaders must be virtuous to be good leaders, and that the consequences of having leaders without virtue are bad. No system can counteract vice; people, after all, run the system. Probably the most famous example of how the state degenerates as virtue weakens is given in Plato's Republic, but this is seen consistently.
The American founders also emphasized the requirement that, for the American republic to function, it must have a virtuous people. The democratic process means that citizens now participate in the political process and thus shoulder some of the responsibility for how well a country is governed. The virtue of citizens becomes even more important.
how come each time researchers find a new spyware, it's always an Israeli shop behind it ? maybe because Israel has developed an ecosystem and an industry around spying. I think it's evil to try to deflect the blame from israel given the fact it's currently committing genocide in Palestine
Based on what you're saying, I think I know more about this market than you do. I'm comfortable with who does and does not take me seriously. For those people who do: this "Israel" stuff is not useful for understanding what's happening in the world with respect to CNE tools.
A long time ago, I went to my first (and only) Defcon conference. There was a speaker who had worked in the US government talking about state use of hacking tools.
After the talk I went up to him and asked, "What are the countries that are using these tools?" He looked at me with a certain amount of scorn and said, "All of them."
They have more experience with such things - all the expertise concentrated there. It's the same reason all the megasocialtech web apps come from Silicon Valley.
Why was it leaked, by whom and why now? That all victims of paragon were notified by whatsApp or Apple is highly unlikely IMO. Or at least less likely than the possibility of Israeli circles or paragon itself being the origin of the leak.
Split up your information so a compromise of any one system does not compromise everything you are working on. For instance, storing contact information on a source on a separate device from any/all information provided by that source. If system A is compromised, they know you contact someone at 123-456-7890 but know not much else. If system B is compromised, they know someone is providing information on corruption within Wakanda’s government, but have no identifying information.
Trying to get into multiple systems and corollate/reconstruct information is much more difficult, time consuming, and likely to be much less complete. If a state actor has decided to stop at nothing to get you, it probably wont help, but if you are just someone that could end up on someone’s list, it will likely help.
Well, a group centered its comms on that particular technology but it was quite an esoteric move.
Not having a phone is nigh on impossible, minimizing phone use isn't quite as bad as you might think. Mine ran out of battery on Monday and I've not charged it all week.
I'm toying with the idea of only using it when I absolutely need to (e.g., for MFA, if I'm out of an evening and likely to need a taxi). Not so much an opsec thing, more that I spend enough time in-front of screens as it is.
The parent comment was flippant, but I think in the context of this piece, phone-use minimization isn't necessarily a bad idea.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but unless you plan on invading a country, killing raping and burning alive civilians, and all this for your half-retarded religion and/or your inability to accept anyone who is different than you, you're safe.
Phone 1 - with sim and is exploited, no data or apps.
Phone 2 - different OS, no sim, uses portable hotspot from phone 1 and has all the apps and data.
Per the article there isn't actually any hard evidence that Italy was spying on this journalist. In fact the relevant Italian parliamentary oversight committee (COPASIR) investigated and said while there were activists surveilled by Italy, legally and with government authorization, a journalist (Cancellato) specifically was not.
Oh, the irony of the person shrieking about a headline being clickbait, when, had the information been included in title, they'd be shrieking that the title was clickbait for including poorly supported information.
However at the same time Paragon offered the Italian Intelligence a way to determine whether their software was used against the journalist, but they rejected the offer and that feels very suspicious.
Headlines are written by the publisher not the author. They’re written to maximize readership. The fact that spying happened in italy by italians is mostly only interesting to italians. The fact that the US backs an israeli company that sells spying tools is interesting to many more people. You can see the selling clicks, but because they’re not twisting the truth or saying something misleading - in this case I mostly see getting info to the people who care about it.
However, the fact that companies sell offensive cyber warfare software to governments is not new, and that specific company isn't either.
There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government, Italy is not Iran or Zambia. And fighting terror or crime using software is valid. The only thing that surprises me is that a western government might attack journalists, and what I'd like to know from this article was what was their motivation
It is absolutely wrong to sell that software. It is mostly used to harass journalists and people advocating against dictatorial regimes. That is why there are endless headlines and articles about it being used against orgs like greenpeace, or people criticizing a govt. The claim was always we want to be able to use it against terrorists or real criminals - but at the least we know it is very frequently used to try to stop critics of governments.
It is immoral. I'd never hire someone who worked on such software or for one of those firms. We should have a movement that declares this.
An incredible self awareness for you to write “There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government, Italy is not Iran or Zambia”.
I wonder how Iran or Zambia feel about the west? The overthrow of their democracy. The colonial exploitations. Are those legit grievances in your eyes? Or are you a “take up the white mans burden” kind of person?
If you're claiming that Iran's government is somehow morally equivalent to Italy's, you're massively wrong.
It's not about "the white mans burden", whatever that means. It's about Iran's government not being democratically elected, being massively unpopular with its own populace that can't do anything about it cause it's not a democracy, enforcing religious laws on people that often don't want them, not respecting minorities. And oh, btw, investing billions of dollars in promoting terror all across the Middle East, with the stated goal of eradicating Israel (and, eventually, the US).
So, I don't really care how Iran's rulers feel about the US - they're evil. If you can't recognize that, you've lost the plot.
You realize that US removed the democratically elected government in 1953 in CIA-led coup that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Then the US government kept the Shah in power. He repressed the population and led to the 1979 revolution.
Who's the one evil again?
Those countries in the middle east that US considers an ally are not democratically elected either and they enforce religious laws like not allowing woman to drive. They do not respect minorites and they invest in terror in the area too.
Turn off the tv and learn about the history of topics you want to shoot your mouth off in public about before you make a fool of yourself.
You’re in a thread arguing that it’s ok for “western governments” to have cyber weapons but not Iran because Iran is morally inferior. If you don’t believe that then admit it and apologize for the confusion. Don’t try to move the goalposts.
>This kind of personal attack is beneath the level HN aspires to
> You’re in a thread arguing that it’s ok for “western governments” to have cyber weapons but not Iran because Iran is morally inferior.
Yes, and the parent's answer to this was "allies of Western governments are also morally inferior". But I never said that allies of Western governments should have cyber weapons, nor did I make any claims on their moral status. Hence parent's comment not addressing anything I said.
> Sophistry is also beneath that level.
I think my argument was clear, but just to reiterate so you don't think I'm engaging in sophistry:
I think Iran's government is morally inferior to Italy's government and to other Western governments, under my value system (a standard Western value system). I think this is blindingly obvious to everyone.
Therefore I think it's worse for Iran to possess cyber weapons than for Western Governments to possess cyber weapons.
> Yes, and the parent's answer to this was "allies of Western governments are also morally inferior". But I never said that allies of Western governments should have cyber weapons, nor did I make any claims on their moral status. Hence parent's comment not addressing anything I said.
First they said that the West did a coup against the Iranian government. Hence according to them they are not morally superior (or rather: “Who’s the evil one again”). That directly addresses your claim.
Then they also went into the bonus topic of arguing that the US doesn’t even make their allies based on who is “moral”, further but more indirectly undermining the shining city on the hill argument.
Iran is far from the only country undermined by covert US interference and there are many US trading partners and allies that are morally and ethically challenged.
This is an area that lacks a clear unique singular datapoint, more a landscape of multiple rounds of buckshot.
It absolutely does test the point[1]. Proving the point in some absolute sense is a completely lopsided requirement since the original commenter did not prove anything in that sense to begin with. You are ready to accept the original commenters non-proofs but not counter-factuals?
Unfortunately I don’t think he is capable of what you are asking him to do. Remember that the majority of the Israeli population think Israel hasnt gone far enough in Gaza. Yes that’s after starvation and murdering over 30k women and children. On top of that most Israelis see no problem with the Nakba which is the origin of the problem as it displaced the majority of Palestinians turning them into scattered refugees who were robbed of their land and property.
Such mindsets would never allow for achieving peace with neighbors through any strategy that isn’t built around dominance through violence.
"... the Nakba which is the origin of the problem as it displaced the majority of Palestinians turning them into scattered refugees who were robbed of their land and property."
The origin of "the problem" is 1920/1924 when 1200 years of Islamic rule ended in that area, and non-muslims no longer lived under apartheid. With the old oppressive laws rescinded, and no able to enforce peace, a violent mess ensued, with both sides killing each other and the British, until some of the land was divided by the UN in 1947 into two nations, one Jewish and one Arab. Israel took that opportunity to declare their independence.
It was only then that the entire Arab world waged war on on Israel, and the result of that war was the "Nabka", or in other words, the Arabs who declared the war lost.
Keep in mind that far more Jews were "displaced" from the surrounding countries, and were robbed of their land and property.
It is the mindset, created through 1200 years of history, that non-muslims are lesser people and do not deserve self-determination that does not allow peace in that area.
>The origin of "the problem" is 1920/1924 when 1200 years of Islamic rule ended in that area, and non-muslims no longer lived under apartheid
The missing piece here is that happened because of the European support and implementation of Jewish settlement.
The zionists had actually initially considered Argentina, which had constitutional provisions that would have lended well to establishing a Jewish community there, peacefully. Instead they chose the more violent approach in the middle east.
If the Arabs had pushed back harder initially, the Zionists would have quickly just went to their alternative. This accident of history ended up being the difference between the ongoing bloodfued we see now and the much happier alternative.
I provided three facts and an opinion that 1200 years of rule created a mindset that would not allow for the independence of those considered "inferior". You also realize that this 1200 year rule was based on violent conquest, slavery, ethnic cleaning, genocide, and apartheid.
Your response is all conjecture and assumptions. There is no reason that there could not have been peace with two states in 1947.
Other homelands, such as as Argentina and Uganda, were considered backups, not as primaries, in case things did not go well and Jews needed a safe haven. This is because living in the mideast under Muslim rule for Jews is not safe. It has not been safe for 1200 years.
And I agree, if the Arabs won, there would not be bloodshed in the mideast because there would be no Jews left, so I will give you that. I would not call it "happier".
Tell me, if the United States falls apart (not so unlikely), and numerous states formed, would you think it is a good idea for the Native Americans to leave for another part of the world because a bunch of racists here in the US could not accept them having a state of their own and would declare war on them ?
Of course not, Native Americans were here long before Europeans came and brutally ruled over them.
The Jews were in the middle east before Islam came into being, and were brutally oppressed by those that follow Islam for 1200 years.
Stop trying to revise history. The Jews in Palestine were living happily alongside the Muslims. Problems didn’t start until the European Jews arrived to implement Zionism.
The end of Ottoman Empire was decades before Zionist terrorists founded Israel (Lehi, Irgun, Haganah). These are facts.
Israel was founded on theft and by ethnically cleansing Palestine of its indigenous people through non-stop atrocities and terrorism. Literally most of Israel’s first prime-minister were terrorists. Even Jews like Einstein recognized this at the time and refused to be associated with the Zionist project.
Just admit it and then it becomes possible to find a solution that doesn’t require murdering tens of thousands of Palestinian children to ethnically cleanse Palestinians that won’t give up their right to return.
> Just admit it and then it becomes possible to find a solution that doesn’t require murdering tens of thousands of Palestinian children to ethnically cleanse Palestinians that won’t give up their right to return.
Out of curiosity, what would that be? From what I've seen, you'd either have to build a wall/externally enforced border, hoping they get over it after forced peace for X years, or force migrate one of them.
I met an old Palestinian man who still works manual, hard labor. Both his sisters were killed by Israeli Air Force bombing. His family was displaced from Haifa during the nakba. Most his elder brothers were kicked out of Palestine decades ago due to their resistance. Do you know what he spent most of his time in discussion complaining about? How his best friend hurt him years ago and caused him lots of frustrating harm. His best friend was an Israeli. They worked together for many years. He is fully fluent in Hebrew. He had so much to say about his old friend that I think what he hated the most was losing his friend.
People move on if you let them.
Stop killing Palestinians. Stop the settler terrorism. Share Jerusalem and stop antagonizing its people. Admit that your Likud party are a bunch of Fascist, genocidal, maniacs and prosecute them. Give Palestinians the right to return.
Let some time pass and many Palestinians will befriend Israelis and vice versa. And when a Palestinian militant group tries to resist with violence again don’t start murdering civilians. Just treat with them. With time the Palestinians will demand that the violent resistance stops. People just want to live.
As you allude to in your story, Palestinians being friends with Israelis was the norm thirty years ago - there was less separation and Israelis and Palestinians more freely interacted.
But you seem to blame Israel for the situation no longer being this way. You say:
> People move on if you let them
So why is the situation worse now than it was before?
The reason, from an Israeli perspective, is that Israel started a peace process with the Palestinians in which it tried to arrive at a reasonable solution, but the Palestinians eventually refused every offer, including very generous offers, and walked away. Not only that, they launched the second intifada, the deadliest wave of terror attacks on Israel.
Israel tried a different way with Gaza - we can't reach a deal, so fine - we'll just leave Gaza completely. It uprooted all Jewish citizens of Gaza, dismantled all settlements, and left. Gaza then proceeded to elect Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, and started almost immediately shooting rockets at Israel.
So as an Israeli liberal - I absolutely prefer peace and want to get to a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians. But it's honestly unclear to me that we have any partner on the Palestinian side that is willing to live side-by-side with Israel.
>And when a Palestinian militant group tries to resist with violence again don’t start murdering civilians. Just treat with them.
You know that this is precisely what Israel did with Hamas - just dealt with them with them. This is what many people are now criticizing Israel for.
The Jews were living "happily" alongside the Muslims in the same way Native Americans have been living "happily" alongside the Europeans for the past 150 years. What choice do they have ?
Fact: non-muslims lived as Dhimmi, meaning they paid a special tax to keep their "protected" status, which meant they would not be killed or enslaved. They could not bear witness against a Muslim, they could not carry a weapon, they could not use the same type of transport (horse vs donkey),could not build or live in housing that was taller or grander than a Muslim, had to wear clothing to distinguish them from a Muslim, etc.
Calling this "happy" is no better than the southern racists who want to go back to a time when everyone was "happier".
fact: The end of the Ottoman Empire did end decades before Israel was founded. It ended in 1920 when they lost the war with the west and were broken up. In 1924, the caliphate was ended. The violence started in 1920 as there was no one able to enforce the "peace" Jews killed Arabs. Arabs killed Jews. Jews and Arabs killed the British.
fact: It was the two Islamic empires that were founded on theft, war, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid. The last genocide of the Ottoman Empire was during WW1 when they killed 1.5M Christians simply because they were afraid of them joining the west. Maybe because they knew that those Christians were not "happy" ?
fact: Israel was founded in 1948, and it was because of this the Arab world waged war. The Arab world lost the war, and it was the result of this losing the war they themselves started that populations shifted. More Jews than Arabs lost their lands and possessions.
fact: for the first 20 years if Israel's existence, the lands designated for the Palestinian nation were ruled by Egypt and Jordan. Israel spent this time building a nation. What did the Palestinians do ?
fact: The Palestinians and their descendants (now total 2M) who chose to stay in 1948 and live in peace now live under equal laws and have 10 times the prosperity of those living in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. So, it is quite possible for Palestinians and Jews to live in peace.
Fact: millions of Palestinians displaced by the haganah, Irgun, and the lehi terrorists now live in refugee camps while the Israelis live on their lands and in their houses.
Everything else you wrote is just a bunch of propaganda to distract from the central issue. If you have a problem with the Turks take it up with them. The Palestinians however have a problem with you because you came from Europe and stole their land and killed their people. Address that and don’t ramble about what some non-Palestinians did hundreds of years ago.
I don't agree with your characterization of what happened (you keep saying "stole the land" but that's just not true).
But even if I did - why is this the root problem here, and yet not a problem for the millions of other people displaced in the world around the same time, and since then? There have been tens of millions of refugees around the world since 1948, they've all resettled elsewhere and stopped being refugees, not kept the idea of endless resistance until they reclaim their land, despite there being no way to achieve this without causing just as big a humanitarian disaster now, if not bigger.
You're right that if you consider the central issue to be the existence of Israel, everything else is "propaganda". But in no other case is it considered legitimate to wage endless war built on the idea of completely destroying a country that is recognized by almost every other country in the world.
So a more correct thing to say is that the central issue is that the Palestinians have never agreed to any form of living side-by-side with Israel, despite having several opportunities to do so, and have demands that are quite simply illegitimate.
My take on this is that unlike other "refugees", Muslims were in power for 1200 years, and when that was taken away in 1920, they simply could not come to terms that they were now peer level with non-muslims.
50 generations of political, legal, social, and economic supremacy does not go away quickly, and it has only been about 100 years. Imagine if the US as a nation was forcibly disbanded overnight, and the various ethnic groups (Europeans, Mexicans, blacks, native Americans) were all given an area of land to call their own. It does not take much to imagine the wars that would ensue, and the ethnic and racist hatred they would be based on.
It has been 160 years since just part of the US (southern slavery) was ended, and no lands were divided up into nations, and yet, even today, there are still white people who cannot accept that blacks are peers and have equal rights, have been violently opposed to their equality, and would look forward to going to war to address this "crime against nature".
I think it is too optimistic to expect that ethnic hostility would end after only 100 years after 1200 of oppression.
There is hope - 2M Arabs live peacefully in Israel, are treated equally legally, and mostly equally on a practical basis. And they live safe and productive lives. It is the Arabs that did not stay in Israel, those that either left or stayed in what was supposed to be their nation state (Gaza/West Bank) and have been under the indoctrination, for decades, of those who want to bring back the Caliphate that are the problem. They should be wearing green MIGA hats - Make Islam Great Again
And this is what I find so ironic -those in America that would be gleeful if the Native Americans were to somehow get part of their land back and create a sovereign state, even through violence, are the same people that are appalled that Jews have done exactly that for themselves in Israel.
You seem to have a mindset that prevents you from perceiving reality.
Israel is a country where all of its people live peacefully with each other according to the same rules, including the 20% of its population is Arab. The problem Israel has is not between its citizens, which is the most diverse group of people in the entire middle east. Arabs and Jews can live peacefully together, they currently do so in Israel, and while Jews are the majority, they do not rule the Arab minority with violence or terrorism or by imposing on them a different set of rules or laws.
The Arabs in Gaza, which is not Israel, on the other hand, live in abysmal conditions, one that I would not wish upon anyone. Unfortunately, they have been indoctrinated from birth to hate Jews by their leaders, and leaders of other countries. They hate Jews more than they love themselves. They have clearly stated on many occasions that their intention is to destroy Israel and kill its Jews. For half of the past 80 years, Arabs in Gaza have had their freedom - from 1947 to 1967 and from 2005 to 2025. Both times they chose to use that time not to better themselves, but to arm themselves to fight Israel.
This is not about being Jewish or Arab, it is about the sane and the insane.
I would greatly appreciate if you didn't just assume things about me with absolutely no reason for it.
Or do you also want people to assume everything about your views based on the average views of people in your country?
> Such mindsets would never allow for achieving peace with neighbors through any strategy that isn’t built around dominance through violence.
Just for the record, Israel has managed to achieve peace with many of its historic enemies like Jordan and Egypt, and more recently the UAE and is (was) on the way to achieving relations with Saudi Arabia. The peace in Egypt included giving back land that is 4x the size of all of Israel.
Israel has not achieved peaceful with its neighbors. Israel has achieved peace with the dictatorship governments that rule over their neighbors.
The people of Jordan and Egypt resent the Israelis because of what the Israelis do to the Palestinians on a daily basis. You know settle their lands, destroy their houses, uproot their trees, murder their children, starve their civilians, etc etc.
So there is literally nothing you can credit Israel for? It hasn't even achieved peace in your eyes - despite signing at-the-time historic peace agreements that ended decades-long wars with its neighbors - because that's just with "the government" and not with the people. As if this is a standard applied to any other situation anywhere else in the world.
If Israel ever signs a peace deal with Palestinians, but the Palestinian populace still hates Israel, that would also not count as peace? What would count as peace besides Israel not existing?
I think at this point we have reached Israel needs to stand down and take a long view of things.
Is this working? Israel stole the land. Israel got away with the murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israel has the upper hand but its policy of violent repression and aggressive expansion has created for itself millions of enemies. Will this stand the test of time? Logic says no. So abandon this course while you still have time.
> I think at this point we have reached Israel needs to stand down and take a long view of things.
If you're referring to the war in Gaza, I completely agree. I think the goals of the war are legitimate and correct, but the way the war is being conducted is morally wrong, and we've long since passed the point where the length of the war makes sense. (Like many Israelis, I suspect the war is at least partially continuing because that benefits Netanyahu personally, even as it hurts Israel.)
Killing them all off would achieve peace, though, since their other neighbors (or at least the ones that could prolong a violent war) seem to have no problem with it. It might be the most peaceful solution, though by no means am I implying I agree with it.
I don't wish to kill off anyone, because I think individual rights trump peace.
Based on the population over/under killing off all of Gaza seems to be the most peaceful solution. Israel would work but it has a bigger population, and only one side or the other would have to be eliminated to achieve gaza-israel peace in that conflict.
Of course we don't have any real say in the matter. They're being starved to death as we speak, and once they all perish I don't think they'll be able to defend themselves or engage in hostilities.
JFC this is a really intensely bad line of thinking. This is literally the kind of zero-sum win or lose kill or be killed thinking that lead to the holocaust. There are so so so many other possible way to achieve peace that don’t involve the death of millions.
You very well might have applied this same logic to ireland during the troubles, and advocated for the extermination of all irish-Catholics or all irish-Protestants. Yet we have had 2-3 decades of peace now, and a resuming of violence seems unlikely.
It seems stuck and peace impossible because that serves to reinforce the goals of those with power in this situation. There are solutions, they just involve a small minority with a disproportionate amount of influence (e.g. US oil companies, ideological christian imperialists, zionist absolutists) not getting their way.
If the Arabs had just wiped out the settlers establishing Der Judenstaat near the turn of the 20th century, I have a real hard time coming to a calculus where it wouldn't have been more peaceful death tally than where we are at now.
Ethnic/religious persecution amongst other ethnic/religious groups being the origin of Jewish strife is literally the ideology written by Herzl in the groundwork that argued for Israel, noting incompatibility with living amongst other ethnic groups in Europe, and I would note somewhat accurately considering the Nazis (and others) indeed went on an ethnically aligned campaign to kill them all off.
Unwittingly, you are arguing the foundation of Israel is Nazi ideology.
You’ve created a false choice between endless war and peace thru genocide. Both have been enacted by israel. Pre-oct-7th “trimming the weeds” israel, and the post-oct-7th ethnic cleansing of gaza. The problem isn’t which option you chose - the problem is the framework of the choice is based on a lie and leads to evil actions either choice.
I said genocide might be the most peaceful option. There might be other relatively peaceful ones. I certainly don't see how you can be certain, though, there is an option of peace in the middle east without eliminating rival group -- that is your own potentially false choice. Sometimes reality isn't a utopia.
Not true. Please don't tell falsehoods in HN. The US, EU, UK, and individual countries have all determined no genocide. Moreover, civilian deaths stop in Gaza the moment Hamas surrenders and returns the remaining hostages.
Remember, the tech revolution started in the US so have some respect for my country's opinion on the issue. Israel is a large supplier of tech including computer chip design.
The unfortunate truth is that the Palestinians in a fair election elected Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.
“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,”
That the political allies of israel defend it by denying an ongoing genocide is hardly evidence it’s not happening.
> Moreover, civilian deaths stop in Gaza the moment Hamas surrenders and returns the remaining hostages.
Israel turned down a deal back in january 2024 that would have released all the hostages.
If hostage taking is wrong - Israel held thousands of palestinians without charges prior to oct 7th.
If hostages are the reason for the war, why has israeli bombing killed so many of the hostages?
> The unfortunate truth is that the Palestinians in a fair election elected Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.
That, and oct 7th, are all events that happened long after the ethnic cleansing of palestine started. The policy of “Trimming the weeds” lead to an intensification of anti-israeli sentiment in gaza.
But the election of which you speak was in 2006 - and hamas was elected. It’s been 19 years since an election in gaza. So anyone under 37 killed since oct 7th could not have voted for hamas. That’s most of them btw.
Also, you do see that the tread you’re responding to is someone explicitly saying the only path to peace is complete genocide of either gazans or israelis? Pick your friends better maybe?
>Based on the population over/under killing off all of Gaza seems to be the most peaceful solution.
That's some of the most degenerate, nihilistic, disgusting, inhumane rhetoric I've ever seen. Ethnic cleansing and genocide is "the most peaceful solution"? What the fuck?
>once they all perish I don't think they'll be able to defend themselves or engage in hostilities.
No shit they won't be able to engage or defend themselves - they'll be dead long before that.
I’ve only seen these kinds of mental gymnastics from Zionists who are forced into this non-coherent blabber to distract from their inhumanity. You must destroy peace for nearly a century to have peace? But then we haven’t had peace for a hundred years genius.
Keep pretending like your murder of children is the way towards peace. The rest of the world will just look at it with disgust.
I know that’s true in theory. But in reality this has become the mainstream interpretation to the point where we see the same take from Israeli government ministers. It’s certainly become mainstream in Israeli right-wing circles and the right-wing has ruled Israel for ever basically.
By the same logic it should be sold to Saudi Arabia as well, they are also not democratically elected and do enforce religious law on their people. But it's okay because they are in cahoots with the West. so dictatorship is only a problem for the west if it is not to their liking. And US and UK played a major role in destabilizing the Middle East in the last two and half decades, but that's okay because it's the West and all that West does must always be right. Even if it overthrows secular democratic governments which are not to their liking . So it's okay for the West to spend billions of dollars for waging wars on false pretenses (wmd) and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the process.
I'm not reading the arguments closely enough to make a judgement, but the reference is to an imagined moral imperative to spread "civilization" and whatnot to "lesser" cultures and peoples. We covered it in high school where I grew up.
The West supported or instigated (which was it?) a coup against the Iranian government in order to install the authoritarian Shah. When he was overthrown in a revolution in 1979 and replaced with a relatively authoritarian theocratic regime the West/US didn’t like it. It didn’t like it because the revolution was done on behalf of some subset of Iranians; it was no longer a Western puppet. That’s why the US is anti-Iran. End of.
I don't think you have to believe Western countries are morally blameless to think that Iran's use of spyware would probably have materially worse effects for whoever they spy on. It's clear to me at least that the West can both be blamed for the effects of colonialism and that the victims of colonialism can do plenty of bad things on their own.
Nobody is disputing that at all. That’s just a byproduct of zero-sum games and at least the fact that victims of abuse tend to grow into abusers themselves.
The problem is the blanket statement which effectively becomes “the ordained group of humans can have these tools while the others we judge as less-than and prohibit”. The more they talk the more they reveal about their views which are either outright racist or extremely disingenuous when it comes to obvious historical contexts.
I don't know how Iran feels about the west, but I for one am not keen about them hanging homosexuals on cranes, cutting hands of thieves, raping protestors in prison or taking random european tourist number 300 hostage in order to make finland cave-in on something.
You might think the above is morally equivalent with whatever the state of Italy is doing, but I believe some governments and some cultures are better than others. Not because they are superior humans, but because human organizations and actions can be compared one to another, and there is at least for me, places I'd rather live in, and places I wouldn't
Who said that? How is this style of discussion even productive?
We can all go back and forth about which nations abuse their people the most. You can point to LGBT and someone can point to American prisoner counts. Why does it matter? Stay on topic?
If it was for no good reason, would that update your “nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government?” I do think western governments are generally better, but spying on journalists is bad.
not yet, although I am curious why this specific technology is linked to so many scandals involving journalists. Is it simply because that journalists are interested in stories about journalists and that what makes the news, or a power corrupts scenario.
I believe that similarly to phone tapping, this is a technology that in the wrong hands is dangerous, but it can be very effective against some threats that might make this worthwhile
Western democracies have worked for a century after the invention of phone tapping, and even a few decades after inventing a much more dangerous technology, of massive government or corporate surveillance networks.
Zero click exploit makes the news but it has no implication on most of the population, it's too expensive.
> journalists are interested in stories about journalists
> it has no implication on most of the population
Journalistic content is still one of my main source of information that most of the population use to get informed, so my bet is many people do feel implicated somehow.
The spy companies sells to non western companies also like UAE and Saudi Arabia, with the approval of Israeli government.
And Israeli company selling software to spy on journalist tells you everything you need to know about the whole “western” concept. It’s a mirage of morality.
but friendly countries hacking friendies is also not new. so in your view then it should not be written at all?
remember belgacom?
western governments are also in the war of information and minds. if they wouldnt wage it, we'd already have lost.
sadly, this results in this kind of weirdness. and its incredibly hard or impossible to find their true motives or intent. especially if for example an investigation didnt turn up what they needed, an so seems like a random hack on a random person.
it doesnt happen only to journalists. but when they are targeted its easier discovered because they might expect it more and look for it more. and when it does, because its related to press, everyones 'freedom of press' button is tripped and they get offended, sad, angry, whatever the button releases.
> western governments are also in the war of information and minds. if they wouldnt wage it, we'd already have lost.
Tangential, but this I strongly disagree with. The reason the US, and West more broadly, has been gradually, and now rapidly, losing this 'war' since the end of WW2 is precisely because we started waging it. And more generally the reason we started waging it is because we started behaving in an increasingly amoral fashion.
Consider that US had absolutely no intelligence agency whatsoever until 1942. And the CIA did not exist before 1947. Then within 15 years they're proposing engaging in terrorist acts against Americans on American soil so we can blame it on another country and get involved in a war. [1] And that proposal was only stopped by a President who would then shortly thereafter be assassinated by a "deluded gunman." [2] For context on that snippet if you're unaware, Bush Sr was the former head of the CIA.
From there it's shockingly just been a rapidly downhill slide. When you pretend to hold the moral high ground while acting fundamentally immoral, it leaves people far more jaded, and noncompliant, when they eventually 'wake up' to what's happening than if you just dropped the pretext and leveled with people.
Their motivation is they are fascists. Like not in an “anything I don’t like is fascism” kinda way - literal fascists.
If you’d like to know more about them, an article in the AP isn’t the right place to find more. But it is a good way to let people know what the US is funding in the world.
What's your definition of fascist and what is your argument that Meloni's party is fascist?
I'm not arguing or disagreeing with you -- genuinely curious about your perspective.
The most damning bit in her Wikipedia article is this: "In 1992 Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party founded in 1946 by followers of Italian fascism. She later became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the National Alliance (AN), a post-fascist party that became the MSI's legal successor in 1995 and moved towards national conservatism."
But that does not necessarily mean she is herself a fascist, but rather that she was a member of various organizations that were originally founded by fascists then later moderated (roughly similar to the French FN/RN).
On the other hand, lots of people you could fairly describe as fascist or far-right claim to not be so, so it's possible she genuinely is and the moderate turn of these parties is a sham. As someone who doesn't follow Italian politics I have no way of knowing which is the case.
> various organizations that were originally founded by fascists then later moderated (roughly similar to the French FN/RN).
The reason those journalists were targeted is because they infiltrated one of those organizations and found that they were in fact still very much fascist behind closed doors (or at the very least racist and antisemitic).
Racist and antisemitic are not the same thing as fascist (all three are awful, of course). Though racism is usually part of fascism, there are lots of other elements of fascism too.
According to Wikipedia: "It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy."
Most of these elements are not directly related to antisemitism or racism.
Racist doesn't mean fascist, but you can't be fascist without being racist.
As long as the executive doesn't control the judges, or insist on carrying a two speed justice, you can't really be fascist country.
Ergo a fascist party is one which is at least nationalist, if not ethnonationalist, and insist on curbing the rule of law : X should be less equal than Y in front of the law (assuming the same social class).
Seconded. I remember a self-described “civic fascist” on Quora who explicitly disavowed racism. Mussolini’s regime wasn’t particularly racist except when it came to their African colonies (he thought antisemitism was dumb until Hitler forced him to adopt Nazi-like racial laws).
> But that does not necessarily mean she is herself a fascist, but rather that she was a member of various organizations that were originally founded by fascists then later moderated (roughly similar to the French FN/RN).
Is it not? If someone is raised catholic it’s best to assume they’re still catholic unless they disavow catholicism - in which case they are an ex-catholic
Your comment is about the US but their question about "motivation" was concerning Italy. As in, why is Italy spying on a journalist in a different EU country?
Hmm, you seem to be implying Italians are more likely to be considered fascists than are Americans. Is that because of the historical connection to Mussolini?
It's because the descendants of original fascists are currently ruling Italy. Including Alessandra Mussolini (AKA Benito Mussolini's granddaughter), who's not in the same party as Meloni, but is in coalition with Meloni's party.
That's a long shot from understanding "what the US is funding", because one company backed by a US VC sold the Italians something they misused.
Concerning why this happened, you seem to know exactly why this happened. I for one am happy to be informed whether this is corruption, fascist crackdown, some unknown italian law that makes it all okay, actually the work of the previous government or maybe these journalists were actually baby kidnappers, whatever. That's pretty much why we need to read an article
> However, the fact that companies sell offensive cyber warfare software to governments is not new
Good thing the story is not about the companies or governments, but the journalists.
The "this is not new" / "everyone knew about this" middlebrow dismissal adds nothing to any conversation, and falsely equates all hacking incidents, but the real story is about the clients, their motivations and the victims who are always different.
> I'd like to know from this article was what was their motivation
Wouldn't we all? Meloni's office had no comment, but the article gave enough breadcrumbs about the reporting of the victims that one can make an educated guess.
no I'm genuinely curious - because no matter who you sell it to it will be used against its own populace - look at bloody PRISM(mass data collection of internet traffic in US by NSA in case you weren't aware), Echelon(older project targeted at radio transmissions), 5eyes(US, UK, AUS, NZ, CN asking each other to spy on their own citizens as a loophole) .. or any other scandal in EU when it leaked that such spyware was used against journalists investigating government corruption. Or in Mexico, or anywhere else.
How you are surprised that "western government" might attack journalists when there has been proof of them doing that for years?!
Spies have saved so many lives throughout history and they prevented nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War on many occasions. Therefore the more spies the better.
> they prevented nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War on many occasions
Spying created the conditions where we were on the brink of nuclear armageddon. That they also saved us from going over the brink isn’t really to their credit.
Also, fyi - as best as we can ever know there was no lab leak. If you want a good summary of why not - have a listen to the most recent “If Books Could Kill” podcast episode.
A 30min drive. So, a relevant point, especially since that’s basically the key piece of “evidence” for the lab leak.
> 6 minutes in “look at the viruses they were working on…”
> Can’t, it’s been scrubbed
They published papers about what they were working on. That has not been scrubbed.
> 7 minutes in: “never been a confirmed case of a lab worker getting covid”
> The documented black market of animals out of biolabs in China and the fact that it’s an aerosol virus might be important here…
Sure. That might be relevant. But it’s not evidence, it’s just an idea of how it might have happened. A wuhan lab worker getting covid early on would be evidence.
Nobody can say definitively it wasn’t a lab leak, but what we can say is that we don’t have credible evidence that suggests it was - just a couple coincidences that aren’t actually super coincidental when you look closer. Like, say, a lab and a market 19km away in a city of 11 million people. For comparison - that’s a city with more people than NYC, and the lab is in Manhattan while the market is in Coney Island.
Only if you want to live in an Israeli-type society where a certain group is inherently suspicious and have no rights. Americans should be repulsed by that.
That's why I don't buy the judeo-christian propaganda about how our values are the same. The western values are justice and due process and "all men are created equal", zionist values are "we are god's chosen", no holds barred "war on terror" with no due process, invoking religous amalek to commit genocide. These are the values of an ancient desert tribe not western civilization. Zionist values have been forced onto the west over the last 30 years as Israel tries to rope us into more middle eastern wars, but they don't derive from western enlightenment philosophy.
> where a certain group is
inherently suspicious and have no
rights
what group? If you mean arabs, israeli arabs enjoy full citizenship rights.
> zionist
values are "we are god's chosen", no holds barred "war on terror" with no
due process, invoking religous amalek
to commit genocide.
That's some very specific claims. I challenge you to show any evidence for this.
>Zionist values
have been forced onto the west over the last 30 years as Israel tries to rope
us into more middle eastern wars, but
they don't derive from western
enlightenment philosophy.
> what group? If you mean arabs, israeli arabs enjoy full citizenship rights.
Disingenuous. The existence of arab israelis who enjoy some degree of equality within israel doesn’t refute the existence of an apartheid. A gazan can’t just decide they’re cool with israel and travel freely around the country they are occupied within.
That's a malicious misrepresentation. They enjoy the same rights and protections as any other citizen according to the law.
The rest of your comment is down to some hideously complicated political arrangements peace treaties etc where most arabs living in israel prefer their own state and citizenship.
At the least it 's an extremely strange apartheid when 2 million arabs are not part of it.
Also as far as i can tell there has been very limited israeli presence in Gaza between 2006-23. If you insist that your thread of logic is still correct you have to continue down that path and say that Egypt is also an apartheid state and they are occupying gaza as well.
Egypt doesn’t claim that gaza is part of egypt, while simultaneously denying that they aren’t occupying them.
Also there has been plenty of violence in gaza in that time period. 6,407 palestinians and 308 israelis. On the palestinian side that’s about two 9/11s, or around six oct 7ths.
“Many Arab citizens feel that the state, as well as society at large, not only actively limits them to second-class citizenship, but treats them as enemies”
> There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government, Italy is not Iran or Zambia.
Yes, because Western ones are the good governments (looking at Meloni).
> And fighting terror or crime using software is valid. The only thing that surprises me is that a western government might attack journalists, and what I'd like to know from this article was what was their motivation
Huh, it’s surprising that Western governments would spy on journalists. But they are the good guys? What was their motivation.
Fighting crime, for example by spying on a WaPo columnist and then strangling him at a consular mission in Turkey and chopping up his body, to then dissolve it in acid.
That's what this company's software is used for.
Good luck to them shifting focus to the bad actors they choose to do business with.
> The only thing that surprises me is that a western government might attack journalists
You might want to look up Karen Silkwood, who was likely murdered by either her employer or US government agents, while driving to meet with a reporter and her boyfriend.
If you think the US government hasn't murdered any journalists in the last 70 years or so, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Actually, there is a lot wrong with selling intelligence tools to western governments. They are doing some of the most evil shit in the world and are complicit in genocide at the moment.
No one should be buying Israeli consumer goods, let alone weapons or security tools as part of Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions.
TFA says that this story is relevant for USA because there exists an executive order which "prohibits federal government departments and agencies from acquiring commercial spyware that has been misused by foreign governments" and at this moment there are contracts between Paragon and DHS and other US government institutions.
So, in theory, these contracts with Paragon should be canceled, unless Trump decides to repeal that executive order, because it is a remnant of the previous administration.
Nobody who knows what the AP is would describe them that way. It's a non-profit news wire, they write up the national/international stories so that smaller newsrooms don't have to redo this work. The person who listens to newsradio, and the person who gets their local news from the Internet (Facebook/Twitter/Reddit posts of articles or whatever) have very little in common with how they stay informed but unless your radio station is sending war reporters to the Middle East are people are part of the AP audience.
(1) Headlines are necessarily lossy due to the limited character count.
(2) It says US-backed, which suggests to me that US investors helped fund it.
(3) It says Israeli tech, which rhymes with 2 previous spyware companies which have been torn to shreds in the public media and US courts for their lack of controls/oversight of how their customers used their software (violating the spyware vendor’s policies, the Israeli government export license, and the ToS of the software the spyware software exploited).
(4) the US-backed + “targeted a journalist” combined is an attack on the foundation of US as a country (on the assumption that the journalist wasn’t engaging in something like terrorism).
I’m bored by people who attack headlines. We all know that they aren’t accurate and can’t be 100% descriptive. And it’s not even clear that you could be appeased by any other formulation of the headline.
I don't understand what's the difference if Italy develops its own or buys it from somewhere else.
Comparably, phone tapping equipment is being sold world wide for almost a century and is used similarly
The fact that some countries that gets these tools starts listening to journalists is concerning, but at least I want to believe it happens less in functioning countries
But I don't see any issue with taking remote control of a drug dealer, terrorist or mafia phone
> The misuse of such tools outweighs the legitimate use cases, so people want to know who is so reckless to sell these programs
Do you have any evidence of this?
Cause my guess is the misuse is the stuff you hear about because it eventually makes the news. But the thousands or millions of legitimate use cases in which it prevented terror attacks or just, y'know, helped solved crimes, are just routine and don't get a mention.
5eyes(spying agreement between US, UK, CAN, NZ, AU) utilizing a loophole to spy on each other's citizens.
Tons of cases with PEGASUS being used to target activists and journalists, usually ones investigating government corruption(EU, Mexico from top of my head).
You know what would also help solve crimes? if every action that everyone did was always observed and recorded. Would you be willing to live in such world? i would rather not.
What happens more often terror attacks which aren't easy to plan and do or journalists and activists do something the people in power don't like.
And how often are tools that were promised to be used only to combat serious crimes such as terrorism and child abuse used for the worst of all crimes: Copyright piracy
It's not simple math, because you're ignoring my point - that you don't actually know how often the tools are used in ways you find morally correct, because those don't get publicized.
I'm not saying I have a clue what the answer is - I'm certainly very skeptical of invasive technologies. But I think pretending there's no upside to them is wrong. Like most technologies there are pros and cons. Probably the system in most Western democracies works relatively well - there are adverserial members of the system trying to prove and/or refute the idea that the tool use is necessary, a judge has to sign off, there are checks and balances (including free press) on abuse, etc.
North Korean and Chinese hackers are soundly shunned but for some reason it's always a "company" from a pariah country like Apartheid Israel that are able to sell their software weapons to indiscriminately target any civilian from any country.
Israel is both a close U.S. ally and a pariah state in the eyes of much of the international community due to its policies toward Palestinians, creating cognitive dissonance for those who support democratic values yet continue to justify or overlook actions widely seen as violations of human rights.
The Prime Minister has been sanctioned by the International Criminal Court. Even close allies (e.g., the UK and France) are engaged in some serious backside-covering right now on their relationship with Israel. They know how this is going to end and they're now into doing the comms to make themselves look less bad when it happens.
I'd say Israel is -- in terms of it's international reputation -- somewhere between where South Africa was in the eighties and Serbia was in the nineties, and deteriorating fast. Definitely on the pariah spectrum, particularly outside of the US.
Just a small part of the biggest spy network ever invented, which is woven into practically all software and tech infrastructure we use in the West and backed by large corporations with ties to that small country.
Western state agencies and mid-tier bootleg spyware vendors are neutral at best and antagonists overall. At best, bootleg spyware vendors drop exploits which agencies can reverse and use for their own purposes. But in general, these vendors bring unwanted attention and burn exploits which the state agencies would like to use. These are not part of a global conspiracy, they are competing groups with the same goals.
To give more context copy pasting my comment from a similar thread
I would like to add that Paragon disagrees with COPASIR: (article in italian) https://www.fanpage.it/politica/paragon-smentisce-il-copasir...
They offered to give some information about who was surveilled by whom, but not surprisingly the Italian government refused (it was used by 2 secret service agencies in italy). At this point, Paragon stopped giving its access to Italian agencies (spying on journalists is forbidden by Paragon'S tos). COPASIR say they are the ones who stopped the commercial relationships though, so it is clear as water that at least one party isn't telling the truth
Could also be that both are being untruthful. Lincoln let us know a long time ago, there are times when "both may be, but one must be". Personally, I think there may even be times when both parties are being truthful. ie - you're being played by a third party.
I'd imagine this is the sort of fallout when things go sideways and there is not the requisite level of trust on both sides to definitively run down root causes.
They both may have simply cut each other off. Since there is no definitive way of knowing the other side is being truthful.
This type of comment I find very peculiar, it attempts to normalize the intimidation and censorship of truths when we know that isn't the consensus nor desired.
Overall, very disappointing to come on HN and find any thread critical of this one country results in mass flagging, censorship and hasbara EVERY SINGLE TIME
> , it attempts to normalize the intimidation and censorship of truths
Very muddying statement. The normalization of intimidation and censorship has already happened by those in power, a comment can only acknowledge the reality of it.
> when we know that isn't the consensus nor desired.
by who? Crearly a lot of very powerful people desire it very very much.
Oh look Apple devices were hacked again. Security through obscurity isnt really working out. Their big cash apparently isnt enough.
I have sensitive data on my phone that I must carry around, and there is no way I'd ever keep it on an iphone. 'Pegasus' was the moment corporations and governments should have banned iphones for their terrible security.
Closed source doesn't imply security through obscurity. Any operating system, closed or open, can be vulnerable. iOS is a big, relevant target, and obviously a lack of publicity/quantity of commercial exploits against AOSP and Desktop Linux doesn't necessarily mean good security.
Humans invented computers, which are capable of nearly-perfect security, but we have to make do with barely-working security, because we can't stop spying on each other.
> Ciro Pellegrino, who heads the Naples newsroom of an investigative news outlet called Fanpage.it, received a notice on April 29 that his iPhone had been targeted. Last year, Fanpage secretly infiltrated the youth wing of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and filmed some of them making fascist and racist remarks.
It's never a good look going after journalists, but this seems especially petty.
Attending a political party's events and reporting what they say and do is petty?
Deploying spyware against journalists in retaliation for their exposing racism in the governing party's youth wing is petty.
Sorry I misunderstood, I thought you were saying Fanpage's actions were petty.
People talk about Japan but if there is one country that has never distanced itself from their role in WW2 it's Italy.
Ofcourse they get away with it because literally nobody has ever taken Italy seriously in centuries.
Color me surprised that neo nazi's in Israel would be in league with neo nazi's in Italy.
Same as happened in greece a few years back against the leader of opposition and journalists using Predator
> Graphite allows the operator to covertly access applications, including encrypted messengers like Signal and WhatsApp
That's pretty obvious. Signal doesn't protect you against full device compromise. Any app can trivially extract your signal conversations
> Any app can trivially extract your signal conversations
There is a security model baked in to the mobile OS that usually does not allow that.
Yes, and it can be subverted when the mobile OS is compromised.
That doesn't lead to
> Any app can trivially extract your signal conversations
I don't think that's obvious for non-techies
In that case, can Signal users take advantage of this to export their own messages?
Yes but one would have to exploit a similar vulnerability as was exploited in this story. Apple would patch it as soon as it became popular because it could be used for an attack like this one.
How does the exploit work, though? The article does some real handwaving around "now the device is yours and now it's not". They don't need to go too deep but isn't anyone reading that far into the article going to be curious?
You're not gonna find technical details in an AP article of all places.
You will find it in CitizenLab's report: https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/first-forensic-confirmation-of...
There isn’t much technical details there either. They list the servers it connected to and log entry but that’s it.
It mentions a CVE number but the apple link is generic and mo details on the CVE database.
Has this even been fixed by apple?
we talking about state sponsored actor with zero day vuln here
You would not find info anywhere
It's no longer a zero day if Apple already patched it.
Just for the sake of being more precise...
On the “vulnerability” it could be considered a zero-day because there was a real exploit against it prior to the exploit being reported by security researchers. It could also be considered not a zero-day because the software vendor is aware of the vulnerability such that no other real exploit of it, regardless of it being patched, will occur on the same day that they learn of it.
It’s kinda moot that it’s been patched. Even if they somehow failed to patch it since the exploit, it is no longer a zero-day vulnerability. But, to your point, knowing that it has been patched is practically (obviously) the same as knowing that the software vendor is aware of the vulnerability.
(Funny enough, they could be aware of it and it still be a zero-day since the definition is how many days have past since the vendor learned of it prior to it being exploited. Though, it would need to be exploited after they learn about it but before they patch it, which is unlikely.)
Why not?
There is now a rich history in outsourcing activities that would otherwise be illegal to other countries where it is legal. For example, the CIA's extreme rendition [1], knowingly sending prisoners to countries to be tortured and/or executed. This is how such countries make themselves useful to American empire.
Likewise, restrictions on the NSA spying on American citizens, for example, are bypassed by outsourcing that spying to, say, other Five Eyes countries.
Israel's role in this hacking phones of politicians, dissidents and now journalists on the behalf of the US and its allies, including Saudi Arabia [2].
The Israeli company NSO Group was sued by WhatsApp for their use of Pegasus [3], something Israel tried to intervene to block [4].
I honestly don't know how people work on things like Pegasus knowing it's being used to target and kill journalists and politicians.
[1]: https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/rendition701/upda...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/middleeast/israel-s...
[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77n76kzmz4o
[4]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/israels-attem...
Chomsky described these countries as "mercenary states". One of his books, Understanding Power, dives into the topic quite a bit.
Chomsky has supported "anti-imperialist" russia and ignored all warnings by the eastern European people, who dared to walk out on socialism in a freedom movement. Blood on the hands, blood on the quill, blood in the will..
This is an inexcusable ad-hominem argument. This is not how we discuss things on this platform.
That might be true, but it doesn't disprove the fact that this is happening, does it?
I think it's a matter of lesser evil..
Chomsky also believes 2+2=4. Is that also wrong because you don’t like some of his other beliefs? You seem to think so.
"I honestly don't know how people work on things like Pegasus knowing it's being used to target and kill journalists and politicians."
You can make many people do pretty much anything under orders, and even more by rewarding them.
"I was just putting food on the table for my family..."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
FYI Milgram is one of the many popular examples of fake science, wiki link has some critical review links
I feel like dunking on personality psychology was Milgram’s big mistake. Live by the sword…
Auschwitz wasn't in Germany.
and? was build by german in german occupied Poland
Bad people often put their bad stuff in other countries.
>I honestly don't know how people work on things like Pegasus knowing it's being used to target and kill journalists and politicians.
Is that all it's being used for? I can easily see situations where its use is saving lives, in which case it would be easy to justify working on.
> I honestly don't know how people work on things like Pegasus knowing it's being used to target and kill journalists and politicians.
Sorry, but it looks like you simply don't know people.
Source: https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/first-forensic-confirmation-of...
Stuff like this will just keep happening unless a major jurisdiction goes after these digital mercinaries. The fact that we ignore all laws for no reason other than "our agencies really like spying on people" is laughable. Literally crime as a service, sanctioned by most governments. Should not be surprising that such criminal organizations use their tools to spy on people who don't deserve it.
There is a higher chance that vendors take OS development more seriously when it comes to security...
Ignore all laws?? EU has officially recognized the utility of these criminal agencies. Of course under the all-time-classic umbrella of "legitimate use for law enforcement" which in common means "go ahead and use it freely, if you get caught we'll give you a slap on the wrist"
>“We’ve seen first-hand how commercial spyware can be weaponized to target journalists and civil society, and these companies must be held accountable,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp told AP in an email.
Is it just me or is this statement written in a way that implies they think spying on people is acceptable just not in this specific circumstance?
waay down, near the end of the article: "Paragon referred questions to a statement it gave to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which the company said that it stopped providing spyware to Italy after the government declined its offer to help investigate Cancellato’s case. "
This is my irritating reminder that there is a whole marketplace of implant/CNE products, most of which you have never heard of, produced in basically every jurisdiction in the world.
It used to be NSO Group that got all the press, now it's Paragon, and I think it's all for the good that the spotlight gets shone on these companies, but do keep in mind that this is not an "Israeli" phenomenon. There are American companies selling tooling that is more effective than "Graphite"; they're just more careful about publicity. Wherever it is you live that you feel is morally superior to America and Israel on commercialized CNE, you're likely to end up surprised.
The issue isn't the mere existence of spyware companies globally. The issue is that Israeli companies in particular have cornered the market on selling to the world's worst human rights abusers, with catastrophic consequences.
Let's be specific: NSO Group sold Pegasus to Saudi Arabia, who used it to track Jamal Khashoggi's inner circle before his assassination. They sold to Mexico, where it was used to target journalists' families within days of their murders. To Rwanda, to hunt dissidents abroad after imprisoning their family. The list goes on.
This isn't cherry-picking. When Citizen Lab analyzes global sypware operations, Israeli companies dominate: NSO, Candiru, Paragon, QuaDream, and arguably Cytrox (Macedonian, but Israeli leadership and investors). The common thread? Former Unit 8200 personnel, who've turned state cyber-warfare capabilities into a business model explicitly built on selling to authoritarians.
Your "but everyone does it" framing fundamentally misrepresents the issue. Yes, other countries have surveillance companies. But there's a massive difference between developing capabilities and systematically selling them to regimes that murder journalists. WHen was the last time a German or French company's tools were found on a murdered journalist's or imprisoned political dissident's phone?
The data shows Israeli companies don't just happen to have "bad PR" (or uniquely terrible luck in choosing their clients) - they actively court authoritarian clients because that's where the money is if you have no morals.
For some context: Israel has a population of less than 10 Million - less than 0.1% of the world's population. If you have a persuasive argument for why Israeli spyware is routinely found by organizations like Citizen Lab, why their products seem so uniquely popular and successful with fascists and authoritarians, I'd love to hear it. Because from where I'm standing, the clear and obvious explanation is that there is a deep, systemic issue in the Israeli private intelligence and cybersecurity sector that is entirely unconcerned with how their tools will be used, or by whom, as long as the money's right. All enabled by the Israeli authorities, who need to approve of these exports.
You're right that spyware companies exist elsewhere. But when researchers keep finding the same tiny country's products in the phones of murdered journalists and jailed activists, dismissing scrutiny as bias is itself a bias. The question isn't why Israeli companies get attention - it's why they keep selling to regimes that use their tools to crush dissent, and worse.
The only reason you're making a big deal about NSO Group is that you've heard of them.
I wonder how they find extremely talented exploit developers. The exploits they produce probably takes years to develop at minimum
Short and sweet: Unit 8200.
Unit 8200 is Israel's elite military intelligence cyber unit - think NSA but with mandatory military service. Israelis serve in their late teens/early twenties, the most tech-savvy and promising recruits land in Unit 8200 where they develop world-class offensive cyber capabilities on the state's dime.
When they finish their service, they take those skills directly to companies like NSO, Candiru and Paragon. It's not a secret - these companies are often funded, and actively recruit Unit 8200 alumni. The talent isn't necessarily found, it's manufactured by the state and then handed off to the private sector.
That's why Israeli spyware is so effective. Arguably, it's not commercial R&D - it's military grade capabilities with a profit motive and little, if any, ethics oversight.
Just about every single Israeli citizen is required to complete mandatory military service. In effect this means that both the local baker and the stay-at-home programmer have likely worked for the IDF in some capacity.
> Wherever it is you live that you feel is morally superior to America and Israel on commercialized CNE
It's not the tech (or lack of it) that makes me feel morally superior. It's the choice to use that tech to defend literal facists that I would find embarassing.
Exactly. As somebody with a past in security, I've often thought about the ethics of my actions. Where is the ethics of government?
If you think that sounds naive, I think you get my point. Those in power can not show worse ethics and morals than those they rule, at least not if you want to uphold the illusion of democracy and its values.
It's not a question of illusion. Classical political philosophy makes it clear that leaders must be virtuous to be good leaders, and that the consequences of having leaders without virtue are bad. No system can counteract vice; people, after all, run the system. Probably the most famous example of how the state degenerates as virtue weakens is given in Plato's Republic, but this is seen consistently.
The American founders also emphasized the requirement that, for the American republic to function, it must have a virtuous people. The democratic process means that citizens now participate in the political process and thus shoulder some of the responsibility for how well a country is governed. The virtue of citizens becomes even more important.
how come each time researchers find a new spyware, it's always an Israeli shop behind it ? maybe because Israel has developed an ecosystem and an industry around spying. I think it's evil to try to deflect the blame from israel given the fact it's currently committing genocide in Palestine
Based on what you're saying, I think I know more about this market than you do. I'm comfortable with who does and does not take me seriously. For those people who do: this "Israel" stuff is not useful for understanding what's happening in the world with respect to CNE tools.
A long time ago, I went to my first (and only) Defcon conference. There was a speaker who had worked in the US government talking about state use of hacking tools.
After the talk I went up to him and asked, "What are the countries that are using these tools?" He looked at me with a certain amount of scorn and said, "All of them."
Just out of curiosity - would you describe companies that are commonly in the spotlight as more mercenary than average?
Absolutely not. Some of them are far more ruthless, some of them much more principled.
I've seen you reference these actors previously. Is there a reason you won't name them? Is this an industry code of silence, or fear of retribution?
because all of this private company linked to the former elite cyber unit that israel army has
its not surprising since israel intelligence unit one of the best in the world
I imagine most of the time it would be pretty hard to attribute which company and from which country the spyware comes from.
I'm always amazed we know the origin of these sorts of things as much as we do.
They have more experience with such things - all the expertise concentrated there. It's the same reason all the megasocialtech web apps come from Silicon Valley.
Why was it leaked, by whom and why now? That all victims of paragon were notified by whatsApp or Apple is highly unlikely IMO. Or at least less likely than the possibility of Israeli circles or paragon itself being the origin of the leak.
I feel like anyone serious about doing actual journalism needs to start with a decent Cyber Security 101 course. Does anyone know of one?
I mean what can you feasibly do against these zero-click exploits? There's only really two things you can do:
1. keep your phone's identifiers secret, as they must target the devices in some way (like phone number/email/whatever)
or
2. don't own a phone
Split up your information so a compromise of any one system does not compromise everything you are working on. For instance, storing contact information on a source on a separate device from any/all information provided by that source. If system A is compromised, they know you contact someone at 123-456-7890 but know not much else. If system B is compromised, they know someone is providing information on corruption within Wakanda’s government, but have no identifying information.
Trying to get into multiple systems and corollate/reconstruct information is much more difficult, time consuming, and likely to be much less complete. If a state actor has decided to stop at nothing to get you, it probably wont help, but if you are just someone that could end up on someone’s list, it will likely help.
> 2. don't own a phone
Honestly I don't think this is going to protect you if you are being targeted. We've already seen what can happen with pagers
Well, a group centered its comms on that particular technology but it was quite an esoteric move.
Not having a phone is nigh on impossible, minimizing phone use isn't quite as bad as you might think. Mine ran out of battery on Monday and I've not charged it all week.
I'm toying with the idea of only using it when I absolutely need to (e.g., for MFA, if I'm out of an evening and likely to need a taxi). Not so much an opsec thing, more that I spend enough time in-front of screens as it is.
The parent comment was flippant, but I think in the context of this piece, phone-use minimization isn't necessarily a bad idea.
I don't know if you're joking or not, but unless you plan on invading a country, killing raping and burning alive civilians, and all this for your half-retarded religion and/or your inability to accept anyone who is different than you, you're safe.
I'm curious to know how many successfully targeted individuals were using features like Apple's Lockdown Mode.
Own two phones?
Phone 1 - with sim and is exploited, no data or apps. Phone 2 - different OS, no sim, uses portable hotspot from phone 1 and has all the apps and data.
in this current world is not possible to leave "no traces" and expect you would not get find out because it literally is
its an anomaly having an "no data" especially in this ever digitized world
https://freedom.press/digisec/blog/journalists-digital-secur...
https://securityplanner.consumerreports.org/statements/
It's amazing that US and Israel are the only countries mentioned in the headline
While the story itself is about Italy spying on a journalist in another EU country
But I guess news sites needs them clicks
Per the article there isn't actually any hard evidence that Italy was spying on this journalist. In fact the relevant Italian parliamentary oversight committee (COPASIR) investigated and said while there were activists surveilled by Italy, legally and with government authorization, a journalist (Cancellato) specifically was not.
Oh, the irony of the person shrieking about a headline being clickbait, when, had the information been included in title, they'd be shrieking that the title was clickbait for including poorly supported information.
However at the same time Paragon offered the Italian Intelligence a way to determine whether their software was used against the journalist, but they rejected the offer and that feels very suspicious.
Why would COPASIR accept such an offer. Third party forensics shows the fox got in the hen house. You wanna let the fox back in just to confess?
Headlines are written by the publisher not the author. They’re written to maximize readership. The fact that spying happened in italy by italians is mostly only interesting to italians. The fact that the US backs an israeli company that sells spying tools is interesting to many more people. You can see the selling clicks, but because they’re not twisting the truth or saying something misleading - in this case I mostly see getting info to the people who care about it.
However, the fact that companies sell offensive cyber warfare software to governments is not new, and that specific company isn't either.
There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government, Italy is not Iran or Zambia. And fighting terror or crime using software is valid. The only thing that surprises me is that a western government might attack journalists, and what I'd like to know from this article was what was their motivation
It is absolutely wrong to sell that software. It is mostly used to harass journalists and people advocating against dictatorial regimes. That is why there are endless headlines and articles about it being used against orgs like greenpeace, or people criticizing a govt. The claim was always we want to be able to use it against terrorists or real criminals - but at the least we know it is very frequently used to try to stop critics of governments.
It is immoral. I'd never hire someone who worked on such software or for one of those firms. We should have a movement that declares this.
An incredible self awareness for you to write “There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government, Italy is not Iran or Zambia”.
I wonder how Iran or Zambia feel about the west? The overthrow of their democracy. The colonial exploitations. Are those legit grievances in your eyes? Or are you a “take up the white mans burden” kind of person?
If you're claiming that Iran's government is somehow morally equivalent to Italy's, you're massively wrong.
It's not about "the white mans burden", whatever that means. It's about Iran's government not being democratically elected, being massively unpopular with its own populace that can't do anything about it cause it's not a democracy, enforcing religious laws on people that often don't want them, not respecting minorities. And oh, btw, investing billions of dollars in promoting terror all across the Middle East, with the stated goal of eradicating Israel (and, eventually, the US).
So, I don't really care how Iran's rulers feel about the US - they're evil. If you can't recognize that, you've lost the plot.
You realize that US removed the democratically elected government in 1953 in CIA-led coup that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Then the US government kept the Shah in power. He repressed the population and led to the 1979 revolution.
Who's the one evil again?
Those countries in the middle east that US considers an ally are not democratically elected either and they enforce religious laws like not allowing woman to drive. They do not respect minorites and they invest in terror in the area too.
Turn off the tv and learn about the history of topics you want to shoot your mouth off in public about before you make a fool of yourself.
I don't know why you think anything you said contradicts anything I said. I didn't say that allies of the US were morally superior.
> Turn off the tv and learn about the history of topics you want to shoot your mouth off in public about before you make a fool of yourself.
This kind of personal attack is beneath the level HN aspires to.
You’re in a thread arguing that it’s ok for “western governments” to have cyber weapons but not Iran because Iran is morally inferior. If you don’t believe that then admit it and apologize for the confusion. Don’t try to move the goalposts.
>This kind of personal attack is beneath the level HN aspires to
Sophistry is also beneath that level.
> You’re in a thread arguing that it’s ok for “western governments” to have cyber weapons but not Iran because Iran is morally inferior.
Yes, and the parent's answer to this was "allies of Western governments are also morally inferior". But I never said that allies of Western governments should have cyber weapons, nor did I make any claims on their moral status. Hence parent's comment not addressing anything I said.
> Sophistry is also beneath that level.
I think my argument was clear, but just to reiterate so you don't think I'm engaging in sophistry:
I think Iran's government is morally inferior to Italy's government and to other Western governments, under my value system (a standard Western value system). I think this is blindingly obvious to everyone.
Therefore I think it's worse for Iran to possess cyber weapons than for Western Governments to possess cyber weapons.
> Yes, and the parent's answer to this was "allies of Western governments are also morally inferior". But I never said that allies of Western governments should have cyber weapons, nor did I make any claims on their moral status. Hence parent's comment not addressing anything I said.
First they said that the West did a coup against the Iranian government. Hence according to them they are not morally superior (or rather: “Who’s the evil one again”). That directly addresses your claim.
Then they also went into the bonus topic of arguing that the US doesn’t even make their allies based on who is “moral”, further but more indirectly undermining the shining city on the hill argument.
A datapoint does not prove the point though.
Iran is far from the only country undermined by covert US interference and there are many US trading partners and allies that are morally and ethically challenged.
This is an area that lacks a clear unique singular datapoint, more a landscape of multiple rounds of buckshot.
It absolutely does test the point[1]. Proving the point in some absolute sense is a completely lopsided requirement since the original commenter did not prove anything in that sense to begin with. You are ready to accept the original commenters non-proofs but not counter-factuals?
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prove , sense number 3
Unfortunately I don’t think he is capable of what you are asking him to do. Remember that the majority of the Israeli population think Israel hasnt gone far enough in Gaza. Yes that’s after starvation and murdering over 30k women and children. On top of that most Israelis see no problem with the Nakba which is the origin of the problem as it displaced the majority of Palestinians turning them into scattered refugees who were robbed of their land and property.
Such mindsets would never allow for achieving peace with neighbors through any strategy that isn’t built around dominance through violence.
"... the Nakba which is the origin of the problem as it displaced the majority of Palestinians turning them into scattered refugees who were robbed of their land and property."
The origin of "the problem" is 1920/1924 when 1200 years of Islamic rule ended in that area, and non-muslims no longer lived under apartheid. With the old oppressive laws rescinded, and no able to enforce peace, a violent mess ensued, with both sides killing each other and the British, until some of the land was divided by the UN in 1947 into two nations, one Jewish and one Arab. Israel took that opportunity to declare their independence.
It was only then that the entire Arab world waged war on on Israel, and the result of that war was the "Nabka", or in other words, the Arabs who declared the war lost.
Keep in mind that far more Jews were "displaced" from the surrounding countries, and were robbed of their land and property.
It is the mindset, created through 1200 years of history, that non-muslims are lesser people and do not deserve self-determination that does not allow peace in that area.
>The origin of "the problem" is 1920/1924 when 1200 years of Islamic rule ended in that area, and non-muslims no longer lived under apartheid
The missing piece here is that happened because of the European support and implementation of Jewish settlement.
The zionists had actually initially considered Argentina, which had constitutional provisions that would have lended well to establishing a Jewish community there, peacefully. Instead they chose the more violent approach in the middle east.
If the Arabs had pushed back harder initially, the Zionists would have quickly just went to their alternative. This accident of history ended up being the difference between the ongoing bloodfued we see now and the much happier alternative.
Interesting.
I provided three facts and an opinion that 1200 years of rule created a mindset that would not allow for the independence of those considered "inferior". You also realize that this 1200 year rule was based on violent conquest, slavery, ethnic cleaning, genocide, and apartheid.
Your response is all conjecture and assumptions. There is no reason that there could not have been peace with two states in 1947.
Other homelands, such as as Argentina and Uganda, were considered backups, not as primaries, in case things did not go well and Jews needed a safe haven. This is because living in the mideast under Muslim rule for Jews is not safe. It has not been safe for 1200 years.
And I agree, if the Arabs won, there would not be bloodshed in the mideast because there would be no Jews left, so I will give you that. I would not call it "happier".
Tell me, if the United States falls apart (not so unlikely), and numerous states formed, would you think it is a good idea for the Native Americans to leave for another part of the world because a bunch of racists here in the US could not accept them having a state of their own and would declare war on them ?
Of course not, Native Americans were here long before Europeans came and brutally ruled over them.
The Jews were in the middle east before Islam came into being, and were brutally oppressed by those that follow Islam for 1200 years.
Stop trying to revise history. The Jews in Palestine were living happily alongside the Muslims. Problems didn’t start until the European Jews arrived to implement Zionism.
The end of Ottoman Empire was decades before Zionist terrorists founded Israel (Lehi, Irgun, Haganah). These are facts.
Israel was founded on theft and by ethnically cleansing Palestine of its indigenous people through non-stop atrocities and terrorism. Literally most of Israel’s first prime-minister were terrorists. Even Jews like Einstein recognized this at the time and refused to be associated with the Zionist project.
Just admit it and then it becomes possible to find a solution that doesn’t require murdering tens of thousands of Palestinian children to ethnically cleanse Palestinians that won’t give up their right to return.
> Just admit it and then it becomes possible to find a solution that doesn’t require murdering tens of thousands of Palestinian children to ethnically cleanse Palestinians that won’t give up their right to return.
Out of curiosity, what would that be? From what I've seen, you'd either have to build a wall/externally enforced border, hoping they get over it after forced peace for X years, or force migrate one of them.
I met an old Palestinian man who still works manual, hard labor. Both his sisters were killed by Israeli Air Force bombing. His family was displaced from Haifa during the nakba. Most his elder brothers were kicked out of Palestine decades ago due to their resistance. Do you know what he spent most of his time in discussion complaining about? How his best friend hurt him years ago and caused him lots of frustrating harm. His best friend was an Israeli. They worked together for many years. He is fully fluent in Hebrew. He had so much to say about his old friend that I think what he hated the most was losing his friend.
People move on if you let them.
Stop killing Palestinians. Stop the settler terrorism. Share Jerusalem and stop antagonizing its people. Admit that your Likud party are a bunch of Fascist, genocidal, maniacs and prosecute them. Give Palestinians the right to return.
Let some time pass and many Palestinians will befriend Israelis and vice versa. And when a Palestinian militant group tries to resist with violence again don’t start murdering civilians. Just treat with them. With time the Palestinians will demand that the violent resistance stops. People just want to live.
As you allude to in your story, Palestinians being friends with Israelis was the norm thirty years ago - there was less separation and Israelis and Palestinians more freely interacted.
But you seem to blame Israel for the situation no longer being this way. You say:
> People move on if you let them
So why is the situation worse now than it was before?
The reason, from an Israeli perspective, is that Israel started a peace process with the Palestinians in which it tried to arrive at a reasonable solution, but the Palestinians eventually refused every offer, including very generous offers, and walked away. Not only that, they launched the second intifada, the deadliest wave of terror attacks on Israel.
Israel tried a different way with Gaza - we can't reach a deal, so fine - we'll just leave Gaza completely. It uprooted all Jewish citizens of Gaza, dismantled all settlements, and left. Gaza then proceeded to elect Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, and started almost immediately shooting rockets at Israel.
So as an Israeli liberal - I absolutely prefer peace and want to get to a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians. But it's honestly unclear to me that we have any partner on the Palestinian side that is willing to live side-by-side with Israel.
>And when a Palestinian militant group tries to resist with violence again don’t start murdering civilians. Just treat with them.
You know that this is precisely what Israel did with Hamas - just dealt with them with them. This is what many people are now criticizing Israel for.
No revision of history here.
The Jews were living "happily" alongside the Muslims in the same way Native Americans have been living "happily" alongside the Europeans for the past 150 years. What choice do they have ?
Fact: non-muslims lived as Dhimmi, meaning they paid a special tax to keep their "protected" status, which meant they would not be killed or enslaved. They could not bear witness against a Muslim, they could not carry a weapon, they could not use the same type of transport (horse vs donkey),could not build or live in housing that was taller or grander than a Muslim, had to wear clothing to distinguish them from a Muslim, etc.
Calling this "happy" is no better than the southern racists who want to go back to a time when everyone was "happier".
fact: The end of the Ottoman Empire did end decades before Israel was founded. It ended in 1920 when they lost the war with the west and were broken up. In 1924, the caliphate was ended. The violence started in 1920 as there was no one able to enforce the "peace" Jews killed Arabs. Arabs killed Jews. Jews and Arabs killed the British.
fact: It was the two Islamic empires that were founded on theft, war, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and apartheid. The last genocide of the Ottoman Empire was during WW1 when they killed 1.5M Christians simply because they were afraid of them joining the west. Maybe because they knew that those Christians were not "happy" ?
fact: Israel was founded in 1948, and it was because of this the Arab world waged war. The Arab world lost the war, and it was the result of this losing the war they themselves started that populations shifted. More Jews than Arabs lost their lands and possessions.
fact: for the first 20 years if Israel's existence, the lands designated for the Palestinian nation were ruled by Egypt and Jordan. Israel spent this time building a nation. What did the Palestinians do ?
fact: The Palestinians and their descendants (now total 2M) who chose to stay in 1948 and live in peace now live under equal laws and have 10 times the prosperity of those living in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon. So, it is quite possible for Palestinians and Jews to live in peace.
It is possible to live in peace.
Fact: millions of Palestinians displaced by the haganah, Irgun, and the lehi terrorists now live in refugee camps while the Israelis live on their lands and in their houses.
Everything else you wrote is just a bunch of propaganda to distract from the central issue. If you have a problem with the Turks take it up with them. The Palestinians however have a problem with you because you came from Europe and stole their land and killed their people. Address that and don’t ramble about what some non-Palestinians did hundreds of years ago.
I don't agree with your characterization of what happened (you keep saying "stole the land" but that's just not true).
But even if I did - why is this the root problem here, and yet not a problem for the millions of other people displaced in the world around the same time, and since then? There have been tens of millions of refugees around the world since 1948, they've all resettled elsewhere and stopped being refugees, not kept the idea of endless resistance until they reclaim their land, despite there being no way to achieve this without causing just as big a humanitarian disaster now, if not bigger.
You're right that if you consider the central issue to be the existence of Israel, everything else is "propaganda". But in no other case is it considered legitimate to wage endless war built on the idea of completely destroying a country that is recognized by almost every other country in the world.
So a more correct thing to say is that the central issue is that the Palestinians have never agreed to any form of living side-by-side with Israel, despite having several opportunities to do so, and have demands that are quite simply illegitimate.
My take on this is that unlike other "refugees", Muslims were in power for 1200 years, and when that was taken away in 1920, they simply could not come to terms that they were now peer level with non-muslims.
50 generations of political, legal, social, and economic supremacy does not go away quickly, and it has only been about 100 years. Imagine if the US as a nation was forcibly disbanded overnight, and the various ethnic groups (Europeans, Mexicans, blacks, native Americans) were all given an area of land to call their own. It does not take much to imagine the wars that would ensue, and the ethnic and racist hatred they would be based on.
It has been 160 years since just part of the US (southern slavery) was ended, and no lands were divided up into nations, and yet, even today, there are still white people who cannot accept that blacks are peers and have equal rights, have been violently opposed to their equality, and would look forward to going to war to address this "crime against nature".
I think it is too optimistic to expect that ethnic hostility would end after only 100 years after 1200 of oppression.
There is hope - 2M Arabs live peacefully in Israel, are treated equally legally, and mostly equally on a practical basis. And they live safe and productive lives. It is the Arabs that did not stay in Israel, those that either left or stayed in what was supposed to be their nation state (Gaza/West Bank) and have been under the indoctrination, for decades, of those who want to bring back the Caliphate that are the problem. They should be wearing green MIGA hats - Make Islam Great Again
And this is what I find so ironic -those in America that would be gleeful if the Native Americans were to somehow get part of their land back and create a sovereign state, even through violence, are the same people that are appalled that Jews have done exactly that for themselves in Israel.
>The Jews in Palestine were living happily alongside the Muslims.
Sure. Just one example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safed_massacre
Must be an accident the most Right-wing Israeli voting block is composed exactly of the Jews who were living with Muslims.
>Einstein... refused to be associated with the Zionist project.
Well, not exactly:
https://www.britannica.com/story/the-time-albert-einstein-wa...
>Just admit it
To get close to a shared narrative, there's a need to connection to reality first... It can't be built on lies.
You stop lying. He did not support the establishment of a Jewish state to rule by violence and terrorism over a majority that is non-Jewish.
Read his own words:
https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/einstein-zionist-views-in...
You seem to have a mindset that prevents you from perceiving reality.
Israel is a country where all of its people live peacefully with each other according to the same rules, including the 20% of its population is Arab. The problem Israel has is not between its citizens, which is the most diverse group of people in the entire middle east. Arabs and Jews can live peacefully together, they currently do so in Israel, and while Jews are the majority, they do not rule the Arab minority with violence or terrorism or by imposing on them a different set of rules or laws.
The Arabs in Gaza, which is not Israel, on the other hand, live in abysmal conditions, one that I would not wish upon anyone. Unfortunately, they have been indoctrinated from birth to hate Jews by their leaders, and leaders of other countries. They hate Jews more than they love themselves. They have clearly stated on many occasions that their intention is to destroy Israel and kill its Jews. For half of the past 80 years, Arabs in Gaza have had their freedom - from 1947 to 1967 and from 2005 to 2025. Both times they chose to use that time not to better themselves, but to arm themselves to fight Israel.
This is not about being Jewish or Arab, it is about the sane and the insane.
Enough with this anti-semite shit posting. If you really care about anyone, be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.
Anti-Semite shit posting? Respond if you can.
I would greatly appreciate if you didn't just assume things about me with absolutely no reason for it.
Or do you also want people to assume everything about your views based on the average views of people in your country?
> Such mindsets would never allow for achieving peace with neighbors through any strategy that isn’t built around dominance through violence.
Just for the record, Israel has managed to achieve peace with many of its historic enemies like Jordan and Egypt, and more recently the UAE and is (was) on the way to achieving relations with Saudi Arabia. The peace in Egypt included giving back land that is 4x the size of all of Israel.
Israel has not achieved peaceful with its neighbors. Israel has achieved peace with the dictatorship governments that rule over their neighbors.
The people of Jordan and Egypt resent the Israelis because of what the Israelis do to the Palestinians on a daily basis. You know settle their lands, destroy their houses, uproot their trees, murder their children, starve their civilians, etc etc.
So there is literally nothing you can credit Israel for? It hasn't even achieved peace in your eyes - despite signing at-the-time historic peace agreements that ended decades-long wars with its neighbors - because that's just with "the government" and not with the people. As if this is a standard applied to any other situation anywhere else in the world.
If Israel ever signs a peace deal with Palestinians, but the Palestinian populace still hates Israel, that would also not count as peace? What would count as peace besides Israel not existing?
I think at this point we have reached Israel needs to stand down and take a long view of things.
Is this working? Israel stole the land. Israel got away with the murder of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israel has the upper hand but its policy of violent repression and aggressive expansion has created for itself millions of enemies. Will this stand the test of time? Logic says no. So abandon this course while you still have time.
> I think at this point we have reached Israel needs to stand down and take a long view of things.
If you're referring to the war in Gaza, I completely agree. I think the goals of the war are legitimate and correct, but the way the war is being conducted is morally wrong, and we've long since passed the point where the length of the war makes sense. (Like many Israelis, I suspect the war is at least partially continuing because that benefits Netanyahu personally, even as it hurts Israel.)
Killing them all off would achieve peace, though, since their other neighbors (or at least the ones that could prolong a violent war) seem to have no problem with it. It might be the most peaceful solution, though by no means am I implying I agree with it.
Who is "them"? You wish to kill off all of Palestine, all of Israel, or both?
I don't wish to kill off anyone, because I think individual rights trump peace.
Based on the population over/under killing off all of Gaza seems to be the most peaceful solution. Israel would work but it has a bigger population, and only one side or the other would have to be eliminated to achieve gaza-israel peace in that conflict.
Of course we don't have any real say in the matter. They're being starved to death as we speak, and once they all perish I don't think they'll be able to defend themselves or engage in hostilities.
JFC this is a really intensely bad line of thinking. This is literally the kind of zero-sum win or lose kill or be killed thinking that lead to the holocaust. There are so so so many other possible way to achieve peace that don’t involve the death of millions.
You very well might have applied this same logic to ireland during the troubles, and advocated for the extermination of all irish-Catholics or all irish-Protestants. Yet we have had 2-3 decades of peace now, and a resuming of violence seems unlikely.
It seems stuck and peace impossible because that serves to reinforce the goals of those with power in this situation. There are solutions, they just involve a small minority with a disproportionate amount of influence (e.g. US oil companies, ideological christian imperialists, zionist absolutists) not getting their way.
If the Arabs had just wiped out the settlers establishing Der Judenstaat near the turn of the 20th century, I have a real hard time coming to a calculus where it wouldn't have been more peaceful death tally than where we are at now.
This assumes wrongly that the problem in the region is multiple ethnic / religious groups. That is literal nazi ideology.
Ethnic/religious persecution amongst other ethnic/religious groups being the origin of Jewish strife is literally the ideology written by Herzl in the groundwork that argued for Israel, noting incompatibility with living amongst other ethnic groups in Europe, and I would note somewhat accurately considering the Nazis (and others) indeed went on an ethnically aligned campaign to kill them all off.
Unwittingly, you are arguing the foundation of Israel is Nazi ideology.
> Unwittingly, you are arguing the foundation of Israel is Nazi ideology.
You don’t say?? A state that can only exist as the result of ethnic cleansing? A state that is currently committing numerous acts of genocide? Huhhh.
Lol so all that just to decide we agree with each other.
We agree that the ideology you are spouting is similar to the ideas that underpin nazism, and justifies genocide in the name of peace.
After that, we have nothing else we agree on, because your ideology is based on a false description of reality.
I never argued that peace was justified, ergo neither did I agree genocide was justified.
It is the Isreali Nazis arguing in favor of this peace.
You’ve created a false choice between endless war and peace thru genocide. Both have been enacted by israel. Pre-oct-7th “trimming the weeds” israel, and the post-oct-7th ethnic cleansing of gaza. The problem isn’t which option you chose - the problem is the framework of the choice is based on a lie and leads to evil actions either choice.
I said genocide might be the most peaceful option. There might be other relatively peaceful ones. I certainly don't see how you can be certain, though, there is an option of peace in the middle east without eliminating rival group -- that is your own potentially false choice. Sometimes reality isn't a utopia.
Not true. Please don't tell falsehoods in HN. The US, EU, UK, and individual countries have all determined no genocide. Moreover, civilian deaths stop in Gaza the moment Hamas surrenders and returns the remaining hostages.
Remember, the tech revolution started in the US so have some respect for my country's opinion on the issue. Israel is a large supplier of tech including computer chip design.
The unfortunate truth is that the Palestinians in a fair election elected Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.
> The US, EU, UK, and individual countries have all determined no genocide
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976
“Specifically, Israel has committed three acts of genocide with the requisite intent: causing seriously serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent birth within the group,”
That the political allies of israel defend it by denying an ongoing genocide is hardly evidence it’s not happening.
> Moreover, civilian deaths stop in Gaza the moment Hamas surrenders and returns the remaining hostages.
Patently false: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israels-netanyahu-...
Israel turned down a deal back in january 2024 that would have released all the hostages.
If hostage taking is wrong - Israel held thousands of palestinians without charges prior to oct 7th.
If hostages are the reason for the war, why has israeli bombing killed so many of the hostages?
> The unfortunate truth is that the Palestinians in a fair election elected Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks to destroy Israel.
That, and oct 7th, are all events that happened long after the ethnic cleansing of palestine started. The policy of “Trimming the weeds” lead to an intensification of anti-israeli sentiment in gaza.
But the election of which you speak was in 2006 - and hamas was elected. It’s been 19 years since an election in gaza. So anyone under 37 killed since oct 7th could not have voted for hamas. That’s most of them btw.
Also, you do see that the tread you’re responding to is someone explicitly saying the only path to peace is complete genocide of either gazans or israelis? Pick your friends better maybe?
>Based on the population over/under killing off all of Gaza seems to be the most peaceful solution.
That's some of the most degenerate, nihilistic, disgusting, inhumane rhetoric I've ever seen. Ethnic cleansing and genocide is "the most peaceful solution"? What the fuck?
>once they all perish I don't think they'll be able to defend themselves or engage in hostilities.
No shit they won't be able to engage or defend themselves - they'll be dead long before that.
I mean, this is why I am not an advocate for peace. Peace is often degenerate, nihilistic, genocidal, disgusting, inhumane.
PEACE is? Nobody blowing eachother up is a bad thing?
When you consider the only way to achieve that is to first kill off all humans or set them into the stone age, yes I would say so.
So when you adopt a false core premise? Cool.
I’ve only seen these kinds of mental gymnastics from Zionists who are forced into this non-coherent blabber to distract from their inhumanity. You must destroy peace for nearly a century to have peace? But then we haven’t had peace for a hundred years genius.
Keep pretending like your murder of children is the way towards peace. The rest of the world will just look at it with disgust.
This is far from what zionism is about, this is a deranged take of some psycho on the internet.
I know that’s true in theory. But in reality this has become the mainstream interpretation to the point where we see the same take from Israeli government ministers. It’s certainly become mainstream in Israeli right-wing circles and the right-wing has ruled Israel for ever basically.
How will things change?
By the same logic it should be sold to Saudi Arabia as well, they are also not democratically elected and do enforce religious law on their people. But it's okay because they are in cahoots with the West. so dictatorship is only a problem for the west if it is not to their liking. And US and UK played a major role in destabilizing the Middle East in the last two and half decades, but that's okay because it's the West and all that West does must always be right. Even if it overthrows secular democratic governments which are not to their liking . So it's okay for the West to spend billions of dollars for waging wars on false pretenses (wmd) and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the process.
> It's not about "the white mans burden", whatever that means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden
I'm not reading the arguments closely enough to make a judgement, but the reference is to an imagined moral imperative to spread "civilization" and whatnot to "lesser" cultures and peoples. We covered it in high school where I grew up.
> And oh, btw, investing billions of dollars in promoting terror all across the Middle East,
Who are we talking about again? I think you could say that statement is true for the US, UK, Iran, Israel, Russia, the list goes on...
Ain't no saints in the middle east.
The West supported or instigated (which was it?) a coup against the Iranian government in order to install the authoritarian Shah. When he was overthrown in a revolution in 1979 and replaced with a relatively authoritarian theocratic regime the West/US didn’t like it. It didn’t like it because the revolution was done on behalf of some subset of Iranians; it was no longer a Western puppet. That’s why the US is anti-Iran. End of.
I don't think you have to believe Western countries are morally blameless to think that Iran's use of spyware would probably have materially worse effects for whoever they spy on. It's clear to me at least that the West can both be blamed for the effects of colonialism and that the victims of colonialism can do plenty of bad things on their own.
Nobody is disputing that at all. That’s just a byproduct of zero-sum games and at least the fact that victims of abuse tend to grow into abusers themselves.
The problem is the blanket statement which effectively becomes “the ordained group of humans can have these tools while the others we judge as less-than and prohibit”. The more they talk the more they reveal about their views which are either outright racist or extremely disingenuous when it comes to obvious historical contexts.
I don't know how Iran feels about the west, but I for one am not keen about them hanging homosexuals on cranes, cutting hands of thieves, raping protestors in prison or taking random european tourist number 300 hostage in order to make finland cave-in on something.
You might think the above is morally equivalent with whatever the state of Italy is doing, but I believe some governments and some cultures are better than others. Not because they are superior humans, but because human organizations and actions can be compared one to another, and there is at least for me, places I'd rather live in, and places I wouldn't
Who said that? How is this style of discussion even productive?
We can all go back and forth about which nations abuse their people the most. You can point to LGBT and someone can point to American prisoner counts. Why does it matter? Stay on topic?
If it was for no good reason, would that update your “nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government?” I do think western governments are generally better, but spying on journalists is bad.
not yet, although I am curious why this specific technology is linked to so many scandals involving journalists. Is it simply because that journalists are interested in stories about journalists and that what makes the news, or a power corrupts scenario.
I believe that similarly to phone tapping, this is a technology that in the wrong hands is dangerous, but it can be very effective against some threats that might make this worthwhile
Western democracies have worked for a century after the invention of phone tapping, and even a few decades after inventing a much more dangerous technology, of massive government or corporate surveillance networks.
Zero click exploit makes the news but it has no implication on most of the population, it's too expensive.
Surveillance of journalists is a way to discourage journalism, because it threatens both the journalists and their sources.
> journalists are interested in stories about journalists
> it has no implication on most of the population
Journalistic content is still one of my main source of information that most of the population use to get informed, so my bet is many people do feel implicated somehow.
>There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government, Italy is not Iran or Zambia
It's not like Iran or Zambia precisely to the degree it doesn't use such tools.
The spy companies sells to non western companies also like UAE and Saudi Arabia, with the approval of Israeli government.
And Israeli company selling software to spy on journalist tells you everything you need to know about the whole “western” concept. It’s a mirage of morality.
but friendly countries hacking friendies is also not new. so in your view then it should not be written at all?
remember belgacom?
western governments are also in the war of information and minds. if they wouldnt wage it, we'd already have lost.
sadly, this results in this kind of weirdness. and its incredibly hard or impossible to find their true motives or intent. especially if for example an investigation didnt turn up what they needed, an so seems like a random hack on a random person.
it doesnt happen only to journalists. but when they are targeted its easier discovered because they might expect it more and look for it more. and when it does, because its related to press, everyones 'freedom of press' button is tripped and they get offended, sad, angry, whatever the button releases.
> western governments are also in the war of information and minds. if they wouldnt wage it, we'd already have lost.
Tangential, but this I strongly disagree with. The reason the US, and West more broadly, has been gradually, and now rapidly, losing this 'war' since the end of WW2 is precisely because we started waging it. And more generally the reason we started waging it is because we started behaving in an increasingly amoral fashion.
Consider that US had absolutely no intelligence agency whatsoever until 1942. And the CIA did not exist before 1947. Then within 15 years they're proposing engaging in terrorist acts against Americans on American soil so we can blame it on another country and get involved in a war. [1] And that proposal was only stopped by a President who would then shortly thereafter be assassinated by a "deluded gunman." [2] For context on that snippet if you're unaware, Bush Sr was the former head of the CIA.
From there it's shockingly just been a rapidly downhill slide. When you pretend to hold the moral high ground while acting fundamentally immoral, it leaves people far more jaded, and noncompliant, when they eventually 'wake up' to what's happening than if you just dropped the pretext and leveled with people.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOkTtpzoulc
Their motivation is they are fascists. Like not in an “anything I don’t like is fascism” kinda way - literal fascists.
If you’d like to know more about them, an article in the AP isn’t the right place to find more. But it is a good way to let people know what the US is funding in the world.
What's your definition of fascist and what is your argument that Meloni's party is fascist?
I'm not arguing or disagreeing with you -- genuinely curious about your perspective.
The most damning bit in her Wikipedia article is this: "In 1992 Meloni joined the Youth Front, the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a neo-fascist political party founded in 1946 by followers of Italian fascism. She later became the national leader of Student Action, the student movement of the National Alliance (AN), a post-fascist party that became the MSI's legal successor in 1995 and moved towards national conservatism."
But that does not necessarily mean she is herself a fascist, but rather that she was a member of various organizations that were originally founded by fascists then later moderated (roughly similar to the French FN/RN).
On the other hand, lots of people you could fairly describe as fascist or far-right claim to not be so, so it's possible she genuinely is and the moderate turn of these parties is a sham. As someone who doesn't follow Italian politics I have no way of knowing which is the case.
> various organizations that were originally founded by fascists then later moderated (roughly similar to the French FN/RN).
The reason those journalists were targeted is because they infiltrated one of those organizations and found that they were in fact still very much fascist behind closed doors (or at the very least racist and antisemitic).
Racist and antisemitic are not the same thing as fascist (all three are awful, of course). Though racism is usually part of fascism, there are lots of other elements of fascism too.
According to Wikipedia: "It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy."
Most of these elements are not directly related to antisemitism or racism.
Racist doesn't mean fascist, but you can't be fascist without being racist.
As long as the executive doesn't control the judges, or insist on carrying a two speed justice, you can't really be fascist country.
Ergo a fascist party is one which is at least nationalist, if not ethnonationalist, and insist on curbing the rule of law : X should be less equal than Y in front of the law (assuming the same social class).
You can be fascist without being racists. Not all countries contain only one genetic population.
Seconded. I remember a self-described “civic fascist” on Quora who explicitly disavowed racism. Mussolini’s regime wasn’t particularly racist except when it came to their African colonies (he thought antisemitism was dumb until Hitler forced him to adopt Nazi-like racial laws).
> But that does not necessarily mean she is herself a fascist, but rather that she was a member of various organizations that were originally founded by fascists then later moderated (roughly similar to the French FN/RN).
Inane.
Why?
It's just like how joining the hitler youth makes you a nazi
It’s not a productive label when used like that though.
Is it not? If someone is raised catholic it’s best to assume they’re still catholic unless they disavow catholicism - in which case they are an ex-catholic
And once Nazis were in power, I presume that joining the Hitler youth was just what normal people did ?
But she didn't have even this excuse of social pressure, did she ?
I’m all for giving people the benefit of the doubt but at some point you have to call a spade a spade.
France's RN appears moderated. They are financed by Putin, my friend [1]. Meloni's coalition party also has ties with Russia [2].
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/marine-le-pen-plays-down-her...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/12/matteo-salvini...
To expand a bit, Matteo Salivni is the leader of Lega (formerly Lega Nord), the other far-right party in Italy's government.
Salvini's ties to Russia of course go way beyond a couple Aeroflot tickets: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/albertonardelli/salvini...
Your comment is about the US but their question about "motivation" was concerning Italy. As in, why is Italy spying on a journalist in a different EU country?
No my comment is about the italian gov being literal fascists. I wasn’t bothering to comment on the US gov
I see, my mistake. I think I just got confused by some of the other statements in your comments.
I think by them being Italian (hint) he meant 'fascist' in quite literal sense.
Hmm, you seem to be implying Italians are more likely to be considered fascists than are Americans. Is that because of the historical connection to Mussolini?
It's because the descendants of original fascists are currently ruling Italy. Including Alessandra Mussolini (AKA Benito Mussolini's granddaughter), who's not in the same party as Meloni, but is in coalition with Meloni's party.
Thanks. (That explains all the downvotes for an innocent - albeit ignorant - Q.)
That's a long shot from understanding "what the US is funding", because one company backed by a US VC sold the Italians something they misused.
Concerning why this happened, you seem to know exactly why this happened. I for one am happy to be informed whether this is corruption, fascist crackdown, some unknown italian law that makes it all okay, actually the work of the previous government or maybe these journalists were actually baby kidnappers, whatever. That's pretty much why we need to read an article
> However, the fact that companies sell offensive cyber warfare software to governments is not new
Good thing the story is not about the companies or governments, but the journalists.
The "this is not new" / "everyone knew about this" middlebrow dismissal adds nothing to any conversation, and falsely equates all hacking incidents, but the real story is about the clients, their motivations and the victims who are always different.
> I'd like to know from this article was what was their motivation
Wouldn't we all? Meloni's office had no comment, but the article gave enough breadcrumbs about the reporting of the victims that one can make an educated guess.
are you... serious?
no I'm genuinely curious - because no matter who you sell it to it will be used against its own populace - look at bloody PRISM(mass data collection of internet traffic in US by NSA in case you weren't aware), Echelon(older project targeted at radio transmissions), 5eyes(US, UK, AUS, NZ, CN asking each other to spy on their own citizens as a loophole) .. or any other scandal in EU when it leaked that such spyware was used against journalists investigating government corruption. Or in Mexico, or anywhere else.
How you are surprised that "western government" might attack journalists when there has been proof of them doing that for years?!
> There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government
i emphatically beg to differ with this statement
Spies have saved so many lives throughout history and they prevented nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War on many occasions. Therefore the more spies the better.
Better spies than more covid research at wuhan.
> they prevented nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War on many occasions
Spying created the conditions where we were on the brink of nuclear armageddon. That they also saved us from going over the brink isn’t really to their credit.
Also, fyi - as best as we can ever know there was no lab leak. If you want a good summary of why not - have a listen to the most recent “If Books Could Kill” podcast episode.
5 minutes in, “Look how far away the breakout was from the lab!”
Really?
6 minutes in “look at the viruses they were working on…”
Can’t, it’s been scrubbed, thankfully some people saved some of the data before it was deleted.
7 minutes in: “never been a confirmed case of a lab worker getting covid”
The documented black market of animals out of biolabs in China and the fact that it’s an aerosol virus might be important here…
> 5 minutes in, “Look how far away the breakout was from the lab!”
> Really?
https://maps.app.goo.gl/t6RUAjksL7caBQvZA?g_st=ic
A 30min drive. So, a relevant point, especially since that’s basically the key piece of “evidence” for the lab leak.
> 6 minutes in “look at the viruses they were working on…”
> Can’t, it’s been scrubbed
They published papers about what they were working on. That has not been scrubbed.
> 7 minutes in: “never been a confirmed case of a lab worker getting covid”
> The documented black market of animals out of biolabs in China and the fact that it’s an aerosol virus might be important here…
Sure. That might be relevant. But it’s not evidence, it’s just an idea of how it might have happened. A wuhan lab worker getting covid early on would be evidence.
Nobody can say definitively it wasn’t a lab leak, but what we can say is that we don’t have credible evidence that suggests it was - just a couple coincidences that aren’t actually super coincidental when you look closer. Like, say, a lab and a market 19km away in a city of 11 million people. For comparison - that’s a city with more people than NYC, and the lab is in Manhattan while the market is in Coney Island.
>"There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government"
The king can do no wrong. What a pinnacle of arrogance.
>"The only thing that surprises me is that a western government might attack journalists"
Welcome to a real world
> fighting terror using software is valid
Only if you want to live in an Israeli-type society where a certain group is inherently suspicious and have no rights. Americans should be repulsed by that.
That's why I don't buy the judeo-christian propaganda about how our values are the same. The western values are justice and due process and "all men are created equal", zionist values are "we are god's chosen", no holds barred "war on terror" with no due process, invoking religous amalek to commit genocide. These are the values of an ancient desert tribe not western civilization. Zionist values have been forced onto the west over the last 30 years as Israel tries to rope us into more middle eastern wars, but they don't derive from western enlightenment philosophy.
> where a certain group is inherently suspicious and have no rights
what group? If you mean arabs, israeli arabs enjoy full citizenship rights.
> zionist values are "we are god's chosen", no holds barred "war on terror" with no due process, invoking religous amalek to commit genocide.
That's some very specific claims. I challenge you to show any evidence for this.
>Zionist values have been forced onto the west over the last 30 years as Israel tries to rope us into more middle eastern wars, but they don't derive from western enlightenment philosophy.
??? What?
> what group? If you mean arabs, israeli arabs enjoy full citizenship rights.
Disingenuous. The existence of arab israelis who enjoy some degree of equality within israel doesn’t refute the existence of an apartheid. A gazan can’t just decide they’re cool with israel and travel freely around the country they are occupied within.
>who enjoy some degree of equality
That's a malicious misrepresentation. They enjoy the same rights and protections as any other citizen according to the law.
The rest of your comment is down to some hideously complicated political arrangements peace treaties etc where most arabs living in israel prefer their own state and citizenship.
At the least it 's an extremely strange apartheid when 2 million arabs are not part of it.
Also as far as i can tell there has been very limited israeli presence in Gaza between 2006-23. If you insist that your thread of logic is still correct you have to continue down that path and say that Egypt is also an apartheid state and they are occupying gaza as well.
Egypt doesn’t claim that gaza is part of egypt, while simultaneously denying that they aren’t occupying them.
Also there has been plenty of violence in gaza in that time period. 6,407 palestinians and 308 israelis. On the palestinian side that’s about two 9/11s, or around six oct 7ths.
Check the fatalities section of this article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_...
As for equality:
“Many Arab citizens feel that the state, as well as society at large, not only actively limits them to second-class citizenship, but treats them as enemies”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel
So while they may be equal in law, that doesn’t mean they have full equality. Hence my wording “some degree of equality”
> There's also nothing inherently wrong with selling intelligence tools to a western government, Italy is not Iran or Zambia.
Yes, because Western ones are the good governments (looking at Meloni).
> And fighting terror or crime using software is valid. The only thing that surprises me is that a western government might attack journalists, and what I'd like to know from this article was what was their motivation
Huh, it’s surprising that Western governments would spy on journalists. But they are the good guys? What was their motivation.
Fighting crime, for example by spying on a WaPo columnist and then strangling him at a consular mission in Turkey and chopping up his body, to then dissolve it in acid.
That's what this company's software is used for.
Good luck to them shifting focus to the bad actors they choose to do business with.
That is not the same company, and as I said above, you expect something else from Italy compared to the Saudis
It's the same awful industry. This software is used to hurt journalists, to try to stop dissent. And kill people like the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Not just same industry, but the same country of origin too actually.
Thankfully Asians don’t do spywares.
I hope you expected something else from the Germans in 1939 too.
Half the employees are from NSO and they're all from the same unit.
That was going to happen without any software based on the history of these theocracies.
> The only thing that surprises me is that a western government might attack journalists
You might want to look up Karen Silkwood, who was likely murdered by either her employer or US government agents, while driving to meet with a reporter and her boyfriend.
If you think the US government hasn't murdered any journalists in the last 70 years or so, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
Actually, there is a lot wrong with selling intelligence tools to western governments. They are doing some of the most evil shit in the world and are complicit in genocide at the moment.
No one should be buying Israeli consumer goods, let alone weapons or security tools as part of Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions.
Everyone is complicit in a globalized world. China kills Ukrainians daily with their tech.
> They’re written to maximize readership.
And to shape narrative!
TFA says that this story is relevant for USA because there exists an executive order which "prohibits federal government departments and agencies from acquiring commercial spyware that has been misused by foreign governments" and at this moment there are contracts between Paragon and DHS and other US government institutions.
So, in theory, these contracts with Paragon should be canceled, unless Trump decides to repeal that executive order, because it is a remnant of the previous administration.
It's the AP. It's writing is not to 'maximize readership'. It is pushing an agenda to a select audience.
Nobody who knows what the AP is would describe them that way. It's a non-profit news wire, they write up the national/international stories so that smaller newsrooms don't have to redo this work. The person who listens to newsradio, and the person who gets their local news from the Internet (Facebook/Twitter/Reddit posts of articles or whatever) have very little in common with how they stay informed but unless your radio station is sending war reporters to the Middle East are people are part of the AP audience.
It's like producing weapons versus using them. Just instead of "weapons" we have "spyware tools".
(1) Headlines are necessarily lossy due to the limited character count.
(2) It says US-backed, which suggests to me that US investors helped fund it.
(3) It says Israeli tech, which rhymes with 2 previous spyware companies which have been torn to shreds in the public media and US courts for their lack of controls/oversight of how their customers used their software (violating the spyware vendor’s policies, the Israeli government export license, and the ToS of the software the spyware software exploited).
(4) the US-backed + “targeted a journalist” combined is an attack on the foundation of US as a country (on the assumption that the journalist wasn’t engaging in something like terrorism).
I’m bored by people who attack headlines. We all know that they aren’t accurate and can’t be 100% descriptive. And it’s not even clear that you could be appeased by any other formulation of the headline.
When you hear an art piece was stolen from a museum, do you ever hear about the buyer?
No, you hear about where it was, who stole it and where it was found.
Are arms dealers immune from responsibility, in your view?
The article itself contains a lot of text about the company. There isn’t much about Italy.
Most of the time the country of the creator is named if it’s about spyware.
The misuse of such tools outweighs the legitimate use cases, so people want to know who is so reckless to sell these programs
I don't understand what's the difference if Italy develops its own or buys it from somewhere else.
Comparably, phone tapping equipment is being sold world wide for almost a century and is used similarly
The fact that some countries that gets these tools starts listening to journalists is concerning, but at least I want to believe it happens less in functioning countries
But I don't see any issue with taking remote control of a drug dealer, terrorist or mafia phone
>I don't understand what's the difference if Italy develops its own or buys it from somewhere else.
because the one who sold it quite likely also gets a hold of all information captured by it's user.
Check your other posts for examples of ongoing mass public surveillance programs.
a functioning country can become dysfunctional with one election
Some spyware like Pegasus is notorious.
It’s always shady if someone uses it because of its high misuse potential.
It’s the computer equivalent of a ABC weapon.
> The misuse of such tools outweighs the legitimate use cases, so people want to know who is so reckless to sell these programs
Do you have any evidence of this?
Cause my guess is the misuse is the stuff you hear about because it eventually makes the news. But the thousands or millions of legitimate use cases in which it prevented terror attacks or just, y'know, helped solved crimes, are just routine and don't get a mention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
5eyes(spying agreement between US, UK, CAN, NZ, AU) utilizing a loophole to spy on each other's citizens.
Tons of cases with PEGASUS being used to target activists and journalists, usually ones investigating government corruption(EU, Mexico from top of my head).
You know what would also help solve crimes? if every action that everyone did was always observed and recorded. Would you be willing to live in such world? i would rather not.
It's simple math.
What happens more often terror attacks which aren't easy to plan and do or journalists and activists do something the people in power don't like.
And how often are tools that were promised to be used only to combat serious crimes such as terrorism and child abuse used for the worst of all crimes: Copyright piracy
It's not simple math, because you're ignoring my point - that you don't actually know how often the tools are used in ways you find morally correct, because those don't get publicized.
I'm not saying I have a clue what the answer is - I'm certainly very skeptical of invasive technologies. But I think pretending there's no upside to them is wrong. Like most technologies there are pros and cons. Probably the system in most Western democracies works relatively well - there are adverserial members of the system trying to prove and/or refute the idea that the tool use is necessary, a judge has to sign off, there are checks and balances (including free press) on abuse, etc.
>But I think pretending there's no upside to them is wrong.
I'm not pretending that, I say the cons outweigh the pros because there are more use cases for misuse than use.
Terrorist are rare, child abuse not so much but the arrests are still rare, so either they don't use them in that cases or they don't work.
Or agenda.. Who knows?!
North Korean and Chinese hackers are soundly shunned but for some reason it's always a "company" from a pariah country like Apartheid Israel that are able to sell their software weapons to indiscriminately target any civilian from any country.
Israel is not a pariah but one of the US closest allies.
Israel is both a close U.S. ally and a pariah state in the eyes of much of the international community due to its policies toward Palestinians, creating cognitive dissonance for those who support democratic values yet continue to justify or overlook actions widely seen as violations of human rights.
But not for you.
Sorry what? I’m not a fan of Israel, but clearly Israel is not a “pariah state” because you and I don’t like them.
The Prime Minister has been sanctioned by the International Criminal Court. Even close allies (e.g., the UK and France) are engaged in some serious backside-covering right now on their relationship with Israel. They know how this is going to end and they're now into doing the comms to make themselves look less bad when it happens.
I'd say Israel is -- in terms of it's international reputation -- somewhere between where South Africa was in the eighties and Serbia was in the nineties, and deteriorating fast. Definitely on the pariah spectrum, particularly outside of the US.
It's not my claim. BBC and other news outlets are running stories stating that "Israel is becoming s pariah state".
Worldwide, if you say "pariah state" people think Israel.
If you don't think so, be warned, you are in a dangerous bubble.
Just a small part of the biggest spy network ever invented, which is woven into practically all software and tech infrastructure we use in the West and backed by large corporations with ties to that small country.
So if a company in country A sells military arms to country B, country B is now part of country A's military network. Is that how this works now?
Works now? Thats how a customer base works.
A customer base means you are part of their military network? Really?
It certainly has some explanatory power so depending on what you're trying to understand about these hypothetical entities, yes.
I have no idea what you're trying to say. The network of vendors to the military is part of the military network.
Yes.
Surprised they allowed a zero click exploit to be exposed for what appears to be low value targets.
That means they have a big bin of zero click exploit ready for use. This one was probably getting old so someone finding it wouldn't mean much.
And even when said small country are gifted "defense" technology, they go and sell it to the gifter's (supposed) enemies.
Why do you need enemies with such "friends".
Western state agencies and mid-tier bootleg spyware vendors are neutral at best and antagonists overall. At best, bootleg spyware vendors drop exploits which agencies can reverse and use for their own purposes. But in general, these vendors bring unwanted attention and burn exploits which the state agencies would like to use. These are not part of a global conspiracy, they are competing groups with the same goals.
To give more context copy pasting my comment from a similar thread
I would like to add that Paragon disagrees with COPASIR: (article in italian) https://www.fanpage.it/politica/paragon-smentisce-il-copasir... They offered to give some information about who was surveilled by whom, but not surprisingly the Italian government refused (it was used by 2 secret service agencies in italy). At this point, Paragon stopped giving its access to Italian agencies (spying on journalists is forbidden by Paragon'S tos). COPASIR say they are the ones who stopped the commercial relationships though, so it is clear as water that at least one party isn't telling the truth
Could also be that both are being untruthful. Lincoln let us know a long time ago, there are times when "both may be, but one must be". Personally, I think there may even be times when both parties are being truthful. ie - you're being played by a third party.
I'd imagine this is the sort of fallout when things go sideways and there is not the requisite level of trust on both sides to definitively run down root causes.
They both may have simply cut each other off. Since there is no definitive way of knowing the other side is being truthful.
https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/medita....
(Is that 3rd party -- God ? xD)
Not normally.
But if it makes you feel better, the third party is usually playing God.
Thanks for providing us the corporation's propaganda.
Buzzword Bingo
I would love to see how they target GrapheneOS. iPhone is easy to break, GrapheneOS is not
Who cares at this point?
If you're a journalist and you don't have basic OPSEC for cyber stuff, there is no point in doing sensitive work.
Nobody is really accountable for those kind of things anyway.
I care
I care a lot
Cyber warfare is an lawless field
That's why it's important to take some precautions
This type of comment I find very peculiar, it attempts to normalize the intimidation and censorship of truths when we know that isn't the consensus nor desired.
Overall, very disappointing to come on HN and find any thread critical of this one country results in mass flagging, censorship and hasbara EVERY SINGLE TIME
> , it attempts to normalize the intimidation and censorship of truths
Very muddying statement. The normalization of intimidation and censorship has already happened by those in power, a comment can only acknowledge the reality of it.
> when we know that isn't the consensus nor desired.
by who? Crearly a lot of very powerful people desire it very very much.
Oh look Apple devices were hacked again. Security through obscurity isnt really working out. Their big cash apparently isnt enough.
I have sensitive data on my phone that I must carry around, and there is no way I'd ever keep it on an iphone. 'Pegasus' was the moment corporations and governments should have banned iphones for their terrible security.
Are you somehow under the impression that Android devices aren't hacked as well?
Of course Android phones are hacked as well
But a hack on my Andriod device might, or might not, work on your Android device
Not so much iPhones. Some difference between versions, but pretty much a monoculture
Closed source doesn't imply security through obscurity. Any operating system, closed or open, can be vulnerable. iOS is a big, relevant target, and obviously a lack of publicity/quantity of commercial exploits against AOSP and Desktop Linux doesn't necessarily mean good security.
Pegasus exploited both iOS and Android, not just iOS.
Thanks Cloudflare for blocking apnews.com! Thanks LLM scrapers that ruin the Internet and make that necessary!
Humans invented computers, which are capable of nearly-perfect security, but we have to make do with barely-working security, because we can't stop spying on each other.
Humans were a mistake.