Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus revelations

Re:Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus r... by ttctciyf on Monday July 19, 2021 @06:25PM (#27887996)

It continues to strike me as a little odd that (AFAIK) there's no mention in The Guardian's reporting of this story of the parallel technology[1] sold by Gamma Group[2] and licensed for export by UK to several suspect regimes[3].

Extensive (40G) information on this was leaked via reddit in August 2014[4], and the leaker noted[5]:

> I assumed the hacking would be the hard part and once I got the data it would just kinda go viral on it's own or something. But it turn's out without any media access or idea how that shit works, getting people to notice or care is actually kind of hard.

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"FinSpy Mobile. Version 4.4, released in of Q4 2012, has the ability to collect data through Skype across iOS, Blackberry, Android, and Windows Mobile platforms . An updated Version 4.5, released in Q1 2013, included the ability to target emails, calendars and keylogging of Windows Phones, and an updated ability to collect data through the camera of a Blackberry or iOS phone."

- https://privacyinternational.org/blog/1522/six-things-we-kno... (2014)

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_Group

3: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/uk-spyware-wi...

4: https://privacyinternational.org/blog/1522/six-things-we-kno...

5: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/2cjlop/gamma_int...

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Re:Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus r... by ozymandias12 on Monday July 19, 2021 @06:45PM (#27888154)

NSO gets the mic because its the biggest commercial name, there are several other companies that fly under the radar with similar technologies.

I like what some other user proposed here: military grade classification. Tada. Now sanctions apply to both sellers and users of this crap.

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Re:Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus r... by ttctciyf on Monday July 19, 2021 @07:06PM (#27888305)

I think there is a licensing procedure in the UK and Germany (Gamma Group) and Israel (NSO), and lip-service to the idea that it's forbidden to sell to repressive regimes, already.

The big deal with the NSO story is the 50K target names, I think, and it is a big deal, but you'd expect in a supposedly oppositional paper like the Grauniad, that there'd be some mention of the current UK government's spotty record in this very department, and a sense of the history of the abuse of this technology. I'd have a hard time believing that any of this is news to the journalists reporting the story.

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Re:Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus r... by mike_d on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @02:00AM (#27890539)

Countries have very little interest in regulating these groups because of the value of fourth-party collection.

If Israel for example provides software to Morocco that is used to spy on Algeria, Israel gets free intelligence on Algeria. It is even more valuable than directly spying on Algeria because it is absolutely deniable and may target foreign spies or terrorists that might not have been on Israel's radar to start with.

While spying on journalists and NGOs is horrific from a human rights perspective, it is sadly of little significance to how the intelligence game is played.

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