A bill that would allow police in France to spy on suspects by remotely activating cameras, microphone including GPS of their phones has been passed.
That’s a good reason to riot.
The US federal government has been doing this since the 00’s. Snowden exposed them and the public responded with hatred towards Snowden. Unfortunately the average citizen just doesn’t seem to care.
I don’t think the majority of people KNOW what Snowden was even trying to tell them. I remember when this came out and the news media was clutching their pearls over the act of leaking information rather than discussing the contents. I’m still learning about what was contained in those leaks to this day. It is so heavily propagandized that we need a new word for it.
That’s an erroneous understanding of our era. The younger generations are gods at liking and commenting on social networks, but they just don’t care about privacy. They flock like birds to litteral spyware just for a quick meme fix.
Not everything you think is wrong has to do exclusively with boomers.
How is this even feasible on Android or iPhones? Are they going to force everyone to download Team Viewer or something?
[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/18/what-is-pegasus-spyware-and-how-does-it-hack-phones](Well crap. We’re fucked then?)
Title then link
We are just as fucked as we’ve always been. Hackers use zero-day vulnerabilities. Can’t do too much about that. Any device is hackable. That became clear after Snowden, and the USA hacking irans centrifuge.
Wonder if Google, Apple, or SoC makera are asked or secretly mandated to leave certain backdoors in. I know mobile providers have quite a bit they can see on their end.
It’s a good thing we’re always presented with two choices for everything, like mobile OS’s, to control our choices like we’re toddlers.
How do you get Pegasus onto LineageOS or GrapheneOS? Especially on hardware with modem isolation?
From the Guardian article somebody else linked:
One of the most significant challenges that Pegasus presents to journalists and human rights defenders is the fact that the software exploits undiscovered vulnerabilities, meaning even the most security-conscious mobile phone user cannot prevent an attack.
Everyone causally saying the government can just do it with Pegasus is ignoring the fact that Pegasus itself is an exploit. It is a hack, to breach your personal device. If I used the same methods to get into a bank’s systems it would be a violation of the law. Same if I created this software and gave it to you for the same purpose. Ask yourselves why it would be permissible to sell this software then commercially? And, why is it permissible for the government to use it to hack your own devices. Let’s not just brush over this discussion like it’s nothing.
Nobody ignores the fact that government is doing something illegal when the conversation about their rampant spying happens. You may just be late to the party. We all know it’s illegal, unethical, and immoral. It basically comes down to this:
What are you going to do about it?
We’re living in objectively dystopian times. Our government does illegal shit literally all the time and gets away with it.
What are you going to do about it?
The very least people can do is talk about it and acknowledge it’s bad.
Acceptance and normalization support the other side.
While this news article is, apparently, not trustworthy, in general, France could demand every phone sold in the country include some kind of spyware. Many sellers already add a lot of programs by default anyway, so this would be how I image it might be implemented.
Given that 7 people were recently arrested for using privacy respecting tools like the Signal messenger and Protonmail, removing that bloatware/spyware might then be cause enough to arrest you. After all, only terrorists want to have privacy, right?
Guess degoogled phones with custom OSes will soon be illegal then?
Modern hardware is likely exploitable by state actors via firmware/hardware vulnerabilities that can’t be mitigated at a software level.
The whole world is going to shit
