The United States has emerged as the largest investor in commercial spyware—a global industry that has enabled the covert surveillance of journalists, human rights defenders, politicians, diplomats, and others, posing grave threats to human rights and national security.
I love democracy
They really shouldn’t call it spyware. What they’re talking about is investment in the cyber mercenary industry
This is the original article
In the case of AE Industrial Partners, investment performance reports show that the firm was backed by several US pension funds—among them the Contra Costa County Employees’ Retirement Association, Baltimore Fire & Police Retirement System, Houston Firefighters’ Relief and Retirement Fund, and the New Mexico Educational Retirement Board—providing cash that could help support the deal with Paragon, which could reach $900 million.
Daymn. Firefighters unknowingly profiting from for-profit cyber mercenaries
The irony is I remember growing up with numerous stories about how expression is locked down in China and everything there is surveilled and if you speak poorly against the government you’ll get arrested etc. And thank goodness we are free in America to express ourselves even if it’s against the government because, my gosh, I might not like what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it!
And as if with no sense of irony and not even a remote bit of critique, all those stories about surveillance in China (true or not, I don’t know) were actually true, are currently true, or are becoming true here in the USA. And in many cases they’re just sold as commodities back to us e.g. ring doorbell cameras.
And a final thought: the USA used to be able to justify many of its foreign interferences on a sort of moral high ground, including freedom of expression and all that. That mask was slipping but now with Trump2 seems to have just fallen off. The pretense has given away to crass might makes right international relations. I consider the USA becoming a hyper surveilled state to be part of this story.
Ironically, many americans are now using chinese platforms to freely discuss things without fear of the US government.
Both are terrible
Indeed, I’m not justifying surveillance in either country. Just reflecting on how it’s been portrayed and is progressing here in the USA
That mask was slipping but now with Trump2 seems to have just fallen off. The pretense has given away to crass might makes right international relations. I consider the USA becoming a hyper surveilled state to be part of this story.
the USA has always been like this and the only reason why they don’t like him is that he never bothered with the mask.
Yeah, because being crass is the ONLY reason to not like trump. 🙄
i failed clarify an important distinction: the only reason why [the ruling class] don’t like him is that he never bothered with the mask.
I just want to ask on behalf of people who don’t care about this, “why should I care about this”?
Because every time I bring up how much we’re being spied on by the government or Amazon or Google, et al, people just shrug it off. At best, they’ll admit it’s a problem - for people who should be worried about it. Meaning, “I’ve got nothing to hide”. If nothing else, Americans lack (or choose to reject) the basic concept of a shared society. If there’s a threat that the government is spying on people, we believe it’s the “other” people, not “us”.
Threats to our privacy is largely hypothetical for the majority of people. I’d even argue that the whole premise of privacy is no longer what it was just 15-20 years ago. I’ve even had people argue with me that they ‘want’ to be tracked so the ads they see are relevant to them.
So, I could see some Americans read this story and be in full support of this. They believe in a spy state as a means of protection. Ironically, these are also often the same people flying “Don’t Tread On Me” flags.
That enforces my point. Why should anyone care about some other person who, some may say, should have been spied on?
What do they define as an “investment”
That’s why I am moving away from all US services, selfhosting and well vetted European services are the only viable way forward.
For individuals who want encryption, wouldn’t client-side checks (aka self hosting) be better than trusting all European services?
well vetted European services are the only viable way forward
Well vetted in that context might mean audited by 3rd parties that can show that even the services themselves do not have access to the data thanks to E2EE, HE, etc.
Regardless of which service it is, it shouldn’t be selected on national lines (this “Buy European”/“Use European” crutch is reactionary nationalist bs), but rather on pragmatic terms: F/LOSS. Because even European services and legislation don’t have your best interests in mind:
- The EU Funds Surveillance Around the World: Here’s What Must be Done About it
- AI mass surveillance at Paris Olympics – a legal scholar on the security boon and privacy nightmare
- Investigation of the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware
- Female health apps aren’t doing enough to protect sensitive data, study says
- 20 Biggest GDPR Fines of All Time
Border-transcending, fully transparent and easily accessible and auditable F/LOSS software is what should be strived for.
It’s definitely a shortcut bus since the EU start GDPR it does force a lot of services, in the EU and elsewhere, to at least show some of the practices that are privacy threatening.
There are plenty of services in the EU that are not better than in the US and elsewhere so “buying EU” does not always mean buying better.
Yet… there are also not geopolitical changes that can’t be ignored. Sure the US had the NSA, 5 eyes, etc before with new regulations and examples like Microsoft, US company, that can’t even tell its relatively big French government client that its data will NOT cross the boarder despite the promise of doing so initially.
So again, yes it’s a shortcut, a heuristic, imperfect by definition, but at least it prompts most users to become customers, namely pay for services rather than get them for free and try to insure that they are indeed private then IMHO it’s an interesting trend.
PS: note that I didn’t even suggest “Buy European” so I’m not even sure why that was addressed to me specifically but because it’s a recurrent trend happy to try to address the concerns.
PS2: the EU is not Europe, the EU does not represent all countries, all members state have their own regulation, the EU itself includes the Parliament, Commission, Council, etc and Members of the European Parliaments go from the far right to the far left so to somehow imply it is all for privacy or all for surveillances is an oversimplification of a much more complex situation.
It really isn’t that complicated. All these major EU services adhering to the oh-so-sacred GDPR doesn’t mean or guarantee anything in the grand scheme of things for as long as they run their services with Google Ad Services, AWS, Cloudflare, etc…
No matter how many times GDPR violations have been paid for, these services aren’t exactly punished for doing what they do when they pay their dues in pennies.
Even if they don’t use or embed tracking into their services like “promised” (which we don’t even know or can confirm since most of them are closed-source), they’re still under EU jurisdiction, any request for data from the service’s respective origin EU country HAS to be fulfilled and they can just make up any pretense (e.g. “think of the children!!” and like we see there linked in the article about “Enhanced Border Security Partnership”). They’ll also gladly incorporate literal spyware (Pegasus), with the EU’s full approval.
So yes, blindly switching from US to EU services, believing that EU services are so great because muh GDPR, doesn’t actually achieve “more privacy”, it is simply nationalist delusion, you can read every single article linked to see why.
Cheaper than to rely on the NSA because people have terrible privacy practices anyway?
