Posts tagged "surveillance":

Moxie and Ceglowski

I found this Twitter interchange regarding Telegram, between Moxie Marlinspike and Maciej Ceglowski, interesting. It is from December 2021. I had somehow seen the Moxie tweets earlier, but hadn't seen Ceglowski's, who brought the practical example of Telegram's use during the Hong Kong protests.

2022-01-18

The main story today was the news that according to a report in Calcalist, the Israeli police is using NSO's Pegasus spyware against Israeli citizens. Apparently it takes advantage of a very large loophole in the legal system: while there are very strict regulations regarding "wire-tapping" there is no specific law that makes it illegal to break into a citizen's phone to harvest information or, at least, the Israeli police made their own interpretation of the laws in determining what was permitted. In the case that a surveilled person was charged, the information they gathered through Pegasus was not used directly as evidence. Etc. According to the article, Pegasus is being used in a very similar way to that discovered in many non-democratic regimes around the world. Haaretz, in its own analysis, concludes that NSO is an arm of the state.

2021-11-23-reading-links

"Son Visage et le Tien", a long essay by Jenni Alexis. Interesting, so far. The English Wikipedia article about him references an article in the Atlantic, “When does a writer become a writer“[1]. Alexis, like T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, John Steinbeck, Margaret Duras and so many others that the article doesn’t mention, has a daytime job. Winning the Goncourt prize came as a big surprise for him. It’s the kind of attainment that so many aspiring writers dream about.