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UK Government Officials Infected with Pegasus (citizenlab.ca)
691 points by yablak on April 18, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 354 comments



I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too, since the Israeli intelligence company was supposedly "closely monitoring how their customers were using the software" or akin to that.

Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better.


The current home secretary, Priti Patel, was forced to resign from her previous (lesser) role as Minister for International Development for secretly (and thus illegally) meeting with Israeli diplomats.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41923007

It is completely unsurprising that there is little care shown by our government.


Israel was also behind many of the efforts to smear the former opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn - https://www.middleeasteye.net/fr/news/israeli-diplomat-sough...

The current government is a huge ally of Israel.


Every British government has been an ally of Israel. You don't turn down a relationship with a country with Israel's military, technical and intelligence capabilities, and worth $5bn in bilateral trade for nothing if you have any sense.


> You don't turn down a relationship with a country with Israel's military, technical and intelligence capabilities, and worth $5bn in bilateral trade

Well, that's certainly one angle.

The other angle is, let's face it, Israel is good at playing the Jewish card and portraying that if you're not pro-Israel you must be some sort of antisemite.

There are all sorts of political ties along those lines, e.g. "Conservative Friends of Israel"[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Friends_of_Israel


UK bilateral trade with Russia was ~$17 billion in 2021 (i assume that's imports plus exports right?).

Russia was a very close friend twenty years ago, Iraq was a very close ally in the 1980s. I'm sure Israel realises how quickly the west can turn on friends and allies when it suits us and that this is why they spend tens of millions a year wooing US and UK politicians.

Russia became a pariah over night and the moment it becomes politically convenient to diplomatically recognise Israel as an apartheid state the trade won't count for anything (not least because most of it is the direct consequence of billions in annual US subsidies)


Russia's been a pain in the arse continuously. 20 years ago they were up to their eyeballs in the Iranian nuclear programme, carpet bombing Chechnya, blowing up their own apartment blocks and blaming it on terrorists, destabilising Georgia and goodness knows what else. That's all just from memory. But they have a lot of oil and gas so we let it all slide. More fool us.


You are aware that the Israely government does similar things, right?


Most European governments look at the simultaneous invasion of Israel by three Arab states in 1948, and statements made about the aims of that invasion, and think "what would we be prepared to do to defend against such determined, implacable hostility?". They look at what Israel does to defend itself and think, yeah, pretty much we'd do that.

They look at Israel and see a democratic, technologically advanced state with a liberal economy much like their own. They look at the repressive, autocratic extraction economies in the Arab world and recoil in horror.

I'm not making any judgement on this, or whether they're right or wrong, but that's just how many Europeans see the situation.


I mean wow, they really don't.


And some other Europeans see the Israeli government as human rights abusers and boycott them.


And some other Europeans see human rights abusers and boycott them.


Yup, so does the US and the UK.


The sad reality is that we've not really had truly independent foreign policy since WW2. The US military never left our soil, and we've been in lock step with Washington on everything serious since then.

We're a vassal state, there's no Brexit on the special relationship.


We did with Europe and the trade is worth way more than $5bn


And we're allies with the EU to this day. What's your point?


We threw away billions in trade with the EU over not really that much, why would not throw away a far smaller sum when it comes to another country that was spying on us?

How much the UK and EU are allies remains to be seen too


[flagged]


>Face it, Corbyn and the Labour Party do have a massive issue with antisemitism

Only if we define it as criticism of Israeli policy.

Otherwise, that's a smear, substituting criticism with antisemitism.

>A smear campaign can only be really effective if there is a solid truth behind it.

Nope, it can be very effective without any truth. Try smearing someone as a pedophile - you think they'll be able to wash it off? Goebbels, for one, advised for complete lies, repeated often.

In fact, a complete huge lie can be even more believable, as people go "would they said something that great, if it wasn't at least a bit true?".


> Only if we define it as criticism of Israeli policy.

Which appears to basically be the criteria these days - which is terrifying.


That's not really how smear campaigns work.

Using a very extreme example: if I got 4 people to call you a pedophile, then people will believe it until you submit proof that you're not.

The problem is that it's impossible to prove the absence of something, so you're forced to push back on me: "Where's your proof that I'm a pedophile", where I can reply with anecdotes or other useless information.

The point is not to "prove" you are a pedophile in that case, the point is to make people associate your name with pedophilia, and to make it unclear if you are or if you aren't. 80% of people will not look further into it.

Pedophilia is probably too extreme of an example and people may be more critical of pedophilia accusations than, say, racism ones.


> it's impossible to prove the absence of something

True, but in this case it was quite easy to prove the presence of anti-semitism in the Labour party, especially in the far left membership.


for what it’s worth, i’m yet to find an individual that was able to concretely identify a single anti-semitic action or statement both in the run up to, and after the november 2019 election.

edit: probably worth mentioning, i read the report of the external investigation (all ~300 pages of it) on antisemitism in the labour party. to call it thin on the ground is somewhat of an understatement.


It's easy if you make it up.

It's also easy to find "presence of anything" in some members of any large group, including satanism, doesn't mean it defines the group or is a big element of it.


And this attitude is why hundreds of thousands of liberal and left-wing Jews no longer support the Labour party.


Which attitude? Basic sense?


Are you implying that all those Jews worried about anti-semitism in the Labour Party lack basic sense? I'm not sure they're likely to find that a comforting response.


Are you weasel-wording strawmen? Maybe, don't do that?

First, who are "all those Jews"? This is handwaving to make it sound like multitudes.

Second, people worrying about anti-semitism in the Labour party in general, either lack common sense (if we accept your argument that is "this attitude" I wrote about above that is their concern), or conflate anti-semitism (as in Hitler, Nazis, pogroms, and co) with criticism of actions by the state of Israel.

In fact, actual jews in favor of Corbyn and the party have been accused of "anti-semitism" (!) - like the Jewish Voice for Labour (jewish members of the UK Labour Party, because they are nonetheless critical about the situation with Palestine).


No, they where clarifying what you meant, It's your opinion that "this" is the cause.


And this is why divide et impera always works


You were 5x more likely to be purged from the Labour party as a Jew than as a non Jew: https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/labour-is-pu...

This wasnt antiracists purging antisemites.

It was racists purging antiracists.


This "5x more likely" sounds horrific ... until you look at how it was reached:

""" According to Labour statistics, by March 2021 there had been 1,450 "actioned complaints" against Labour party members in relation to allegations of antisemitism - equivalent to 0.29 percent of Labour’s membership, which averaged 500,000 between 2015 and 2020, when Corbyn was leader.

By contrast, says JVL, there were at least 35 actioned complaints against Jewish members. This is equivalent to 1.4 percent of Jewish members, who the group estimate to have numbered around 2,500 during the same period. """

Having 35 "actioned complaints" against Jewish members does not sound like a purge from the Labour Party, and portraying it as such is pretty misleading. I'm also wondering if there's some careful wording here, since they're comparing a total number of actioned complaints against Jewish members, vs number of actioned complaints specifically relating to allegations of antisemitism. Interesting that one of the two authors of the article is a Conservative (ie, the party Labour is in opposition to)


>Having 35 "actioned complaints" against Jewish members does not sound like a purge from the Labour Party

35 isnt a purge. > 1000 IS a purge. The fact that being an Jewish made it 5x more likely you would be purged simply underscored the fact that it was exclusively a project to purge anti-racists who were critical of Israel.

This point was underscored again when the party hired an ex Israeli intelligence agent.


I have misunderstood you then, I thought you were saying this was an purge designed to target Jewish members of the party, which didn’t seem to be the case to me.


Israel plays the anti-semitism card much too loosely to be taken seriously. The issues I have with Israel are because of the actions of its government and absolutely nothing to do with the majority religion there.

If you criticise Israel, you're an anti-semite. We're all scared of being called such, so we let them do whatever the fuck they want.

Fuck Israel; but not because of their religion.


It's interesting that you find the need to type this out though, as if the UK (and US, and the West) doesn't cultivate many similar ties that absolutely get nowhere near the same level of attention. It's rare to see people with the same level of dislike towards a country like Saudi Arabia or the UAE. With Israel, people viscerally hate it.


The main difference between Israel and worse global players is the wide range of westerners (including self described "liberal" ones) who tolerate or are willing to step up to endorse its vicious racism, its ethnic cleansing and its illegal settlement expansion both with trumped up accusations of antisemitism and whataboutism.

That naturally elicits a bit of a reaction.

By contrast I dont remember anybody calling anybody an Islamophobe because they condemned Mohammed bin Salman's killing of Khashoggi or invasion of Yemen.

There's also an element of what is done in Israel being done in our name, since it was essentially a remnant of European colonialism (a particularly shameful part of our history) and continues thanks to support from our governments.


I can't speak for anyone else; but I feel the same way about any other country which is committing similar crimes against people just for being alive, as I do about Israel.

That includes the US, Russia, China, UAE, SA, Myanmar and whatever other examples you wish.

Why pro-genocide israelis feel (and shout that) they get an inproportionate amount of criticism vs the other dickheads of the world is an exercise I leave to the reader.


>Israel plays the anti-semitism card much too loosely to be taken seriously.

This rhetoric is not any different than conservatives arguing Af-Am play the 'race card'. In both cases there's actual bigotry that some people want to sweep under the rug by a mindless counter-accusation.


> there's actual bigotry

as implied by "too much" - your comment is truly rhetoric as it cheaply dismisses this claim as "mindless" and makes a poor tribal comparison - African-Americans aren't currently occupying another state.


The comparison is to the rhetoric used to ignore bigotry (see the absurd defence of Corbyn in the comments). The alleged sins of a country are irrelevant to that issue.


Please show me where Corbyn said anything against Jewish people for being jewish? He, like me, is strongly against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the war crimes it commits against its peoples in exercise of that.

Saying so does not make you a bigot or an anti semite. Israel and it's defenders hide behind these kind of statements and they're nonsense. Labour if elected would not have given Israel such an easy ride and they throw a lot of money around -- thus, Corbyn is an anti-semite and labour has 'issues' around Jews, and surprise surprise; the tories got in and are happy to sell them lots of nice missiles and intelligence.

It's bullshit. They just have ethics. I Would feel the exact same way if it was Christians or Hindus or whatever in charge of Israel and behaving like this; where is the defence then? Criticise us and you're anti-christian? Doesn't have the same ring to it does it?


Nearly all of the statements and actions in issue with Corbyn have nothing whatsoever to do with Israel. 99.9999% politicians manage to avoid antisemitic murals and endorsing antisemitic books just fine.

It's not remotely difficult, and I'm sure 99.999999% of Labour Leftists with nigh-identical positions would not be so compromised. Can't understand why the Labour Left had to (politically) die on that hill.


Corbyn didn't support an anti-Semitic mural, if that's what "managing to avoid" means: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/23/corbyn-crit...

The book was presumably "Imperialism: A Study" - not wholly about Jews, and Corbyn describes the accusation as "mischievous representation".

These are weak examples, basically a degrees-of-separation argument coupled with your own opinion of what is black-and-white anti-Semitic without informed discussion (or even examples since you only provide suggestive anecdotes, not sources). Feel free to demonstrate your "99.9..%" numbers for politicians that are under the same amount of scrutiny.


So the topic you wish to discuss is "rhetoric used to ignore bigotry".

Feel free to demonstrate where this exists in the comment you replied to. I can just as easily decide the more relevant topic is "rhetoric used to ignore ethnic nationalism", which your post could be.

EDIT:

I'd also note the comment you replied to says:

> Israel plays the anti-semitism card much too loosely to be taken seriously

your own comment elsewhere (on Noam Chomsky):

> Noted genocide denier (repeatedly) with zero credibility on anything.

Why is dismissive labelling ok in one case, and not another?


>Why is dismissive labelling ok in one case, and not another?

Because the only source given for the quote was Chomsky himself*. In that case, the question of Chomsky's credibility is directly relevant.

* It's possible Chomsky had an actual source etc., but if so, it was not provided in the original comment.


The issue isn't if Chomsky's credibility is relevant, but on the credibility swipe itself: If Chomsky can be dismissed on all topics (zero credibility on anything) for alleged genocide denial, why isn't that "rhetoric that ignores X" for whatever X Chomsky might discuss?


I was dismissing Chomsky's testimony on anything, not anything he might say. If he said '2+2=4' that would be true (if also trivial). I regret not being 100% clear in a forum comment.


It was testimony aka credibility that I'm talking about.


> Israel plays the anti-semitism card much too loosely to be taken seriously

They use it in very specific circumstances that relate to criticizing the idea of Israel being a Jewish state. I can understand that people may innocently criticize this, due to missing the historical context of why Israel was created, but I agree that this form of criticism against Israel should be condemned.

P.S. There are very specific actions by the Israeli government that I do condemn. Notably, not stopping settlement expansion in the West Bank. However most comments against Israel are far more gangue and sensationalist.


> the idea of Israel being a Jewish state

That was only very recently codified and was very controversial inside and outside of israel.

> They use it in very specific circumstances

I'm sorry but that's just incorrect, it's been used much more broadly.

for example according to Noam Chomsky:

"Actually, the locus classicus, the best formulation of this, was by an ambassador to the United Nations, Abba Eban, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.... He advised the American Jewish community that they had two tasks to perform. One task was to show that criticism of the policy, what he called anti-Zionism—that means actually criticisms of the policy of the state of Israel—were anti-Semitism. That's the first task. Second task, if the criticism was made by Jews, their task was to show that it's neurotic self-hatred, needs psychiatric treatment. Then he gave two examples of the latter category. One was I. F. Stone. The other was me. So, we have to be treated for our psychiatric disorders, and non-Jews have to be condemned for anti-Semitism, if they're critical of the state of Israel. That's understandable why Israeli propaganda would take this position. I don’t particularly blame Abba Eban for doing what ambassadors are sometimes supposed to do. But we ought to understand that there is no sensible charge. No sensible charge. There's nothing to respond to. It's not a form of anti-Semitism. It's simply criticism of the criminal actions of a state, period"


>That was only very recently codified and was very controversial inside and outside of israel.

Very recently as in 'in the UN assembly resolution authorizing the creation of Israel' (1947) or the 1985 basic law etc.

>Noam Chomsky

Noted genocide denier (repeatedly) with zero credibility on anything.


> Very recently as in 'in the UN assembly resolution authorizing the creation of Israel' (1947) or the 1985 basic law etc.

You are correct. I'm sorry. I was misremembering the news from when "Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People" [1] was passed in 2018. My bad, I can no longer edit my post though. So apparently "Jewish ethnic homeland in Palestine", "Jewish state" and "Jewish nation-state" mean different things and have different connotations. The latter being the recent and most controversial one.

for people that want to check the resolution referenced is UNGA181.[2]

Turns out the Palestinian opposition to the term is because they see it as giving up on their right of return (given to them by UNGA194 [3] )

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Law:_Israel_as_the_Natio...

[2] - https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/res181.asp


I don't often respond to claims like these, but I think it might be necessary to in this case. I am not sure what sources you used to inform those claims, but I will simply say that in both cases both are misleading.

Noam Chomsky is a lot of things, but 'genocide denier' label is at best inaccurate and, more importantly, does not automatically make him wrong on any other issue. I get that character assassination works well, but this is HN, where stuff like that will be called out.

"That was only very recently codified and was very controversial inside and outside of Israel.

Very recently as in 'in the UN assembly resolution authorizing the creation of Israel' (1947) or the 1985 basic law etc."

I think parent is referring to this piece of legislation[1]. I might be wrong, but if not, that would strike me as recent.

[1]https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/31/17623978/israel-jewish-n...


The quote in question provides no sources beyond that Chomsky said it (no direct sources or anything). So the question of Chomsky's credibility is important, and well, Chomsky's own record in the Balkans and earlier in Cambodia speaks for itself.

>I think parent is referring to this piece of legislation

I believe you are right, but the particular issue parent's objecting to is not new at all [EDIT: Note that parent clarified his position in a later comment].


I will admit that I don't follow him closely enough to know his stance on either Balkans or Cambodia. If you can share any sources, I would not mind learning a little more.

That said, I accept your argument that credibility is relevant. Not to search very far, if we accept him as some sort of authority on geopolitical matters, is he wrong, say, about US-Iraq relationship? My point is that opinions should not be automatically dismissed or automatically accepted. It should be based on the merits of the argument. And Chomsky can present an interesting argument based on what I heard.


That's fair enough. We can discuss arguments to a large extent divorced from who made them. This is often useful.

However, the quote in question goes a bit further, Chomsky says Eban started a specific strategy of using antisemitism to Eban's own ends, almost directly paraphrasing something Eban allegedly said. I think I'm entitled to ask what's Chomsky's source, and if there isn't any, than it rests on Chomsky's credibility which, well, isn't very much IMHO.

[EDIT: On the Balkans, you can see Kraut's video on YouTube. This text has similar arguments though:

https://srebrenicagenocide7111995.wordpress.com/2008/11/03/n... ]


I followed a chain of links to see if I can pinpoint the origin of the quote, but that only resulted in, as you indicated, in Chomsky's own words[1]. As such, you are right, for that reason his credibility is more relevant since I was not able to verify Eban's words.

Separately, I did some basic googling of Eban quotes and his positions[2] do not seem at odds with the gist of Chomsky's quote though:

"One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all. Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism….”

I only started reading the link you provided so it may take a while before I respond.

[1]https://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/27/noam_chomsky_at_unit... [2]https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/18/corb-n18.html


>his positions[2] do not seem at odds with the gist of Chomsky's quote though

I would like to differ slightly. Chomsky has it that Eban wants to tar criticism of Israeli policy as antisemitic* - which leads to the 'oh well, they just accused Corbyn of antisemitism because of his Israel position' argument you see in the comments.

Eban wants to argue against a specific ideological position which at least is aimed at completely modifying the Israeli state (not 'policy criticism') and he has his argument for it - an argument we can safely say Israel has lost in the West. People may defend Israel, but they usually do not consider their opponent antisemitic per se.

* There's also the 'neurotic self-hatred' part, where Eban supposedly is naming Chomsky specifically, but I think we can safely discard that.


The problem with Israel being "a Jewish state" is that requires the suppression and occasionally ethnic cleansing of its non-Jewish residents in order to prevent them from ever achieving enough numbers or power to make it not Jewish.

It's a fundamental contradiction embedded from the Israeli declaration of independence (which commits to racial and religious equality) onwards: what does it mean for a state, rather than individuals, to be Jewish?

The underlying argument is that it's necessary for the continued survival and security of Jewish people that there be a Jewish state, and unfortunately the continuous attacks on Israel suggest they might be right.


I think you can point out that any state founded on ethno or religious grounds is a bad idea. Although in this case given when it was formed and why that clearly adds a lot of context.

You can certainly state that the right of self-determination doesn't trump the rights of others. So a Jewish state somewhere is a right, but not if there are already people living in that particular somewhere who object.

You can also state that predominantly European migration to a part of the world where there are other people living has been somewhere between a mistake and a disaster and a tragedy, be that America, Australia or Israel.

I think the last part is the issue that causes much of the problems. Many people in Labour party wanted to protect the right of those directly affected by the migration to call it out in their terms. We wouldn't deny native americans or aborigines using terms like 'racist' to describe what has happened to them. Yet the misuse of the IHRA examples (turning examples into a legal definition) did exactly that. And many people in Labour objected.

I can understand the continuing need for there to always be a place of safety for Jews. Although it's tragic that this is the case, but understandable, not least given the holocaust still being within living memory. The current direction of Israel can't be it though, there has to be some other way.


Some left-leaning organisations across Europe supporting Palestine is not antisemitism, regardless of what nationalistic Israelis might say. Is there any proof whatsoever for those claims or is it like the Labour party "scandals" that are taken out of proportion as a part of a smear campaign? For instance in France there are multiple left parties, and none of them are antisemitic in any real sense of the word.


https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/french-president...

>Jean-Luc Melenchon, a far-left politician running for France's presidency next year has suggested that a jihadist's 2012 murder of Jews was part of an elections conspiracy.


What a weak argument — but let’s humor this idiocy. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you are saying that smear campaigns are built exclusively on “solid truth”?

So you think it is impossible for anyone to organize a smear campaign based on lies and/or misrepresentation?

Seems naive to me.

I wonder, are you just trying to add to the “labor is anti-Semitic” smears that Zionists push online? You know the smears they push because they have no answer to the criticism that zionist Israelis are (a) stealing other peoples lands through settlements (b) supporting racist Apartheid laws and (c) supporting a criminal state which regularly oppresses and violates the universally-acknowledged rights of the native population.


I took their meaning to be that successful disinformation includes enough truth to provide some level of plausibility. That doesn’t mean that truth is at the core of the smear, or even that it’s a “whole” truth.

Epstein had many rich and powerful friends. Epstein was a pedophile. Epstein died within an inexcusable lapse in custody. These are all truths. Combine them together into the Q narrative, and now you have a massive conspiracy that is mostly wild speculation but contains some kernels of truth.


When did it become a "massive" issue? It was a few isolated incidents that were handled badly. What has happened exactly please? There's been no reports of 'massive' issues. I think you might exaggerating the actual allegations.

Also very suspicious that some of the biggest advocates for Palestinian rights have suddenly become anti-Semites seemingly overnight.

The conversation has moved from Israel's utterly disgusting treatment of the Palestinians to almost trivial claims of anti-Semitism.

One a systematic and brutal campaign of regression against hundreds of thousands of people, the other a few people got called names.

I always thought it was probably a very successfully Mossad smear campaign akin to Putin's anti-Hilary campaign.

And a lot of the British press helped because they hated Corbyn.


I have a problem with Israel and its politics, not with Jews or any other religion.

Does that make me an antisemit? Because then the term has been redefined and I'll gladly wear it


If you simply dislike how Israel is treating Palestinians (and maybe support BDS) then no it does not, so you should not accept that label.


Afaiu, the solid truth was that higher-up admin people of the Parliamentary Labour Party HQ, which is separate from the office of the Leader Of The Opposition, failed to do the investigating, partly due to the fear and hate of Corbyn in the PLP, but then LOTO took the blame (partly cos Corbyn isn't the greatest of communicators). Novara did various detailed videos on the whole saga, including looking at the PLP WhatsApp leaks. https://youtu.be/G02ZZY_KE4E https://youtu.be/ZjNB7fGc1-A etc


I can't believe you've been downvoted to oblivion.

Labour party antisemitism goes way beyond criticism of isreal, including support for hezbollah and hamas.

https://labourhatesjews.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/29-examples...

Also: Jeremy Corbyn faces fury after praising ‘brilliant’ book which claims Jews control world banks

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8975188/jeremy-corbyn-praises-...

Corbyn also backed the artist behind the mural clearly depicting evil jews controlling the world like a board game:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/mar/23/corbyn-crit...

The excusing away of this behaviour on HN is crazy, it's not just about isreal. Not by a long shot.


These are again examples without context.

e.g. on Hobson's book.

This was a book that was widely referenced. Certainly referencing it didn't mean endorsement of Hobson's antisemitism ( a few lines in that book).. like praising the works of many other authors of the time that contain antisemetic references.

Here's the then leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg citing Hobson.

http://www.demos.co.uk/files/Liberal_moment_-_EMBARGOED_18.0...

Or Blair:

"J.A Hobson was probably the most famour Liberal convert to what was the literally 'new Labour'"

or Gordon Brown

"In Britain, this idea of liberty as empowerment is not a new idea, J A Hobson asked, “is a man free who has not equal opportunity with his fellows of such access to all material and moral means of personal development and work as shall contribute to his own welfare and that of his society?”"

Is the same for all other cases.

This is how smearing works. People take something that happened (that cannot be denied) and then insist this is proof. If the person says nothing they seem guilty, if the person tries to explain and put things into context they seem guilty.


People who write an encouraging and approving forward to a book are endorsing what the book says, duh.

That's very different from a general reference to a phrase that a person said (Brown) or mentioning a person as part of an historic development (Clegg) - the difference between say, an historian mentioning Goebbels, compared to writing an approving forward to a new edition that a book that Goebbels wrote.

Corbyn has a long long history of happening to not notice antisemitism by people he has been encouraging.

>People take something that happened (that cannot be denied) and then insist this is proof.

How dare we look into mere evidence?! Apparently the important thing to some is that the guy is left-wing and that covers for everything.


Ok, how about the others?


well that's exactly the trap isn't it? The others have clearly been contextualised and explained many many times, but that's never enough and there's always 'but what about this one..'

Throw enough stuff at the wall and hope something will stick.

And if I put up a list of the times where Corbyn has gone above and beyond to support Jewish communities in the UK, people will undoubtedly put the effort in to dismiss them.


No, you are doing exactly what you are claiming was done, explaining away one thing (which still btw doesn’t work, Blair and brown are both labour too), and saying the others don’t matter because you’ve proved one wrong.

Yet somehow it’s always Corbyn labour that gets “misquoted”. Why is that? The Labour Party has plenty of motivation to smear the conservatives over antisemitism, yet somehow they don’t have the material for it. Why is that?

But whatever, I won’t convince you anyway, you refuse to look at the evidence. The mural one is the best example but you claim it’s a smear too. Yet somehow again it’s corbyn who got messed up in it.

But fine, I understand why the left is antisemitic, just like the Soviet Union was, it would just be nice if you were honest about it. If you blame identity groups for the worlds problems it’s hard to not blame Jews, and it must really frustrating seeing a successful nationalistic nation be successful against all odds.


Did you just call "the left" "antisemitic" and then immediately complained about people who "blame identity groups for the world's problems" in two consecutive statements?


Yes I did. Who does the american left blame right now for the world's problems? Individuals evaluated by what they do, or a certain group of people?


"plenty of motivation to smear the conservatives over antisemitism" "yet somehow they don’t have the material for it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Conserv...

And On the Tory Prime minister

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/11/boris-johns...

On the mural. Yes I agree that is the clearest example. The mural is clearly antisemetic. Corbyn claims he wasn't paying attention and made the comment about censorship without opening the image. He has since agreed the mural was antisemetic and that he made a mistake.

That's basically the only scandal that has stood up though, that he said he wasn't paying attention when surfing on Facebook 10 years ago, and people who believe the other scandals insist he was paying attention and was deliberately endorsing a piece of antisemetic art.

And on the 'left' blaming Jews for everything. You are wrong obviously. but also worth noting many of the heros of the left : Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Jesus Christ. Are Jews.


> Labour party antisemitism goes way beyond criticism of isreal, including support for hezbollah and hamas.

corbyn famously laid a wreath on the grave of a hamas fighter[1]. an interpretation - more in line with how corbyn has historically treated war and violence - reads:

> "They insist Jeremy Corbyn was at the service to commemorate the Palestinians who were killed in an Israeli airstrike in 1985"

i'll leave "support for palastine is equivalent to antisemitism" argument to the side here, needless to say i don't think i'm unique in thinking that this isn't the case.

> Jeremy Corbyn faces fury after praising ‘brilliant’ book which claims Jews control world banks

if this is in reference to the hobson book foreword, then, this would be very similar in nature to calling me misogynistic for recommending the 1st edition K&R C book, because it presumes the programmer is a man.

the book in question, Imperialism, is a treatise on how capatilism causes imperialism. which does sound like something corbyn would be interested in. i implore you to read it and tell me how antisemitic it is.

> Corbyn also backed the artist behind the mural clearly depicting evil jews controlling the world like a board game:

look at the damn mural![2] where is the antisemitic message? it's literally called "freedom for humanity". it seems clear to me that this is a complaint on the power the rich have over the rest of us.

every single one of the threads i've ended up going down over years has always been a variation on: corbyn, or the labour party, is decried as antisemitic for something. this "something" is rarely made clear or obvious when it gets media coverage. surface level investigation makes claims of antisemitism look not particularly strong.

in the meantime, i need to learn advanced memory keeping techniques to keep track of conservative government scandals from the last 6 months.

> The excusing away of this behaviour on HN is crazy, it's not just about isreal. Not by a long shot.

if corbyn is antisemitic, then let me be clear: fuck him. it would be at odds though with his otherwise radical socialist and humanitarian track record: views on which he has been remarkably consistent on for the majority of his political career. somehow, even today.

the only thing that seems crazy to me is just how effective the campaign against him was.

[1]: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-jeremy-cor...

[2]: https://i0.wp.com/inspiringcity.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/...


Do they really though? Honestly?


You mean a smear campaign like the blood libel?


The only thing the Israeli lobby attacked him for was not being their kind of racist.

They dont even give a damn about anti semitism. They backed Orban when he put out hook nosed Jew campaign adverts because he backed Israel and they treasure their relationship with anti semitic US evangelicals.

That particular smear campaign wasnt very effective but it was remarkable in its audaciousness - just like the fantastically stupid czech spy smear.


Also unsurprising in view of even more egregious incidents from the past: Shai Masot, the Israeli embassy official at London, caught on camera in 2017 talking about 'hitlist' of members of parliament, including Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan, a vocal supporter of Palestinian state [0]. And that led to a slap on the wrist. A comparison of reactions to related incidents involving different parties is revealing [1].

[0] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israeli-embassy-rep-caug...

[1] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20220214-espionage-is-a-di...


Doesn't the fact that she had to resign point to the opposite conclusion, namely that these governments are distinct entities with sometimes conflicting interests?


She is now Home Secretary of the UK. She got fired upwards.


The current Cabinet is suffering from a serious lack of talent in my opinion; several political purges related to Brexit has meant the only real qualifying characteristic for some of the highest offices in the land is being a yes-man for Johnson.


Now that you are saying this.. take a look everywhere, it's all like this.. every country turned into the worst versions of themselves, but even the worst of UK its kind of not bad in my opinion, compared to other countries.

At least from an outside view, it's the UK now that is showing a good leadership in the current worldwide crises. While the US, France and Germany are completely lost, especially on how to deal with a "strong-man".

(Meanwhile nobody remembers Cameron or that guy that was a pure puppet of the US in the forced Iraq war, and they were the posh gentleman everyone was expecting)


I too hope I will be fired some day (upwards)


It points to there being some pressure, probably from the public. But like police officers who get fired only to be rehired the next town over she now has a even more prestigious position in government. So there is no actual accountability here, just theater.


> I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too

Are you really surprised? I'd be surprised if the UK and its media made a fuss about it. Certainly we won't be making a fuss about it here in the US that's for sure. I'd imagine russia and china wishes they had 1/10th the influence that israel has in the US/UK. Say what you want about israel, but for such a tiny country, it punches far above its weight.


When 11 US diplomats in Uganda turned up with NSO Pegasus Malware on their phones, the US government responded by listing NSO as a covered Entity and forbidding any US company from buying or selling with it without express permission of the USG- Dell can't sell them monitors or laptops without the State Department publishing written, specific permission. Several US congresspersons advocated for even harsher response (Global Magnitsky Sanctions, which would, AIUI, basically cut them off from the dollar and their employees from traveling to the US). The US reserves the right to do that later.

So the US has responded, quite forcefully, to people much lower on the food chain being hacked by Pegasus.

See: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/12/the-s...


Sure, the US effectively blacklisted NSO, but they did nothing to Israel. Imagine if a Russian business was found to have hacked State Department employees phones. Would being a private company prevent Russia from being blamed, particularly if they had the kind of state connections NSO had?


> Dell can't sell them monitors or laptops without the State Department publishing written, specific permission.

I wonder how this is enforced in practice? I have to assume Israel has retailer shops where anybody can just buy whatever, most likely even Dell laptops and monitors.


I don't know about Russia, but China doesn't let people from other nationalities to occupy positions of power especially in foreign policy, in which they're completely right. This is the main weakness of the USA and UK. They will let foreign born people to raise to power and dictate self servicing policies, many times in detriment to their own population. For example, take Henry Kissinger: a german born person, he spent his whole life influencing American policy to accommodate his views concerning Europe and the rest of the world. It is not a surprise that the Western world is in this situation.


Which UK politician are you referring to? The only one I’m aware of in high office currently who was born abroad is Boris Johnson, who was born in New York - a fact so far down the list of reasons for his unfitness for office that it does not really register.

The idea that this is the “main” problem in the UK is frankly laughable.


Well of course, GP said 'positions of power' rather than 'politician'.

Controversially, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evgeny_Lebedev has been ennobled and is now qualified to sit in the House of Lords, most definitely a position of power though he has not as yet chosen to appear there as far as I know. It turns out that Unelected Lords are also permitted to be ministers in the cabinet, so...


Lebedev definitely qualifies here.


Just wait until you find out the UK had a Jewish prime minister.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli

The rabbit hole goes deeper, keep digging! They can't keep the truth hidden forever.


The UK is quite xenophobic as it is. No need for extra laws to prohibit foreigners to ascend to positions of power. Your peers will take care of that. I'm quite surprised that an UK born citizen of Pakistani heritage is currently the mayor of London. Maybe Labour is less xenophobic that the others.


> I'm quite surprised that an UK born citizen of Pakistani heritage is currently the mayor of London

The only surprise here is that he's Labour, not Tory.

Half of the current Great Offices of State are held by brown people under the Tories, who also had the first Jewish PM, the first (and second, and only) female PMs, and then there's Saj who's been Chancellor and Home Secretary, and I reckon is about as likely as Sunak to be the next PM. They appointed the first female, gay head of the Met Police, and the leader of the party in Scotland was also a gay woman for 8 very recent years.

Some of these people are clearly the worst of British politics (hello Priti Patel!), but the Tories have an excellent record of putting people who aren't straight, white, Christian men into positions of power.


There are so many people in this thread talking nonsense about the UK. The current Tory (right wing) Cabinet (the executive) includes Rishi Sunak as Chancellor, Priti Patel as Home Secretary, Savid Jaavid as Secretary of State for Health, Kwasi Kwartang as Secretary of State for Business, Alok Sharma as COP26 President, Nadim Zahawi as Secretary of State for Education, and Suella Braverman as Attorney General — all of Pakistani, Indian, or African ancestry.

It is quite likely the next PM will be of Pakistani or Indian ancestry (unless it’s a Labour PM; they have a poor record of promoting minorities to the top of Government) It's simply not true that the UK is xenophobic.


> No need for extra laws to prohibit foreigners to ascend to positions of power.

What on Earth are you talking about?

10% of parliament are from ethnic minorities (including many high profile positions, Tories included), against a UK background of 14%.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn01...

9% of parliament identifies as gay/bi against a UK background of 5%.

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/12/31/lgbt-mps-gay-lesbian-b...


>"I'm surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel too."

I think Realpolitik is the reason why and that's all I'm going to say about that.


The realpolitik of it is that Johnson some weeks ago went to the Saudis hat in hand asking for oil after they've stopped responding to phone calls from POTUS.

Last year:

  The Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, warned Boris Johnson in a text message that UK-Saudi Arabian relations would be damaged if the British government failed to intervene to “correct” the Premier League’s “wrong” decision not to allow a £300m takeover of Newcastle United last year.
The takeover of the club was of course completed shortly afterwards. As were the weapons sales.

As for the NSO, it is rather likely that the UK government itself is a client. In fact taking all of that into account it isn't unlikely that the UK government is more than just a customer and was already aware of being "hacked". But that's all I'm going to say about that.


Some context/background to the deal

the sale has been stalled for more than a year at that point , the league had decided arbitrarily to put a fitness check and delay(not reject) the deal. Roman, usmanov (minority holder ) and Abu Dhabi sovereign fund are current owners of major clubs before Saudi Arabia .

The stalling and later approval has nothing to do with concerns of sportswashing (PL has sold out any morality they had long before then). The block and later approval was mostly because Qatar was pissed .

Qatar owns PSG , hosting 2022 World Cup and most importantly owns lucrative PL broadcast rights in Middle East.

beIN with Saudi government informal support has been streaming matches illegally. Complicating this Qatar for last 4/5 years has been pretty much isolated in Middle East and kicked out of many forums in unrelated diplomatic fights.

In the end Saudi paid 1Billion pounds to Qatar to settle that dispute before Newcastle could be bought.

Sovereign/government influence peddling and involving in sports clubs is nothing new. Real Madrid has benefited a lot over the years , west ham got a brand new stadium for nothing , even in the U.S. favorable policies , tax breaks are used heavily to attract sports teams at city /state level all the time.

Democracy or dictators sports are cheap trick to improve ratings , it has been used at least since gladiators in Rome as a tool.

My intention is not defend Saudi actions just that it is not surprising governments were involved.

Disclaimer : I am a Newcastle fan


> Disclaimer : I am a Newcastle fan

As-salamu alaykum

I reckon the fans of rival clubs will absolutely terrorize you with taunting going forth.


I’m sure the Sunderland lads have already clocked it. Feel free to drop by…

https://www.readytogo.net/smb/


Shots fired!

I had to look them up. Today I Learned about one of the earliest football paintings in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunderland_A.F.C.#/media/File:...

That is pretty neat actually.

I don't really follow football but I do enjoy the shit talking. This seems like a fun team to root for actually :)


I was once goaded into going to a Sunderland away game. I was somewhat surprised to hear them chanting "he s*ts where he wants" to the tune of the theme from the Addams Family.

No, I cannot explain.


There's quite a good series on Netflix about the club called "Sunderland 'til I die". The timing was sort of perfect, when it started Sunderland had just been relegated from the Premiership (England's top tier) and I think it was intended to be a series documenting them rebuilding the team and immediately getting promoted back. In reality thought it didn't go like that at all. The team collapsed, their wealthy owner lost interest and stopped supporting them financially, they made a few management blunders and suffered more tragedy that I will not spoil.

I don't support the team, but I still found the series quite fascinating and found myself rooting for them to succeed. I was surprised to see two of my university friends in the show - Sophie (one of the backroom staff who clashed with the management) and another friend who happened to be in the crowd and got an extreme-closeup before/after a goal in one of the match sequences.


USA chiming in here to point out that the name of the sport is pronounced "soccer".


To be clear, the above was meant as satire. Maybe not a good example of the form though.


That is par of the course, you are always taunted no matter what your team is or isn’t doing .

I would rather be taunted and be in the conversation rather than fade away as a once good club .


> fade away as a once good club

Newcastle were good once? ;-)


Alright well I hope you have an explosive season.


odds are UK and UAE mutually hacked each other.


> "Like, yeah, blame the UAE mostly for this but let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all. Western countries need to do better."

The UK itself is one of the largest weapon exporters in the world, exporting to many countries in the Middle East with dubious human rights track records. The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol, bullet, missile or drone they sell (if they could, nobody would be buying):

[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_arms_export

A private Israeli company is exporting weapons to the same countries the UK does, and when those weapons get used inappropriately, you're then "surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident between the UK and Israel".

By the same account, are you suggesting that there should be a major diplomatic incident between every country in the world and the UK/USA every time they catch terrorists somewhere around the world using either UK/USA built-or-designed firearms?

There wouldn't be any diplomatic relationships left then:

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-produced_firearms


The difference is NSO control the Pegasus servers. They know who is using their tools and who is being targeted. This isn’t the same as untraced weapons.


I'm not challenging your assertion, I'm genuinely looking for backing evidence here. Do you have evidence that NSO knows who is being targeted by the tools they sell?


Of course, the most digestible form of it is on this podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/38RuwrVwAHNXgHLDOANtmj Sources are then linked on their site.



Could you please point out where exactly in this 69 minute podcast do they talk about NSO knowing who exactly is being targeted at any given moment, and what proof is there to back these claims? Could you perhaps quote the transcript?

This is a 69 minutes podcast episode, I'm not in a position to listen to all of it and try and pick out the relevant details. A lot of links are provided, but again - which of those are relevant here? Skimmed through some of them, and they don't even touch on this specific issue at-all?

As I've mentioned before, I'm not challenging your assertions - I'm looking for credible proof that NSO can tell, at any given moment, which specific people are being targeted by the clients/governments to which NSO is licensing its' software.


I’ll have a relisten later to find it but in a brief scroll I found this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/whatsapp-israe...

—-

According to WhatsApp’s filing, NSO gained “unauthorised access” to its servers by reverse-engineering the messaging app and then evading the company’s security features that prevent manipulation of the company’s call features. One WhatsApp engineer who investigated the hacks said in a sworn statement submitted to the court that in 720 instances, the IP address of a remote server was included in the malicious code used in the attacks. The remote server, the engineer said, was based in Los Angeles and owned by a company whose data centre was used by NSO.

NSO has said in legal filings that it has no insight into how government clients use its hacking tools, and therefore does not know who governments are targeting.

But one expert, John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, who has worked with WhatsApp on the case, said NSO’s control of the servers involved in the hack suggests the company would have had logs, including IP addresses, identifying the users who were being targeted.

“Whether or not NSO looks at those logs, who knows? But the fact that it could be done is contrary to what they say,” Scott-Railton said.

In a statement to the Guardian, NSO stood by its earlier remarks. “Our products are used to stop terrorism, curb violent crime, and save lives. NSO Group does not operate the Pegasus software for its clients,” the company said. “Our past statements about our business, and the extent of our interaction with our government intelligence and law enforcement agency customers, are accurate.”


Adding to this, it's relatively trivial to have encrypted traffic transit your servers without the ability to actually view the traffic. This is basic stuff so I suspect you're not going to find the evidence from people who are citing podcasts...


Correct, and when traffic transits your servers you know where that traffic is coming from (i.e. the target). I found your last comment rude considering the podcast I citied is an interview with citizen lab researchers; the people who research Pegasus malware. The podcast website also contains sources that I also linked to above. It’s “basic stuff” to look into what someone posted before making a comment like yours.


How do you identify a target individual purely from source traffic metadata...? Sure, you can identify them if you've totally rooted a target's phone and uploads all the data such that NSO group can read it - my point is that NSO group could offer transit encryption so long as they haven't backdoored whatever client is being used.

The reason I bring that up is that it's precisely the service you might offer if you wanted more plausible deniability. I still don't consider this hugely complex stuff.


What "evidence" are you looking for? Proof that humans manage the NSO servers?


The realities in that industry is that this information is provider-client privilege if you still want to sell tools.


> The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol, bullet, missile or drone they sell

You say that, but UK export law imposes a bunch of conditions, including that you're not knowingly facilitating resale to embargoed countries. And the legality of exports to Saudi Arabia has been litigated - it's legal, but only just.


> "You say that, but UK export law imposes a bunch of conditions, including that you're not knowingly facilitating resale to embargoed countries. And the legality of exports to Saudi Arabia has been litigated - it's legal, but only just."

Both the UK and Israel have export law, complete with conditions and legal frameworks for enforcement. It surely reduces the possibility of weapons ending up in the wrong hands, but it doesn't eliminate it completely. Regardless, it still doesn't imply that the manufacturers themselves or the jurisdictions they are incorporated in should somehow bear blanket responsibility for misuse.

Cyber-weapons and spying are particularly complex from this perspective, because it can be difficult to draw the lines on what constitutes as "misuse". Especially when the operator of the weapon is part of a government (a law-enforcement agency, for example), and when the victim is a citizen of a foreign jurisdiction.

With this out of the way, we're only really left with the "legal, but immoral" argument. I'm not going to argue against that (mainly because this is where things get very subjective and nuanced) - but I will say that the bar for holding an entire government accountable by invocation of "major diplomatic incidents" should be higher than that.


>The UK government can't possibly know what happens with every single pistol, bullet, missile or drone they sell (if they could, nobody would be buying):

Oh, yes they would. And they do. Quite fucking happily, too.


> let's also have a discussion about why this was sold to anyone who would pay with no oversight at all.

There will always be cyberweapon brokers. If not NSO, then someone else. And money talks.

Why would there be any oversight? What you need is plausible deniability.

I’d prefer if they started selling Pegasus to absolutely anyone at all. Like, online, for $999 a month or something. Maybe then there will be actual efforts to patch the vulnerabilities that are being exploited for it to work.


Or perhaps the security services we pay so much for could stop hoarding vulnerabilities and start patching them. So as to add to our.. security.

Of course the problem is that these services are geared towards protecting the state, as distinct from the people. It is a distinctly unpleasant legacy of the cold war. We'll learn the hard way before there's a change of mindset.


> If not NSO, then someone else.

There's a big difference between an underground group doing it in semi-secrecy, vs a state-sponsored company doing it publicly. With said company somehow not being sued into the ground or said country's action not being taken as an act of war in situations like this.

> I’d prefer if they started selling Pegasus to absolutely anyone at all

The high value of what they offer comes from the scarcity, which result in lower likelihood of it being patched.


NSO isn't the equivalent of NSA. While NSA is part of the US government and actively spied on allied countries with no repercussions, NSO is a privately held company employing ex intelligence. With mandatory service at 18 and the private sector paying between 8 to 10 times more, it's common to find these intelligence boys leaving the service asap and working in different private companies.

Implying Israel has anything to do with NSO or that the government is behind it, coupled with the amount of attention this gets relative to a company like Italian based Hacking Team (which both the FBI and Russian government made business with) is cause for concern. Is this hacker news or culturally biased vent club?

I think the domain cyclonefront is nice for a new forum, don't you? You can be an admin there, grow a short mustache and do quarter jumping-jacks.


NSA doesn't sell Hacking as as Service to foreign countries.

While NSO isn't part of the government, their work and existence is obviously very much endorsed and allowed by their government.


These products, just like any offensive weapon, aren't quite as useful for defensive purposes, or when used by someone who doesn't do this stuff 24/7.

The justification that "somebody else would have done it" is morally bankrupt, of course, as shown in Nuremberg or the Eichmann trial. It's also just not true: by definition, the alternative would be worse in some way, or it would have been the first choice from the beginning. For simple products, the margin between the knife you are selling and the next-best choice might indeed be small. For nuclear weapons, the marginal product is 100 % less useful, as far as I can tell: there is no other seller. For tanks, you can probably get some Sowjet era relics if you know the right people in the 'stans, which will be significantly worse than western state-of-the-art but not entirely useless.

I'd say Pegasus is somewhere between the tank and the nuclear bomb on that spectrum, right now. Which might well be the point where export controls are most useful, because they also reduce the need and incentive for others to enter the market as buyers and sellers, respectively.


Ah yes, because export controls have stopped bad actors in the past.

If we can't stop Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, thinking that we can stop sale of software is, mildly speaking, delusional.

I also fail to see the relevance to Nuremberg trials, because this is a simple matter of supply and demand. There definitely is demand.


> If we can't stop Iran and North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, thinking that we can stop sale of software is, mildly speaking, delusional.

I don't see any nukes in Iran.

Maybe because "we" kept that from happening, idk.


Export controls don't work? Did I miss the news, North Korea bought an MERV tipped intercontinental ballistic missile from the 'free market'? Do they have thermonuclear warheads?

I am not convinced if we way we treated Iran is justified, but thats a different suvject. And after Ukraine, noone will. Ever give up nukes


Because western countries use the same services to spy on their citizens. Even if they feigned outrage, the potential blowback could topple some people.

Besides, governments also tend not to want to be scrutinized on moral ground for trading war assets of any kind.

Why should I be enraged if government officials were put under surveillance? They made abundantly clear that they are in favor of increased monitoring. Their secret surveillance programs were laid open.

So how do you propose they should do better?


My outrage against dragnet was never about me, personally. I know I am way too unimportant to surveil. It has always been about the next thought leader, who could come from any background, from being nipped in the bud. I'm sure "they" would have loved being able to contain MLK Jr before he even had a chance to have any following

» Why should I be enraged if government officials were put under surveillance?

I am not worried about the officials themselves but the people who talk to them. Once again, the next thought leader, who could be but will never be because of the surveillance and subsequent actions.


They even tried it back in the day and with the modern surveillance we probably would not have heard from him at all. Just the right bribe to deflect the issues and it will never become a large issue in the first place.

It doesn't even have to be malicious, there are people working in these agencies that are trained to follow orders. They believe intrinsically that what they do is necessary for security. No appeal will ever work, just a tight corset of regulation or protections by law that have actual teeth with heavy sanctions against misconduct. Today some agencies just blatantly disregard the most fundamental laws. If you scrap those you don't even need terrorists anymore, you did it all to yourself.


'They believe intrinsically that what they do is necessary for security.'

That's thr rub isn't it - if you startva security agency thst does terrible things, it will hire people that can somehow justify and rationalise those terrible things

Very few people in KGB or whatever thought that they did anything wrong


You have a similar problem with police. If you day to day see instances of crime and you have a lot of contact with criminals, you develop preconceptions towards people. You view gets skewed and you start to see crime everywhere. The same happens to security agencies that deal day to day with the spy game. This is why external observers are necessary. Not primarily to punish people stepping over lines, but to provide support and reasonable boundaries and context. People with a strong sense of duty are especially vulnerable to develop a wrong perspective.

Then there is the other dimension where corporations just help the worst dictators for profit or provide surveillance capability against the population. Almost all major names in tech are guilty here to certain degrees. Some more than others, but there are no morals in business. Especially not with investment mechanisms like ESG or similar constructs to provide wellness to rich investors, but that is another topic.


Indeed, reminds me a lot about Oracle trying to sell predictive policing tech to China, tech that was already beta-tested on US protesters [0] or on the more grey scale end; Nokia facilitating lawful intercept in Russia [1]

[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/05/25/oracle-social-media-surv...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220328071032/https://www.nytim...


Ironically, the fact that it's not playing out as a major dust-up in public will probably only further contribute to conspiratorial thinking in re: the Israeli gov't.


Israel seems to have a relative degree of immunity when it comes to subverting UK pol. Anyone ever see the investigative journalist piece of the Zionist group trying to subvert the UK Labour Party? They had a journalist go undercover for 6 months recording all kinds of things they weren't meant to:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ceCOhdgRBoc

There was only minor fallout from this incident, and I imagine it will be the same here.


I watched the first 15 minutes of this and what shocked me is how unrevealing it was. If someone recorded me over the course of weeks or months, I would almost certainly say something that would land me in hot water in some sense. This piece of 'investigative journalism' I actually found embarrassing, all this editing to big it up as some major conspiracy when to me, in that 15 mins at least, was at worst run of the mill lobbying. Considering how unsavoury a character Corbyn was, I actually found the subjects incredibly restrained, perhaps part of the JD however.


[flagged]


Numbers?


Brand new account posting anti-Semitic conspiracy theory crap. I’d just flag it and move on


This is one of those Pepsi things, probably a bot..


Politics...

If russia did that, they would be treated a lot differently than israel or eg. USA.


> If russia did that, they would be treated a lot differently than israel or eg. USA.

Russia poisoned multiple British nationals with chemical and radioactive weapons on British soil and got away with it scot-free.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51722301


There are definitely some holes in the allegations. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2021/04/pure-ten-poi...


Is there any particular reason this link is actually worth reading? Is 'Crag Murray' a former high-level politician/intelligence officer with useful information? Do they have a track record of finding genuine and severe issues with government narratives?


Craig is a former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who served in the Foreign Office for many years. He's since dedicated a lot of his time to following and reporting on the Assange case in the UK.

He doesn't hide his opinions, some of which are quite strongly worded, but I don't think that makes him less worthwhile as an observer. I'd say he is less of a fact-finder/whistleblower and more of an analyser/commenter.

I personally find his articles insightful and nuanced.


Thanks! I think you should have noted that for people who have no idea who he is (I'm assuming many people outside of the UK).


Yeah, a random blog which references Russian state media. Got it. (y)


There are a few thousand kids (and their parents) in Yemen that became all-too-literal "end customers" for American exports of the non-cultural or Apple variety. It's fundamentally the same, except the impact was not metaphorical.


Maybe certain interest group within UK is working with certain interest group in Israel and "borrowed" Pegasus to use against other interest group(s).

Actually Yes Minster joked about surveillance put on certain ministers. Can watch for fun. Sitcoms nowadays rarely talk about political issues.


The UK sells weapons. Should they be blamed for anyone who is affected by them? Regardless of your own opinion they would argue no. So they can’t be hypocritical.

UAE on the other hand is a decrepit money laundering people smuggling cesspit and should face the full brunt of Iran/Russia style sanctions.


I can guarantee you that if the UK was supplying weapons to a country that was using them against its own allies, there would be an incident, and at the very least they would stop supplying them. There is no hypcrisy - yet.


These trojans do not run without central C&C, already proven in the past to be run by NSO. Selling a weapon is not travelling into a war zone and firing it off on behalf of who hired you; that's what a mercenary does, under punishment of death.


The UK is where the world's dictators and corrupt politicians hide their money. Does that mean you think that the UK should "face the full brunt of Iran/Russia style sanctions"? Take your double standards elsewhere.


I agree. Not double standards.


There's nothing to be gained by wringing our hands and kicking up a public fuss, crying to the press about it. That's not how grownups do business. We all know everyone spies on everyone else, it's a given. I'm sure GCHQ spies on Israel and UAE.

For all we know the security services already knew about this and were feeding false info to manipulate the UAE. Heck, the Israelis might have even tipped us off, I'm sure they value their relationship to us much more than with the UAE. I'd give it at least 50/50 Munk School trying to 'help' us just trashed a perfectly good MI6 counterintelligence op. That's the sort of way these things work.


Not saying you are wrong, but the kind of leaps in assumptions you make remind me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance


I'm not making any assumptions, I'm saying we just don't know. Those like the poster I'm responding to suggesting this mean this or that for international relations, and we should be responding this way or that way are making assumptions. I'm pointing out those assumptions are unsupported and somewhat naive.


Why would that be surprising? I haven't heard about Yemen being outraged at France for selling weapons to the UAE for example. Western countries can't do better, it's how the world has and always will operate.


I've not heard about France but Yemen has definitely been outraged at Britain for selling weapons to Saudi Arabia...


> Western countries need to do better

Yeah, I agree. The western nations which built their lead through brutal colonialism and presently maintain that lead with neo-colonialism structures where brutal governments (Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE) do the dirty work which they (western countries) ostensibly condemn.

How about this: let’s have the western countries leave the world alone. Let’s have the western countries abandon their profit by misery business models (eg western arms industries which profiteer by instigating conflict and supplying aggressors).


And affect my style of living? No thanks, I'll stayas i am and keep my blind eyes turning.


> surprised this isn't a major diplomatic incident

It all depends who the (UK) Government is "friends" with. Let's not forget the infamous Russian Novichok poisoning cases in Salisbury - those naughty Russians! The Saudis execute 81 citizens in a day, and Boris visits the day after to beg for oil and gas - those naughty Saudis!

I'm not surprised it isn't a major diplomatic incident!


3rd and 4th party collection are a hell of a drug


Expecting any honest reporting on Israel is naive. That hasn't happened for 70+ years.


The whole thing is barely in the news


[flagged]


> I really don’t feel that anyone is prepared to have a serious discussion regarding Israel, and I believe that’s mainly because…

…Israel’s intelligence finds or creates blackmail on more than enough key politicians and their staff in the western countries.


I expect basically every intelligence agency to do that to everyone else.

On the other hand, Johnson and many of his staff clearly can’t be blackmailed because he and many of them are totally shameless.


“Israel’s intelligence” is like a gang member calling themselves “lil NSA” or some shit. It’s the NSA and globalist interests within the US who don’t like the idea that nations are nations and they don’t control the Earth. It’s very insulting to people with compensate for a lack of personality or wit with egotism to be told you can’t just “do whatever” when you have a billion dollars. Again, I think no one is ready for a serious conversation about this. We don’t consider our rich mentally ill, and therefore there can be little else to be said or done.


Sounds like they are a very powerful force not only controlling your mentally ill rich but also living rent free in your head.


Could you explain what this comment means? It doesn’t make sense. ESL?


John Mearsheimer (Chicago professor) & Stephen Walt (Harvard professor) wrote a New York Times bestseller book called the Israel Lobby which delicately discussed in careful details the influence of the Israeli lobby on US politics.

Perhaps the treatment they got for the book is the reason many serious academics and intellectual steer clear of the topic. Which is unfortunate since the pernicious influence of the lobby has arguably grown steadily since they published the book, culminating in the election of Trump and such disastrous consequence for the world like shredding of Obama's Iran nuclear agreement.


This hits the nail on the head with a sledgehammer. It’s not merely difficult for the ideological reasons I outlined but also because of the power structures one deals with discussing it. Ah, the banal bureaucracy of evil.


>since the Israeli intelligence company was supposedly "closely monitoring how their customers were using the software"

If the Israelis were going to veto a country's use of the software, it's reasonable to assume that the country was intelligent enough not to tell them what they were doing with it.


The important thing to realize is that NSO doesn’t just hand over their attack tools completely. If they did, they would just get copied and they wouldn’t be able to charge for them.

NSO maintains control and is semi-actively involved in the exploitation (NSO servers are used and they control this access). This is very different from selling someone a knife that is later used in a murder.

There is a very good Darknet Diaries breakdown of what the NSO group can and cannot do - https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/ - and despite their claims otherwise, the evidence strongly points to them being complicit in attacks rather than just being a vendor.


This is a bit of a tangent but I think reports like these strengthen the argument against electronic voting. There's basically no way of building a secure electronic voting system that can beat the security and auditability properties of old school pen and paper voting.


Generally a lot of voting security experts advocate for paper ballots with electronic counting. It is very robust, efficient, has great fallback, and lots of systems available to keep secure.


I envision a system where after I vote I rip off the top of the card and am able to use that hash like token to later verify that my vote was counted correctly


That's only viable in countries/situations where secret ballots are not a strict requirement and vote buying is not perceived to be a problem

With paper ballots if you want to be sure that your vote was counted correctly you generally can go and see the counting process, as a bonus like that you help ensure that every vote is counted correctly


It’s possible to keep it secret, it’s just more complicated. I proposed one such setup in an old comment. Quoted here with some fixes.

“What if you get the receipt with UUID and your voting choices, then at a separate kiosk only in the polling station, you can enter your UUID to view the full results as posted online (meaning electronically recorded and stored). Along with your UUID and results, a hash of the two is displayed and can be printed onto your receipt. Before leaving the station, you must detach and dispose of the plaintext voting choices portion, but you can hang onto the UUID + hash.

At any time in the future, you can enter your UUID into the site, which will compute and display only the hash, giving you verification of no tampering but not disclosing any results to nefarious third parties.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14921442

It’s not foolproof and still requires more trust in maths than just showing your voting choices would. But it does solve vote buying and voter intimidation.


The only time vote buying was historically a problem was when it was decriminalized or legal and done out in the open. The instant it was criminalized it evaporated completely.

Doing it on a scale that is large enough enough that it becomes meaningful quickly becomes impossible even if the police only do a few half hearted sting operations.

Im not particularly in favor of electronic voting but i wish this particular meme would die coz it's mainly gonna be used to excuse voting systems corrupted at the source that the voter cant check.


From Wikipedia:

> The 2010 and 2012 surveys for the Americas Barometer showed that 15% of surveyed voters in Latin America had been offered something of value in exchange for voting a particular way

> 16% of voters [in Africa] were offered money or other goods in exchange for voting a particular way in the most recent election

And yeah, in developed countries and stable democracies it probably wouldn't be an issue, but then maybe it would eventually be, and it's a pretty big flaw to introduce in order to achieve something that is not an issue

You can already check that your vote is being counted with paper ballots, you sign up as a poll observer or worker and you look at the vote counting operations


Brazil was a clear example of where it started out legal (until 1999!). After it was made illegal it declined a lot in spite of really inconsistent enforcement.

Where it happened it was perfectly obvious who was doing it, but the cops wouldnt touch them. It was a crime committed out in the open.

A similar pattern played out in America in the 1800s where it was widespread, made illegal, started out not particularly well enforced and then it gradually became extinct.

Everywhere it's been a problem it's basically been officially tolerated. The crime quickly becomes impossible to commit if it isnt.

This is in stark contrast to many other crimes (e.g. drugs) where even strict enforcement doesnt do much.


No, you could do it in a way where the voter can verify their vote was recorded correctly but can't prove it to anyone else. Trivial method: require the voter to assign random numbers to each candidate. They remember the number of the candidate they chose. The voting system later says "you voted for 6".


And how do you avoid a scenario in which you assign 6 to candidate X but the machine secretly assigns 6 to candidate Y?


You have all of the recording done to a paper tape that the user can inspect as their vote is made. That paper tape is read by machine later. That means you only need to trust the counting machine, which is pretty easy because you can easily do random samples to check it is working, or have both parties count or whatever.

You can't eliminate the possibility that your paper vote is completely discarded and replaced by fake ones. But that's not really any different to existing non-electronic voting.


I envision the same system to later verify the votes I bought


This is one of the reasons it’s not legal in many places to take a picture of a filled out ballot.


I think the problem is who builds it. I wouldn’t trust election software that wasn’t open source with a lot of eyeballs on it. Diebold wasn’t exactly a shining example to set. Preferably a non profit organization backing it and then having it adopted as a standard. I just don’t see that happening in the US where voter obstruction is part of at least one party’s strategy.


Open source doesn’t actually matter here. A closed source electronic system should work just as well. Why?

The way it should work is the machine should just print out a scantron AND a human legible copy (probably with a bar code linking the two). The person submits both by hand. You get early results by counting the scantron. Before certification, there is a statistically significant manual counting of the human legible ballots. For tighter races you recount all. The linked barcode lets you also statistically cross-validate in case there was a discrepancy between the machine readable copy printed and the hand ballot (you sample randomly).

Open source means absolutely 0 here. There are too many vectors of attack (eg physically compromising a machine, chain of custody, malware etc). Better to assume the machine is compromised and build a system that doesn’t care.


Back in 2004, “Official federal voting system standards require audit logs to record all normal and abnormal events that occur on the system.”

And yet at that time Diebold had a system that did NOT do that deployed all across the US. Someone was deleting votes, and it wasn’t being logged.

Here’s lawmakers saying “should” do something, and an opaque reality where that didn’t happen. It was also running windows…

This is an attack vector. I prefer transparency. Open source would help.


> Open source would help.

How does open source help? If I place a device in front of you and tell you it's open source, there is no guarantee that it is running what you can download from github.


> It was also running windows…

Nothing wrong with this choice. The rest of your point still stands though.


It’s just that windows is quite a bit more complex and vulnerable compared to much simpler and security focused OSs like a BSD back then or maybe Alpine Linux these days.


That's the point of the system I described. Vulnerabilities of the automated system don't matter. You verify the manual result and the digital result are the same.


The only output of the machine could be a bit of paper that you can view through a window and verify. Doesn't really matter if it's closed source.


So we don’t have to trust that the company wrote it correctly. https://www.wired.com/2009/08/diebold-audit-logs


Correct.

Not sure why you linked that?


The issue is verification - how do you verify the elctronic count was accurate? And if you're going to manually count it to verify the electronic count, then why have the electronic count in the first place?


A small, statistically representative sample of the paper ballots are counted by hand and compared against the electronic count. If discrepancy arises, a more thorough audit is performed.


Interesting, makes sense. Is this actually the recommended resolution process by the vendors as well or is this something that needs to be approved and adopted by each voting precinct?


Because the results can be statistically verified with sampling rather than a full manual recount?


Spot checks are good enough in such a case; if you manually count 1% of the votes and the margin of error is negligible, the electronic count is sound. If there's too many errors / differences, stop using the electronic counting and just count by hand.

I mean it's not exactly rocket science.


Do a manual count for a random sample plus all tight races and in case of any suspicions or challenges.


This is what a lot of states get wrong, with the voting machine itself being the gateway to entering your vote and having it read. For the machines in my Georgia county, it prints a paper ballot that you drop it into a counting/scanner machine, but the issue is that the only thing on the paper is a QR code that is likely encrypted (nothing readable when scanned with a standard QR reader), so there really isn't a way to verify that the paper you got actually matched what you entered into the ballot machine.

The ideal system is: ballot machine entry -> prints paper ballot scantron style, so the only information the scanner will see is what you've verified is correct -> scanner reads it and enters it into their database while also saving the paper.


This is how it works in India: Once we click the button for a candidate, There will be light highlighting the selection on the voting machine. A printer that is connected to the voting machine prints the voted candidate symbol (and name?) and shows us the printed paper through a glass for a few seconds for verification and then drops it in.

Later during the counting procedure, random ballots are counted for both. If someone arises some issues about the voting, those are then counted using printed ballot papers.


India is the only country doing electronic voting well that I'm aware of

Almost certainly the only one doing it well and at scale


I do not think so (my opinion, I may be wrong here).

Paper ballots (pen and paper) are susceptible to more rigging. Government officials can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results. It is seen in many countries where corruption is very high in the election commission. In these places, elected candidates, voters, 'pro-democracy' individuals advocate for electronic voting (Electronic Voting Machine, EVM.)

Recently, we saw the images and videos from the recent Belarus Lukashenk elections, where the officials just threw out paper ballots. In Pakistan, to curb voter fraud by paper ballots the previous Imran Khan (PTI) Government tried to install electronic voting equipments at locations particularly in rural areas where voter fraud was at a really high rate.

The ruling Government can use its state power to influence the outcome of elections. By pen and paper, the actual voting happens in a 'democratic way', but, the counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud.

Whereas, in electronic voting, 'Code Is Law, every single vote is counted properly. To curb the cons/disadvantages of electronic voting, which are

a.) The underlying code can be tweaked by the ruling government to give them an advantage in the counting.

b.) Voter fraud can be committed by abusing the actual hardware of the voting machine.

To solve this particular problem, the Election Commission of India (ECI) recently tried to bring some new changes. It majorly includes, having paper proof along with electronic proof called as VVPAT (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail). The way it happens is:- When you cast your vote to a candidate 'C', the machine will print a slip with the proof of your vote to candiate 'C'.

So, if the opposition party alleges that voter fraud happened with the tampering of EVM, the election commission (or an independent third party, or the opposition candidate himself on his own) can then do a recount based on the VVPAT slips and cross-check the results per booth (per EVM).


> can directly change the results by deliberately miscounting the results

This is why in liberal democracies the process of casting and counting votes is usually done in the presence of at least representatives of the candidates running and more usually whoever wants to attend them

You'd need total complicity in every single polling station to cheat without raising alarms

In electronic/internet voting, unless there is a paper trail which can be counted in the same manner as manual voting, all you need is government officials to tweak the code/the hardware being used. Are you going to let every candidate audit every single machine independently? Unlikely since that is, in and of itself, a security risk

> where the officials just threw out paper ballots

And since they had to physically remove material evidence we were able to get videos of it happening. Plugging an USB while the machine is in the warehouse or in the middle of voting can be done a lot more discreetly

> counting is left to individuals which will commit voter fraud

Which is why counting is usually done with supervision

The system in India works, but it works because it reduces the entire process to a paper ballot. Ultimately the security guarantees of the Indian elections are identical to the security guarantees of the traditional paper ballot system

The digital component is limited to easing the logistics of getting the first results of the election in a timely manner

Which is about the extent to which you should trust electronic voting


You pointed the problems out yourself, but the compromise india gives is severely misguided: It leaves the possibility of the paper ballots not being counted. If the paper ballots aren't counted, you open yourself up to the possibility of both a) and b). If the paper ballots are always counted, Tom Scott had the very nice quote "Congratulations, you just invented the world's most expensive pencil."

There is no better way of voting than physical paper, but the running government has to be both determined to allow democratic elections and enforce its monopoly on violence to protect the voters and ballots.


True, it can be costly, I agree with it. But there is no other way to have fair elections where everyone beleives that the election which happened was fair itself.

In paper ballot voting, the election commision is gonna count the paper ballots one by one. It is gonna cost money. The same amount of money will be for EVM+VVPAT. (less actually, as paper counting will be less and reserved for candidates who want a recount).


Does having a paper trail generated exactly after voting help? This is the system that's followed in India. I tried to think of ways it could fail but it seemed pretty fool proof as far as I can think. I'm pretty sure I might have missed some corner case


If you're going to have a paper trail for an electronic system, then why not just use the paper system?

It's like there's a pro-electronic movement that's looking for every excuse to move to electronic...

Ok, so we go electronic. We put in all these extra checks and balances to account for it's downsides. It runs well. People start questioning the need for the checks and balances, since it's so full-proof. So we remove the checks and balances. <anakin-fun-begins.gif> <shocked-pikachu.gif>

For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election.


In India at least there is a lot of votes to manually count. Electronic just makes things smoother. As for people questioning the need I didn't hear anyone raising the during the last election I followed. Besides I'm pretty sure either the election commission of India or the various opposition parties will point out the problems with having just electronic vote records. As far as electronic voting with paper trail goes I see it as just a normal paper based voting system with an automated counting system that can be easily verified


> "For the people that complain about the staffing requirements for a paper-based election: it's a feature, not a bug. The sheer number of people involved make it virtually impossible to rig an election."

There are two ways to rig an election. The first is miscounting or changing votes but I think the other is the real risk and likely dates to the very first time we as a species ever started having votes by anonymous ballot: ballot stuffing. If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process, the entire system is vulnerable.

And the number of votes required to change elections tends to be shockingly low. In the 2020 election, more than 155 million people voted, but the outcome of the presidential election itself was decided by a total of less than 43,000 votes [1]. That's a margin of victory of 0.03%. So a system that was 99.9% accurate at ensuring that each ballot was completely legitimate would be insufficient.

[1] - https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/02/10/wapo-the-...


Here in Australia, ballots are (initially) counted at the place they were cast. Every ballot issued has a corresponding (but unlinkable) person on the roll (electors are crossed off the roll prior to a ballot being issued). The count of names crossed corresponds to the number of ballots issued which will correspond to the number of ballots counted at the end of the day. Virtually impossible to "insert" a ballot as then your final count would exceed ballots issued.

As the count is completed at the polling place, of which there are multiple per electorate, the total number of votes is substantially lower than 43,000 even, and so the % accuracy is much higher. No publicised figure (that I know of) for how many "missing" ballots there can be before questions are raised, but I suspect its in the single digit range. Ballots are generally counted a couple of times but, even more if there's any ballots missing.


> If, at any time in counting process, an individual could successfully insert a single valid but fabricated ballot into the process

This varies by jurisdiction obviously, but where I'm from the procedure for counting must be done in an area which the public can access and it begins with a single person taking ballots out of the box one by one and giving it to a chain of 2-3 other people.

This way you can count how many ballots were taken out of the box and check with the totals at the end

And obviously the box is always in the presence of observers from various stakeholders

> less than 43,000 votes

Unless you can predict where these tiny margins will manifest with perfect accuracy you'd need to add a lot more fake votes, or at least have thousands of conspirators ready to add them at a moment's notice, that's ridiculously hard to organize discreetly


I’d argue that gerrymandering is a far bigger issue than ballot stuffing. Its sole purpose is to ensure that elections go in favor of the party who draws the map. If that ain’t rigging an election, I don’t know what is.


I presume costs (wages vs computers) are a significant factor.


> then why not just use the paper system?

One reason is efficiency, if you have the machines counting you get results faster and then you can audit only a random sample of machines records and get statistical guarantees of the election integrity. (The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others did cheat)

A second is that it allows one more level of trust. With a paper ballot you have to trust that the poll workers are going to notice/stop/not help ballot stuffing etc. In most cases that's a good enough guarantee, but with voting machines you can also trust the people who programmed audited it

If the poll workers are trustworthy, because of the paper trail, you don't have to trust the auditers of the machines, but if you don't trust the poll workers then you can gain a modicum of trust from the auditers

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2019/12/06/how-elect...

This link talks about the benefits in the indian election, specifically a software lock on the amount of votes per minute that can be cast

It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random

One last way it might be useful, though this is an abstract scenario, is if you want to deploy a more complicated to count voting system to large areas. In some voting systems counting can't be done in parallel, you need to do one round of counting, wait for everyone else and then do a second round and so on.

Similarly some voting systems might benefit from a digitized interface (for instance ballots in austria look like this: https://cdn1.vienna.at/2013/09/zettel.jpg and there are systems which would lead to even larger forms) which outputs a paper trail with only the actual information the voter inputed (in the case of the ballot I showed it'd pretty much just show a party name and a list of candidate names)

In these cases a machine outputting an auditable digital model of the votes cast would greatly simplify counting procedures. You could have every polling station just publish a signed file with the votes in their station and everyone could run the election algorithm

The votes can then be audited same as in the indian system


> The machine can't know before that it will be audited so if you test thousands of machines and find no discrepancy it's highly unlikely a significant portion of the others did cheat

> It also shows that in 2013 they audited "only" 20k machines out of almost millions yet found no discrepancy. Statistically that's probably good enough if the choice of machines audited was random

So how do you protect against the corrupt actor manipulating every machine except the percent that will be checked?

> With a paper ballot you have to trust that the poll workers are going to notice/stop/not help ballot stuffing etc

There's a simple and straight forward solution: Have people from opposing political parties count the vote and check each others result. If you have members of the far left, far right and everything in between sitting there, checking each others results, theres about a 0% chance any vote will be miscounted.

> In these cases a machine outputting an auditable digital model of the votes cast would greatly simplify counting procedures. You could have every polling station just publish a signed file with the votes in their station and everyone could run the election algorithm

There is no difference between a machine publishing the counted votes and the poll workers publishing the counted votes, is there?


> how do you protect against the corrupt actor manipulating every machine except the percent that will be checked?

According to this: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/count-vvpat-slips-...

India checks 5 machines randomly selected in each voting "segment", no clue what that is but it's smaller than a constituency so I guess it's a polling station

From what I understood that's done locally right away after polls close. So that means that you'd need a way for the conspirators to identify the non tampered machines and for them to randomly select exactly those machines and you'd need them to be present in almost all polling stations and no one to challenge the choice

At that point it's essentially the same level of trust needed for paper ballots

> Have people from opposing political parties count the vote and check each others result

Yeah, but apparently that particular attack vector was a problem in India and this feature helps mitigate it, electoral solutions need to account for the practical situation they're in. For instance I don't support any form of electronic voting machines in my polity because the electoral system works fine with paper ballots and there aren't issues of ballot stuffing

> There is no difference between a machine publishing the counted votes and the poll workers publishing the counted votes, is there?

Yeah, but I was talking, for lack of a better term, about non additive electoral systems, in which the information conveyed in multiple ballots cannot be easily compressed

For instance in the FPTP system you can compress all the information in a polling station by counting how many votes for X how many for Y etc. And you can simply add up these numbers to other stations

The complexity scales linearly with the number of candidates

In a system like, for instance, IRV, where the voter ranks the candidates and the rank is an important part of the ballot itself you can't easily transpose all this information into a single number

The most you could do is build a tree data structure where the first level nodes are the first preferences and each node points to other nodes based on the successive preferences.

In this case the complexity of the process is exponential/factorial because you need a field for every possible combination of preferences, including cases in which not all candidates are ranked

My point was that going from a ballot to that structure is probably more error prone and time consuming to do manually than having a machine do it and that could conceivably be a reasonable justification to use electronic voting machines

The auditing will still be time consuming but that's mitigated by the fact that you audit only a portion of voting machines

But to clarify, I'm of the opinion that paper ballots and manual counting are preferable in every electoral system used at the national level that I'm aware of

India's electronic system is just not worse than paper ballots, which for electronic voting systems is a huge success


I’ve always wondered they we’ll get the cyberpunk future we envisioned when people decide physical media is the sweet spot between paper/written representation and digital media. Like old cdrom style discs that can only possibly be write-once, and the provenance of the data on it depends on the physical presence of the media itself.

Not that I’m necessarily advocating for it. Just they seems like a plausible future.


For voting integrity, the vote that is saved needs to be human-readable (the voter should be able to make sure that the digital part of the machine didn't change their vote), so digital storage is right out.


Plus, even with some absolutely secure digital voting system, there's no way you could explain it to most people. A huge advantage of paper voting is that everyone can understand it works and how it can be attacked. Otherwise it's going to be even easier to claim the system is rigged or foreign hackers manipulated the vote or whatever, to undermine trust.


There’s actually a pretty interesting approach in which: voters can see that their vote counted, everyone can tally anonymous votes, and it is resistant to DoS https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/RR14b.pdf

Of course, the real problem would be explaining to the general population that this works. Great in theory, but will never pan out


If you can verify your vote, how do you stop threats or bribery being used to buy votes?

Show me your receipt saying you voted for Big Ron and I’ll give you a fiver and/or won’t hit you in the knees with a spanner.


Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well, so regardless of mechanism you’re in a pretty sticky situation.

It’s not a perfect system, but I would personally find it comforting knowing that I could verify that my vote counted and that I could independently confirm the election results

Edit: haven’t read the paper in a while, but IIRC you can see that the vote counted without revealing details of who you voted for. They definitely would have covered this case


> Big Ron can ask you to take a picture of the paper ballot as well,

You can take a picture of a marked paper ballot, trade it in for a fresh one (original is destroyed) and mark the new one differently and turn it in.

A ballot picture doesn't prove the ballot was cast and counted, a receipt that identifies the voted candidate does.


Camera bans are strictly enforced in polling stations.


You go into a private booth with a curtain where no one can see what you’re doing. If coercion is at play, I don’t think a ban is going to stop you.

That said, check the edit. This case is definitely covered, I just forgot


We would need some voting system where each person can verify that their vote was properly counted, something like this: secure end-to-end verifiable e-voting system using zero knowledge based blockchain: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/466.pdf


We should never consider any voting system that is not simple to the point of being almost-trivial. Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating which are enough to create massive instability - even when they are provably false. We see this even with the current election systems!

Since there's no simple way to explain 'blockchain' to non-tech people, any voting system using it is irrelevant - and will end up discarded like nearly all the other attempts invoking blockchain hype.


> Anything even slightly more complex than necessary will lead to accusations of cheating

The zero-knowledge proof avoids that...

Even with paper ballots, there's no way to verify that your vote was counted.... as far as I know


The zero-knowledge proof avoids true accusations of a particular type of cheating. However, the biggest problem is humans, not machines. An election system must be ELI5able, or we can expect a fair amount of instability regardless of truth.


There are plenty of ELI5 explanations of zero-knowledge proofs


Yeah, not like there's any sort of transparent way to audit a public chain of data blocks representing votes associated with an anonymous certificates that would allow end users (verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics) to check their votes were recorded correctly and for 3rd parties to easily audit the vote totals.

That's a problem that hasn't been solved at all by the current applications of cryptography.

Even if my computer gets hacked, as long as I can trivially search my "confirmation id" from another device to ensure it's what I cast, I'm going to see if it was or wasn't tampered with.

Having public records of votes on a per vote basis with multiple layers of cryptographic signatures at each stage of processing them would be a world of improvement over the current system, both client side and server side attacks considered.


Being able to easily validate what individual people voted for is exactly the opposite of what you want in a voting system, as it make vote buying/selling trivial. I suggest looking into the huge list of previous electoral fraud for all the different kind of attacks that need to be defended against: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud


Voter coercion and retaliation for voting 'the wrong way' is probably even more important than vote buying/selling.

A key feature of a secret ballot is that it must remove the ability for anyone to verify how you voted even with your cooperation (no matter if willing, coerced or bought) - you must have plausible deniability i.e. any reasonable "demonstration" to others how you voted must be possible even if you actually voted differently.


This argument never really made sense to me, because it's already completely undermined by mail in voting in which you can not only sell your vote but even have the guy you sold it to turn it in for you so he can be 100% certain he's getting what he wanted. You can even give him a 'blank check' by filling out your personal data/signature, and leave the vote slots blank for him.

And for context on the scale of this, in the 2020 election there were 65,642,049 mail-in-votes cast. And the outcome of the presidential election was decided by 42,921 votes. [1]

[1] - https://www.cfr.org/blog/2020-election-numbers


> it's already completely undermined by mail in voting

This keeps coming up but is not generally true. See my comment from another thread [0]:

I don't know how it's done in the USA, but in Germany voting by post has to be carried out before the day of the election. The actual postal votes are stored and only opened on the day of the election. After somebody send in their postal vote they can go to the public voting office and declare to invalidate their postal vote. The people counting the postal votes will get a list with invalidated votes and remove these envelopes before the votes are opened. The person who invalidated can then either do another postal vote or vote at the ballot box.

So in Germany postal voting is secured against selling votes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30843447


> already completely undermined by mail in voting

Which is why mail in voting is a bad idea

Just because bad things are happening doesn't mean people need to like more bad things being made easier to achieve


> verified with registration cards and authorized with their mobile device biometrics

What does "verified" even mean here? At the end of the day, you need to convert it to some cryptographic key, and then that key is vulnerable to attack: either it's kept in the voting machine, in which case the machines themselves are a single point of failure, or else it's given to voters, in which case their insecure phones, computers, etc are easily compromised to get the keys.

Checking your votes doesn't help: a significant number of people do not vote. An attacker can submit votes on behalf of those people using their keys and noone will know, and even if you find someone who claimed that they didn't vote, how would you ever prove it either way?

The advantage of a physical system is that there is no single point of failure: changing the overall election result requires a physical presence at multiple polling locations. All electronic voting solutions are intrinsically worse in that respect.


these hacks can influence politicians after they've been voted in. If anything direct rigging of a vote is more transparent : people can notice if the vote goes against common sense.


And what were GCHQ, MI6 and NCSC doing to protect our prime-minister at this time?

We have a problem in democratic nations. I've written about it here [1]. Bruce Schneier has also addressed it in his own way.

Our lack of any framework for civic cybersecurity is a disgrace. People in future ages will look back on our time as a wild-west.

A solution can only come from a ground-up awareness through education.

[1] http://www.icicte.org/assets/icicte2019_5.4_farnell.pdf


The Johnson government has been widely but toothlessly criticized for using WhatsApp on personal devices to conduct affairs of state (and deleting messages, failing to hand over messages to investigations, etc.). My personal opinion is that they don't care too much about this type of thing (being hacked by UAE, etc.), and are preoccupied with more selfish matters. It can be quite profitable to be the butler to Gulf, Russian, and UK billionaires.


I do think secret services did more damage than good with their forward surveillance of citizens, which basically was wild west surveillance initiated by states. The lost trust cannot be repaid for decades, maybe even centuries. It basically voided the significance of huge parts of constitutions of many countries that explicitly forbid such actions. This is beyond political realities of realpolitik where the justification was an alleged immediate threat of terrorism.

And that is an overall problem. The fears decide the action. So improving security is becoming dangerous, because parents or teachers just putting their children into a cage of complete surveillance is the most probable outcome. Because the ambition is to get more control. But that doesn't provide much security at all and creates even far greater threats than the "wild west" free open net ever posed in the past.


>And what were GCHQ, MI6 and NCSC doing to protect our prime-minister at this time?

Preparing an advertising campaign against E2E encryption: https://www.engadget.com/the-uk-government-is-reportedly-pla...


> And what were GCHQ, MI6 and NCSC doing to protect our prime-minister at this time?

Nobody is perfect - but there are people who blatantly ignore ITSEC best practices and are therefore almost unprotectable.


> Nobody is perfect - but there are people who blatantly ignore ITSEC best practices and are therefore almost unprotectable.

I hear you, but I would contest that they're not at liberty to ignore them. If pizza delivery drivers consent to obligations to carry issued and configured devices while on duty by what exceptionalism is Downing Street excused?

Secondly, I'd say that they may make themselves unprotectable, but that is not where their duty of care ends. Boris Johnson is not only responsible for his own security, but that of a nation. Insofar as the spooks are responsible for Boris (god help them) their pants are round their ankles again.


I don't think you really want a world where the security services can overrule the elected government, rather than the other way round.

However, I'm not one to defend either MI5 or Johnson here. MI5 routinely surveil anyone to the left of the Tory party as being some kind of dissident. The Johnson government is notorious for ignoring any kind of rules, restraint, or best practice. If they had something to say about it, they should have done so in public like the rest of us, once privately recommending had failed.


> I don't think you really want a world where the security services can overrule the elected government, rather than the other way round.

Well said, and excellent point. But I would like to live in a world where security services could professionally, and in good faith, advise other public servants, who would professionally, and in good faith heed that advice. As I understand it that fits the actual job description for all parties.

A world in which public servants are adversaries, in which intra- and inter-institutional trust has totally broken down seems to be the fruits of the misadventure, over-reach and disrespect for the Rule of Law in all quarters.


Well, yes. But we're not dealing with public servants in the Cabinet, we're dealing with inept looters who are being propped up by the conservative press.


> Nobody is perfect - but there are people who blatantly ignore ITSEC best practices and are therefore almost unprotectable

This is tangential to this story however. Even people who follow best practices can get owned when ex-Mossad/8200 agents armed with dozens of zero days and millions of dollars come after them.


Could these agencies enumerate some phone models / sw versions that are vulnerable to Pegasus and just blast email the govt folks "if you got one of these it's vulnerable, upgrade to new hardware or software { list of phones without known vulnerabilities here }"?


Well, what if the lists got leaked, and the secret services no longer can spy on the electorate with these tools? /s


'solution can only come from a ground-up awareness through education'

Average consumer cannot be responsible for security. Not because they are uneducated but becauae corporations have physicall talen away control from us.

You have no control over software running on your router supplied by the internet company, wifi printer, smart toaster, tesla or what crapware is preinstalled on your phone (often you can't even update it)

So since they took away control, they shoupd be held financially accountable


> because corporations have physically taken away control from us.

The solution of ground-up awareness and education I am suggesting involves making sure people understand they must take that back. The tag-line for the final chapter of my book is "Taking back tech" [1]

> You have no control over software....

Well, actually you do, but it is insufficient, and moreover others have control over it which they should not. Legislation can fix this, but legislation requires an educated user base first. Many folks don't know how they are being abused, or even that they are being abused. This is the project of a new digital literacy.

Digital literacy 1.0 was about "the amazing things computers can do" Digital literacy 2.0 is about "the dangerous things computers shouldn't do"

> So since they took away control, they should be held financially accountable

I don't think money is a factor in this. The questions revolve around fundamental rights, responsibilities, ownership and control, One cannot buy or sell such obligations.

[1] https://digitalvegan.net


>And what were GCHQ, MI6 and NCSC doing to protect our prime-minister at this time?

Laughing their tits off?


>Bruce Schneier has also addressed it in his own way.

very interesting, can you link to it? tia!


Sure I guess this one [1] is fairly typical of Bruce's psoition. He identifes as (coined the phrase?) working as a "public interest technologist". He mentions this throughout his writing. I took to using the term "civic cybersecurity" and "digital self defence" after about 2014. I think we're on the same page, loosely.

[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2019/02/public-inte...


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There's so much that's factually wrong with this comment I don't know where to start. 1. The UK does have a Bill of Rights (It's different in England and Scotland). The English one pre-dates the US Bill of rights by a century[0]. 2. It does have a constitution, but not a written constitution in the American sense[1]. 3. The Queen doesn't nominate Bishops; she rubber stamps nominations by a committee who are approved by the PM. 4. The Queen does not vote in elections.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...


I stopped reading around: "Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;" and something about (only) Ireland repealed it in [1].

In [2] it says, quite straight faced, that "The Constitution of the United Kingdom or British constitution comprises the written and unwritten arrangements that establish the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a political body. Unlike in most countries, no attempt has been made to codify such arrangements into a single document. Thus, it is known as an uncodified constitution. This enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched.[2] However, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom recognises that there are constitutional principles, including parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, democracy and upholding international law".

There is no codified constitution but there are constitutional principles. Because it is not "entrenched" it can be easily changed. How can someone even say this without an Orwellian sneer? If a North Korean said that we would laugh them out of the room.

Edit: North Korea does have a constitution. Written. Just not followed. Britain does not have a written constitution but it is followed (how?), except when it is not as in the wag that it just takes a minister's signature to violate an unwritten (but somehow codified) constitutional principle.


> Because it is not "entrenched" it can be easily changed.

Don't downvote him, he's right: we literally went round all this with the various Brexit cases. Especially "R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union": https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2016-0196-judgme...

40. "Unlike most countries, the United Kingdom does not have a constitution in the sense of a single coherent code of fundamental law which prevails over all other sources of law"

43. "This is because Parliamentary sovereignty is a fundamental principle of the UK constitution, as was conclusively established in the statutes referred to in para 41 above. It was famously summarised by Professor Dicey as meaning that Parliament has “the right to make or unmake any law whatsoever; and further, no person or body is recognised by the law as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament” - op cit, p 38"

If you have a majority in Parliament - which the current government does on 43% of the vote - you can do anything. That is the long and the short of it. All the rest you might think is there - bills of attainder, retroactive legislation, any kind of rights whatsoever - can be overwritten and it is merely convention not to do so. Longstanding convention, but convention none the less. Last bill of attainder was 1820, but you could argue that the Shamina Begum case was a similar thing with extra steps.

The UK is currently subject to CJEU and ECHR external courts, but from a constitutional point of view that is "voluntary" and the government could also choose to withdraw from those just as it did from the EU.


“If you think for a minute, is it not the case that every dictator in the world has a bill of rights, every banana republic, every republic has a bill of rights?”

- Antonin Scalia

A constitution without the ecosystem and institutions to carry it out is meaningless paper. Institutions without a constitution, but with a long history of case law can be just.

Governments are systems but people aren't computers and laws aren't source code.


This is a good train of thought even though you quoted Scalia who was a strict constructionist.

Care to expand on it?


A constitution without separation of powers with the possibility of judging the representatives is worthless.

The fact that doing so is difficult (the most blatant case being Nixon) does not make it worthless, it only helps granting the executive some stability (because it has usually been elected by the people, so it needs some berth to operate).

In that sense, the US constitution is a very good early example.

The independence of the judiciary is essential.

I am not defending the US constitution per se, though.


> Britain does not have a written constitution but it is followed (how?),

Pretty much the same as in the US/Australia/etc where written constitutions exist: the courts strike down unconstitutional laws or acts.


In the absence of a written constitution whatever is unconstitutional is the ad-hoc interpretation of the Justices (or whatever they are called in the UK). There are arguments in the US about strict constructionists vs. judicial activism in regards to justices and judgements.

How do those debates and decisions happen in the UK? Do they just go with whatever the Judiciary deem to be constitutional zeitgeist of the land?


Don’t they use past decisions as juris-prudence? With centuries of constitutional decisions you start to have a good amount of records to base your judgement on.

But generally speaking I feel that the “interpretation of the constitution” where judges have the responsibility to interpret century old documents is a very US thing, other democracies generally have a more recent constitution, and see it as a living document.


Largely they don't. It's simply not a significant part of UK political discourse, unlike America where many important rights (even interracial marriage!) are the result of court decisions.

It has only picked up in a couple of areas: the conflict of ECHR especially right not to be tortured and right to family life with UK immigration law. And of course around Brexit.


They are the final court of appeal, but they can't strike down primary legislation because Parliament is sovereign. They can strike down secondary legislation and legislation that may be contrary to the Human Rights Act (with the agreement of parliament in many cases). They can make life difficult for the Government, but Parliament can always make new laws. I think the UK system is more democratic because it does not give the judiciary primacy over elected representatives.


> Britain does not have a written constitution but it is followed (how?)

Perhaps this is just a tacit admission that writing the rules on a piece of paper changes nothing. People follow the rules as a kind of collective consensus. Writing them down in one place wouldn’t change that.


"The English have a system that is no system, which is also a system, only better."

- I have completely forgotten the quote source, but it is a lesser cited quip from a famous political philosopher.


Fun fact: In addition to the Queen, the Speaker of the House of Commons also cannot vote due to their role in keeping order between all parties.


"Britain is not a democracy in any modern sense of the word."

Demos kratos - things/doings of the people (or similar) - Old Greek. Nowadays it describes a generally agreed form of government and approach to governing. After that it gets pretty complicated - your democracy may not match mine ...

I'm going to be voting for councillors soon in Somerset, along with everyone else here who can be bothered to turn out. We are not forced to vote. We can freely discuss the vote. We have a reasonable expectation of our vote being counted correctly and can inspect the process if we wish. We can volunteer to count votes too.

That's just local government stuff. Obviously, countrywide elections are taken rather more seriously.

I'm sure your home country of India has similar processes and probably invented them in the first place.


Yours is the most honest answer, but yes, lets agree that Democracy means one person/one vote and everyone's vote is equal. The Brits have a pretty good form of government for its citizen but a one-person/one-vote-and-equal vote it is not. Similarly a country where the Majority's choice does not become President (like the US) does not qualify no matter how loudly they proclaim themselves to be the world's oldest democracy. Those folks also conveniently forget that they just got universal suffrage in 1967.

India did not invent democracy or representative assemblies and I am sure that principle occurred to many a tribe wandering the Savannah or Steppes a long time ago. There are written records of Republican assemblies dating back to ~500 BC in India.


As much as I might want to believe in "one person, one vote" defining a democracy, I don't think it does. It's certainly not in the dictionaries I look it up in (e.g., [1]), and it's not like we don't carve out exclusions even in the most democratic societies (e.g., a 15-year-old would have a hard time finding a place where they could vote). Heck, my understanding is you don't even need to have elections for a democracy, let alone letting every person vote - check out the system in [2]. I don't really like that lottery system, but it sure seems pretty democratic to me.

This isn't to say the US or UK or whatnot is a perfect democracy by any stretch, but that's how I'd describe them: flawed democracies. They're still close enough to democracies to be called democracies, but they're flawed/defective/etc., so that's what I'd call them. (Unless you're going for a no-true-Scotsman thing.)

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy

[2] https://democracywithoutelections.org/


It does though - "rule of the majority" in the Webster definition implies one person, one vote. If you work out the mathematics starting from n=2, and then by induction it holds. If not one-person/one-vote then for every n, there exists a set of weights, for which one person can usurp the popular vote. In the US, due to the electoral college, some state resident's vote counts for more than others which is why the loser of the popular vote can be the President. Company boards are famously not one-share-one-vote as the latest Muskian opera shows.

The legal age cutoff is a red-herring - every self-proclaimed democracy has a legal voting age i.e. definition of what constitutes the one-person. As long as it is applied uniformly across genders, races and the rest then it is does not take away from the one-person/one-vote criteria. I would argue that if they can enlist you to fight (and die) for them, then you should be able to vote. However different societies might have different criteria for what constitutes the person in one-person-one-vote.

BTW, thank you for your comment, after all the sneering and name-calling it is nice to engage is reasoned discourse.


Note majority rule isn't in the definition either, it's just strongly correlated. As the simplest example, a democracy that required 55% of the votes wouldn't stop being a democracy. For more different examples, see the lottery system I linked to, or imagine variations thereof (e.g., half the population votes one year, half the next year, etc.).

Also, I don't think the age-limit is a red herring in this case to be honest, since it's another manifestation of "who is a person". Claiming a 17yo is not a person in the US but is a person in Argentina undermines the notion that there's a universal definition of democracy (even one that has an age cutoff)... which is the premise of this entire argument! Otherwise we're acknowledging different societies can differ on whose votes they care about, and still be democracies. (Which I think is fine: we merely need a fair & just definition of democracy. It just isn't as simple as "one person, one vote", is all.)


> "As the simplest example, a democracy that required 55% of the votes wouldn't stop being a democracy."

Good point. Considering that 55% is > 50%, would we not say that anything that requires more than 50%, is a supra-majority system? In a multi-party system, they sometimes require some thresholds which requires runoffs but I would consider them supra-majority or supra-variations on the majority rule.

> Claiming a 17yo is not a person in the US but is a person in Argentina undermines the notion that there's a universal definition of democracy... which is the premise of this entire argument!

Societies the world over different notions of what constitutes legal age for driving, marriage, enlisting and in general to be considered of age. Voting is just one more manifestation of that inconsistency.

Your other point about lottery systems does seem interesting but could we not say that term-limits are a (poor) version of a lottery system? Term limits have pros-and-cons and those would transfer to the lottery system, namely lack of institutional knowledge to run a govt in which case the bureaucracy (also called the deep state in fringe literature) would dominate.


I just wrote a long reply to your comment, but I realized it ultimately was just a ramble, so I'll scrap it.

To answer your questions briefly:

- Sure, I guess we can call it that.

- Term limits seem orthogonal to the lottery system though? You can have either with or without the other. Not sure I can see them as being versions of each other.


Sorry for the delay in replying - timezones etc!

Democracy doesn't mean one person one vote per se - it means governance by "the people" instead of the tyrant. Ironically a tyrant might be deliberately installed in times of peril by the people and then removed from office later on. Politics were quite robust in those days. Politics - from politike I think (never studied Greek, only Latin) - people of the city, also "police" is derived from politike or perhaps polis, which is nearly how Police is pronounced with a Scottish accent - especially around Glasgow.

Let's face it when the Greeks came up with a functional democracy, slavery was routine and obviously women and servants and other undesirables were ineligible to vote. Times have changed somewhat since then but there is still much work to do to ensure full equality for all. One day we may all be able to cry "Liberty, equality, fraternity" and not frown at fraternity meaning brotherhood and hence is rather sexist.

Anyway, what we have here in the UK is a voting system which is called "first past the post". It does involve one person = one vote but it is designed to avoid close results meaning a hung parliament. I don't actually know anyone who is a fan of this system but then again voting systems are quite a niche worry at the moment. The US system for presidential elections "colleges" is even weirder than ours for parliament/PM.

Quite obviously the UK cannot be the oldest example of a democracy because the word itself is way older than the UK and the old Greeks clearly invented the concept and lived by it! The current boast I think is oldest parliament "Mother of Parliaments" but I think Iceland may have prior art on that with the Alþingi - "allthingi". That letter that looks like a p is a thorne and was also used in English until we unceremoniously ditched it a few years back. Thorne also has a form that looks like y so "Ye olde shoppe" which is literally pronounced as "the old shop" but most hereabouts will insist on as something like "ye oldee shopee". Bloody kids!


No, democracy is NOT one person one vote. That is a specific kind of democracy, which may or may not be acceptable for whatever reasons. Democracy means “the people” as a group decide the outcome. But how it is done may defer a lot.


> There is no constitution, bill of rights, and while there are elections in the mainland

The UK is a constitutional monarchy and does have a bill of rights.

> nominates huge numbers of Bishops to the British Parliament

It's a bit more nuanced than that. The Queen doesn't nominate anyone to Parliament, at least not in the way you're implying. Just like she has to sign a bill into law before it has any effect, she does so as a ceremonial function rather than with a critical eye which is exactly the same as with nominations like this.

To take any action but that which is recommended to her by relevant (elected) parties would result in a pretty big crisis that would ultimately see her ceremonial roles stripped.

> Many hereditary "Peers" hold title and they cannot prevent Bills from Passing but they can hold them up and amend them.

The house of lords is a pretty good check on the house of commons. Implying it's purely a thing that functions to "hold up" bills is rather incorrect.

> Britain even them claimed the mantle of "World Oldest Democracy"/ "Cradle of Democracy".

I've never seen such a thing, have you got a source?


> To take any action but that which is recommended to her by relevant (elected) parties would result in a pretty big crisis that would ultimately see her ceremonial roles stripped.

This actually did occur in Belgium: in 1990 then-king Baudouin refused to sign abortion laws in to effect, citing his Catholic faith. The Belgian constitution allows for parliament to sign laws in to effect if the king is incapacitated so they declared him incapacitated for a day, signed the laws in to effect, after which everything continued as before (the exact legal manoeuvring is a little bit more complex, but this is essentially what it amounted to).

I would imagine something similar would happen in the UK; for reasons that elude me personally the monarchy is quite popular, so I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be stripped of all ceremonial roles.

Reading the applicable Regency Act of 1937 it has similar language that could be used to the same effort, but of course hard to be sure without it actually happening :-)


You say all this about the UK's constitution but it is not codified anywhere. Is it based on precedence, custom or generally accepted principle that it will happen this way if things do come to a crisis.

It all seems to be asserted resting on....on an uncodified constitution.


I'm a massive fan of an uncodified constitution. It allows parliament to have a great deal of flexibility and modernisation.

New laws can be iteratively created rather than relying on extremely old documents and lawyers/historians who attempt to decipher what was intended and how that relates to modern times.

If the US constitution was converted into a set of laws and then deleted, what do you think would happen? Attempts to be made to change the laws, some would pass, some would fail, but the passing of those laws would still be democratic if those making them were democratically elected.


I'm trying to understand why the toys flew out the pram when I said "democracy". Did it offend, as if to say "Hey we live in a democracy and by implication all other countries are shite" ? I didn't mean that. It's a very loaded word, so sorry if it "triggers". Notice I didn't say functional democracy. I guess along with it goes a whole slew of hidden values, like how we expect public figures to behave, and how we expect institutions to work.

respects


Because it goes against the facts: the government is chosen by vote of the people.

It may not have the rule of law or separation of powers, but that is totally different.


This is essentially true. The UK was nothing but a dictatorship until it shed off all of its colonies.

As it is right now, the UK has a mix of parliamentary supremacy and unequal representation which means that with ~40% of the vote, given you are courting the right people and are a more entrenched party, you can do essentially whatever you want as a majority in parliament is basically supreme.

As it is right now, the UK does not fit any definition of democracy.


Dude I live there, it's a green and pleasant land, especially on summer Fridays after a beer by the beach. Quite good enough for me.


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Don't talk anything like that on HN, thanks, no matter what you are responding to. Read the "In comments" section of https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


There is a point being totally missed in this thread and that is the UK government basically ignore all security common sense and do absolutely incomprehensible things like discuss national security over WhatsApp and Zoom, as a British citizen, in my eyes this absolutely amounts to treason as they're knowingly potentially giving away state secrets, anyone else would be instantly jailed.

UK government and any departments discussing sensitive matters (or everyone, really) should not be using a) off the shelf phones, and b) should not be using public communications networks full stop, nevermind foreign communication platforms.


The problem isn't a technological one arguably though, and that's why all purely technical solutions are probably doomed to failure.

A huge part of the reason senior government figures around the world often choose to use WhatsApp or Zoom is to avoid or reduce exposure to the statutory recording requirements using the "official" comms channel would entail. The UK in particular has had serious chilling effects on government due to the fear that email or official communications will later embarrass you following publication under Freedom Of Information laws. This isn't a hypothetical - FoI journalism is a real thing in the UK and a source of a huge number of stories that can embarrass the Government of the day.

As long as the official channels are subject to strong public disclosure laws that allow the media relatively easy access to many government communications, politicians will seek devices that allow them to communicate "privately" even if that means adopting less secure devices and services. The "threat" they see is FoI/embarrassment in press a lot of the time, not the State level Cyber attacker.

I'm not defending this practice, but I can understand why it happens. I've even seen NHS employees (state employed drs in the UK health service) avoid saying things in meetings for fear of the later FoI reveal if the meeting minutes are published.


I used to think that is an issue with old non-technical generation and therefore it is argument for new blood. But.. new blood is about as careless about sharing all sorts of information online as old blood. I don't know if there is a solution to this. I am starting to wonder if it is one of those 'best not to think about it' things.


It's the same problem as the lack of widespread technical comprehension in the general public.

New blood politicians may know more about tech, phones and services from a _user_ perspective, but most of them are still politicians, not engineers - and just like the vast majority of the general public, will mostly not appreciate the implications of any details bellow the surface of modern technology. What we think of as common sense are based on principles in this domain that is invisible to most people.

There is no simple solution to this. For government specifically, perhaps a new specialised division that dictates policy for technology use throughout the government (I say new because I would not be surprised if some antiquated and dysfunctional version of this already exists).


NCSC are supposed to be doing this, but they're genuinely clueless and just like doing PR.

I also don't think it's reasonable to say it's lack of awareness, the same people wouldn't give the launch codes to a 3rd party, it doesn't require any technical clue to apply this.


The UK government hates its own country and people, why would they bother with something so trivial as national security. That would be like a serial killer worrying about infection whilst dismembering their victim.


I'm curious about the threat modelling of those high level officials. With all these hacking going on, if feels like it's not been a consideration.

Pegasus claims iOS and Android hacking capabilities, one would expect more specialised communications being used at that level. Car companies provide specialised vehicles for governmental use, I would have expected to see specialised iOS or Android devices at least. Nothing completely out of this world but with special software configurations and features to detect and prevent attacks.


>with special software configurations and features to detect and prevent attacks

I could imagine a special build of the OS where everything was compiled with Address Sanitizer. You'd take a bit on performance and battery, but, tradeoffs.


I'm pretty sure its just accepted it is government by WhatsApp groups.


;) always a scandal. When Dems do it.. Politicians of both parties routinely use apps like wickr and signal. often illegally not following records keeping laws.

I know obama had a special blackberry made so he could use email on mobile.

I'd be surprised if the federal government hasn't created a mobile version of SIPRNet yet?

I work in politics (low level compared to these elected s). most of the committees use signal + email 2fa or similar now. But that does nothing against sate sponsored hackers with 0 days. Maybe rotating burner phones and chat platforms would work better, but probably not worth it for the vast majority unless doing something sketchy.


I would guess the best approach is to try to have as small an attack surface as possible, meaning as few applications etc, and the simplest possible operating system.

Like for example a minimalist build of the PinePhone with software that literally never updates unless there is a security issue. Maybe something like a stripped down Slackware, or I was gonna say OpenBSD where even the proprietary hardware drivers are re-written to be open source (and free), but I guess for the PinePhone, the hardware is already open anyways.

edit: A stripped down Slackware I should say


My headcanon at this point is that the spymasters know about the security binary[0], and have decided that the threat of going dark is worse than the threat of getting pwned with their own NOBUS[1] exploits. Better to have everyone be vulnerable.

I do know at one point Apple had special Korean iPhone SKUs with no physical camera installed, I have no clue if those are still being made. Samsung probably did the same thing. The problem is that, aside from just removing hardware, there's no particular special software configuration that you can do to make the device more secure. Every good idea out there is either already being done on the consumer versions of these devices, or is an optional feature you can already enable on a stock device with MDM software. The security on phones is already pretty good, albeit at the cost of freedom for enthusiasts and tinkerers.

[0] Binary as in gender, not as in untrusted.

[1] US intelligence term that stands for "NObody But US" and is equivalent to "0day".


Perhaps they hacked honeypot devices and were thus fed disinformation. UKG has mounted such operations (some with high level of sophistication) since 1945 at least.


Time to revamp the black berry.


The RCMP had access to all the encryption keys for the blackberry messaging back end :). They could basically access any message that was sent through RIM servers, and used that access pretty often (sometimes at the request of foreign governments).


Well, they certainly won’t do it again! Therefore, this should be ignored and not logically used to infer that governments spy on citizens!


I don’t feel sorry for them. They are hard at work building a surveillance state and (attempting to) ban end-to-end encryption.

I actually see this as a good thing. Getting a taste of their own medicine.


Im a brit, Im not tech expert but I work adjacent to tech. I feel some what smug over this:

* If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear is official policy

* We aggressively use "tools" like this both domestically and abroad, both for military/intel and for law enforcement with basically no oversight

* Our government are basically technic-illiterate. And proud of that in many cases.

So this is a train wreck of their own making.

The only thing making me sad is that it will have zero effect.


Obviously this news is a bit embarrassing for both the UAE and the UK, but if the UK's response isn't to press the UAE for a reciprocal no-hacking treaty, then presumably the UK is trying to keep its options open. Unless I'm mistaken, the UK isn't surprised that it doesn't have any treaties with the UAE prohibiting this sort of thing... live by the hack, die by the hack.


UK has been through a period of getting very cosy with the Qataris, which began during the Cameron era and has since (I believe) cooled a bit.


For anyone interested in the topic of Pegasus and NSO, there is a great New Yorker piece about them from yesterday.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/25/how-democracie...


As appalling as this intrusion is, I can't help but feel there is some measure of propriety that it should be done to a nation taking advantage of its impressive technological legacy to eavesdrop on most transatlantic communications, and scheming and hacking to subvert the communication infrastructure of friendly countries. Not that "what goes around comes around" is going to fix anything in this regard...


History has shown that those willing to exploit the existing technologies weaknesses profit in wartime. Israel and the US are two great examples


The Citizen Lab’s core mission is to undertake research on digital threats against civil society. During the course of our investigations into mercenary spyware, we will occasionally observe cases where we suspect that governments are using spyware to undertake international espionage against other governments. The vast majority of these cases are outside of our scope and mission. However, in certain select cases, where appropriate and while preserving our independence, we decide to notify these governments through the official channels, especially if we believe that our actions can reduce harm. https://www.jcpenneykiosk.review/


Can’t phone vendors have people pose as a client to NSO to get access to the latest RCE and patch it?


In general, no.

Two aspects. The first is client vetting - such organizations (I have in mind a particular organization that's not NSO but also has products which rely on RCEs) simply don't sell at all to random companies - I'm not sure if they sell to companies at all as all the published cases have been from the government sector, but in any case they already know all the potential clients they might have, it's not like there are many of them in the world. And it's not trivial for Apple to falsely pose as, for example, the intelligence agency of Bolivia in a way that's not easily discovered. Also, in the specific case of NSO, every new client will likely require approval from Israel government for the 'arms' export license, and is likely to be vetted by Israeli intelligence agencies which are considered to be quite competent.

The second aspect is that such organizations generally are very wary of actually giving access to RCEs themselves - in many cases they will sell access to the use of RCEs, where the buyer won't get the ability to get the exploit but rather the seller will run the exploit themselves. Of course there are exceptions, but any less trustworthy clients (e.g. if selling to some USA local law enforcement which realistically aren't as secure as FBI) simply won't get the opportunity to compromise the 'goose that lays golden eggs'.


re your second point: you don’t need access to the RCE itself, you could say I want to hack XXX phone number where XXX is a honeypot and try to reverse engineer it from there.


There are others who would know more about this than I do, but a few reasons come to mind:

1. NSO almost certainly has more than one exploit chain at a time. While this would burn one of their exploits, it wouldn’t put them out of business or eliminate the ability for them to get RCE on phones in general.

2. Vendors already have bug bounty programs with established award ceilings. These exploits are almost always far more valuable than the vendor is willing to pay via their bug bounty program. Why would the vendor pay more in this instance?

3. Given (1), how long would this go on for? NSO—who is aware of how many exploit chains they have—likely wouldn’t sell all of their exploits to a single buyer and risk them all getting burned.

TL;DR: It wouldn’t be practical.


Vendors may be more incentivised to intentionally kill the Pegasus business model, which would have immeasurable PR value if executed well.


Then another one pops up. Fact is, the market is there. It's not too dissimilar how after the silk road was taken down 10 others came up in its place.

Markets for exploits are unfortunately here to stay.


The models are different. Silk Road has millions of sellers and millions of buyers; Pegasus has a very small set of both, who would be more difficult to connect with. It probably won’t kill it, but will create a harder to leverage profit model


Do you think the phone vendors have better intelligence apparatus' than NSO, or that NSO doesn't vet the background of who they sell to, given it requires cabinet approval?


UAE hacks UK give officials using Israeli cyberterrorism software and there are no consequences?

I'm sure Abraham would be proud to have had his name attached to essentially a weapons contract masquerading as a peace deal between two evil governments.


The question is then what phone exists that is immune from this? A flip phone? A Nokia 1011? I might be completely misinformed but seems like SIM card and the underlying OS is vector. What happens if I use a cell phone from late 90s and early 2000s? What is there to hack with those flip phones? JavaME over the wire? What if the cell phone dates even further?

Legitimately curious what options is there. Could If you are someone of interest then it seems like having a smartphone is an automatic liability. What then solution is possible since sending and reading a simple text message is enough to escalate privilege?


No technology is entirely secure today, we haven't built it in a provably secure way

The most secure today is probably a Pixel 6 running a secure messaging app with a limited attack surface, no image support, no emoji, etc. Removing all the standard apps including the browser and Webview engine would significantly help.

If you could switch an iPhone into a secure mode which removed large chunks of messaging functionality then it would be the preferred option.


I would be shocked if people couldn't find an RCE in an early 2000s flip phone. I had a friend who had hers since 2010 and MMS crashed it all the time.


If you're talking about flip phones and trying to protect against an eavesdropper of a phone call or SMS, then there's no point. The network that these phones used is full of holes already https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_System_No._7#Protoc...


Attack surface reduction is the important part. I’m not in disagreement with what you said, but if you took a modern iPhone and removed all capabilities other than sending and receiving phone calls, it would be much more secure than one which supports mms, email, browsing, etc.


Are you sure having a phone in your phone is a good idea? Phone calls are a significant source of attacks now, even if none of those attacks exploit a vulnerability in the phone software. As far as I'm concerned, the only point in having a dial-able phone number is to ensure I'm still eligible for car warranty scams and 2FA code harvesting attacks.


You’re right, my point was surface reduction, not that one tech is more or less vulnerable than others


Print from your phone to a piece of paper. Then use RFC 1149 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1149)-- IP over carrier pigeon. And then use one time pads on each end.


thank you for posting this, made my day.

I'm still cracking up over:

> A typical MTU is 256 milligrams


Probably PGP encryption / authentication using files on an SD card with a computer separated from internet is your best bet for secure communication. An ,,easier to use’’ version can use a firewall that only allows the PGP emails through, at least in that case the firewall can be made simple and secure.


GNU/Linux phones are immune to this (or at least they make it easy to fix bugs and separate the modem from the OS): Librem 5 and Pinephone.



Was it the phone provided and secured by the government or the off the books phone they have WhatsApp groups on?

If it’s the first then security services have a problem. If it’s the second then those individuals have a problem.


They do government business through those secret WhatsApp phones too. AFAIK the only government business we know about are the Covid contracts, but it could be anything. We know they have no kind of archival and have claimed phones are lost/replaced when they're required to provide messages, eg: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/aug/04/covid-contr...


So malware has finally crossed the electronic-human barrier. Wow.


I wonder what about the third world countries with weak cyber policies.


The patch for Pegasus has been out since September 2021.


No wonder Boris can't stop horsing around




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