> the U.S thinks it's OK to sell F-15 planes but not OK to sell software?
The U.S. thinks it's okay to sell F-15s that don't attack Americans and not okay to sell software that attacks Americans. As a, granted, American, I'm not seeing the incoherence.
I was delineating why the U.S. is fine with selling weapons to e.g. Saudi Arabia but would not be happy about those same weapons being sold by Russia to Iran. You seemed confused on that point. There isn't a grand philosophy. It's international relations. It's anarchy. The U.S. government promotes American and allied interests.
Separately, yes, if you're hacking the State Department, you're attacking the U.S. This is consistent with how cyberterrorism is treated by DNI since at least 2014.
In the past month or so, there was a front page story on HN about NSO and a journalist, detailing evidence that NSO-controlled servers served up the exploit to the journalist's phone. This suggests that the NSO group has less of an arms-length relationship with their clients than they let on. It seems that at least for some clients, they're running some variant on exploits-as-a-service.
That still doesn't mean they knew about this. How would they even know it were American phones? Its very possible it were some IPhone with a Ugandan sim card. How do you know who's using it - do the Ugandans tell you? It's a very real possibility NSO servers simply show some Ugandan number.
I have no more knowledge on this than anyone here but I don't find it realistic NSO would take this chance.
Mitigating but not exonerating. (Also, unknown and possibly unknowable.) NSO are still selling cyberweapons hitting the United States. If they didn't give a shit about keeping an eye on their kit, that's a negligent gap in oversight by Jerusalem.
It's a good thing we have a talking-not-shooting relationship with Israel. The U.S. would be within its rights to launch a proportional counterattack were that not the case. If Israel doesn't deal with this properly, there's a decent chance we'll see calls for criminal penalties and targeted sanctions.
I didn't say that they knew. I was saying "This wasn't done by NSO knowingly." isn't necessarily true. I think I was pretty clear about the fuzziness of the evidence as it relates to this specific case.
The U.S. thinks it's okay to sell F-15s that don't attack Americans and not okay to sell software that attacks Americans. As a, granted, American, I'm not seeing the incoherence.