Yeah, no, this is bullshit. People don’t just have agencies (Mossad, CIA), they also have agency as in: the power to change reality. And the vast majority of democratic countries are run by people who have a decent appreciation of the rule of law, which is what stands between your actual freedom and your gloomy fantasies.
Then, there’s also a group of countries that simply cannot afford / don’t have the people to do these things.
How do I know? Consider the usual suspects for these operations: the US, Israel, Russia, and China. For every single one of them, we also have examples of their work that got leaked or otherwise exposed.
What are the chances that Belgium happens to be the country that manages to run such a program and keep it secret? Or Equatorial Guinea?
Then, there’s also the growing list of known customers of NSO: if two dozens of them decided to buy this software, chances are they do not have homegrown solutions with similar capabilities. Nor does it seem as if there were any other sellers at NSO’s scale. Meaning: if we successively learn about all of NSO’s business, we might be getting close to knowing everything there is to know about the sector, with the exception of the large countries mentioned above.
I mean the NSA literally admitted in 2013[0] that the NSA had employees doing stuff like this just for personal reasons. The only real difference is where the data was gathered from and I'm not even sure it's worth differentiating:
> At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.
> The practice [...] was disclosed by the NSA Office of the Inspector General
I feel like the distinction between "employees at the NSA using tools to look up stuff for personal issues" and things like "the FBI actively looking up dirt on civil rights leaders to try and blackmail them" like with MLK is extremely important!
One is a case of employees abusing a system for personal gain. Another is establishing a system of abuse in service of the security service. Absolutely night and day in terms of the implications, even if in both you have people with access to private information.
The NSA employees weren't trying to advance the goals of the State by stalking their exes.
I don't understand your argument: if the shady things they're doing have gotten leaked, isn't this because they were doing those shady things in the first place? Can you conclude one way or the other that the net is so loose that bad things will always see the light of day? Don't forget that with PRISM taking 6 years to be disclosed and MKUltra having taken 22, a lot of people rightly don't have such idealized views anymore.
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that any, much less the vast majority of democratic countries are run by people who have a decent appreciation of the rule of law.
There are certainly plenty of states that cannot afford these programs, or that may choose to spend their resources in other ways, but the big powers are more than willing to assist when their interests align. I think the case of Denmark shows that it's very difficult to anticipate when interests will align, because we sometimes don't even know the identities of the people whose interests matter.
100% sure that they have spy software, of course, bought abroad. Equatorial Guinea has oil money and it is one of the most authoritarian countries in the world.
Then, there’s also a group of countries that simply cannot afford / don’t have the people to do these things.
How do I know? Consider the usual suspects for these operations: the US, Israel, Russia, and China. For every single one of them, we also have examples of their work that got leaked or otherwise exposed.
What are the chances that Belgium happens to be the country that manages to run such a program and keep it secret? Or Equatorial Guinea?
Then, there’s also the growing list of known customers of NSO: if two dozens of them decided to buy this software, chances are they do not have homegrown solutions with similar capabilities. Nor does it seem as if there were any other sellers at NSO’s scale. Meaning: if we successively learn about all of NSO’s business, we might be getting close to knowing everything there is to know about the sector, with the exception of the large countries mentioned above.