When you first go on duty at CIA headquarters, you raise your hand and swear an oath — not to government, not to the agency, not to secrecy. You swear an oath to the Constitution. So there’s this friction, this emerging contest between the obligations and values that the government asks you to uphold, and the actual activities that you’re asked to participate in.
By preying on the modern necessity to stay connected, governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets. It sounds like fantasist paranoia, but on the technical level it’s so trivial to implement that I cannot imagine a future in which it won’t be attempted. It will be limited to the war zones at first, in accordance with our customs, but surveillance technology has a tendency to follow us home.
– From the post: A Whistleblower Manifesto by Edward Snowden
Yesterday, Forbes published an interesting and disturbing article profiling a company called Ability Inc in the post: For $20M, These Israeli Hackers Will Spy On Any Phone On The Planet.
First, the good news. As the article notes, the company has been struggling as of late with lawsuits and it seems obvious to me that the reason Ability agreed to talk to Forbes is for some free advertising. If the company was performing particularly well, there’d be no need to agree to this interview and executives would try to keep their business practices as clandestine as possible. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that a global “industry” like this exists in the first place. While virtually all countries in the world have harsh penalties for individuals who decide to do drugs on their own time and to their own bodies, governments appear to have no problem with corporations that exist solely to violate people’s privacy. Probably because these same governments as the main clients of such companies. The fact that we put up with this and pretend it’s a legitimate business practice is an embarrassment to us as a species.
Now, without further ado, here are some excerpts from the Forbes piece:
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