There are many other companies beyond NSO Group, if I were a journalist I would write a more comprehensive list of them and educate about this whole "industry".
NSO Group is unique in that they are entirely sheltered from (largely due) criticism by their government, creating an unaccountable and injust basis of relations between the United States and Israel that many readers are concerned by. There simply aren't any other comparably corrupt "cybersecurity" outfits in the world.
Kinda similar to how the IDF has never been charged with war crimes despite several of their service-members being recorded breaking the law in their Israeli fatigues. It's not that international law was never broken, it's that Israel considers themselves above the rule of law and international bases of morality. That type of behavior absolutely must be called out in it's lonesome, such that no nation ever repeats Israel's embarrassing mistake.
What other nation besides the USA and its 5-eyes lackeys willfully murders children almost every day in their own ‘self defense’? Got a list of states that murder more people than the USA/5-eyes and Israel right now?
Sudan, Ethiopia/Tigray, and Syria would all be recent (or ongoing) examples of non-primarily-US military conflicts where mass civilian death, including children, has been publicly evidenced. Each of these conflicts has seen one (or all) parties use self-defense as an argument.
(This doesn't somehow imply that anything is OK about the US's own role in global war, or anything in particular about the I/P conflict. But it's incorrect to treat US/Israel as uniquely competent or active in terms of immiserating the world's civilians and innocents.)
Yes, but these are not western allies with immense financial and industrial resources, shared among themselves, whose leadership have signaled for decades their intent to create a new world order in the ashes of the wars they have intentionally fought - for decades.
Certainly the genocides in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Syria are atrocities which must be addressed. But they are not the world’s biggest bully thugs. The US and its coalition of willful criminal states, including Israel, are the worlds biggest bully thugs. Sudan doesn’t have a nuclear threat regime which promises to eradicate all life on earth if it doesn’t get its way, politically, across the globe.
> But it's incorrect to treat US/Israel as uniquely competent
I disagree completely. The US and Israel are extremely powerful nations capable of the industrial might required to assemble nuclear weapons. They very definitely should be held to to task - especially since one funds the other, providing immense military power where they could, instead, be using that overwhelming industrial capability to build peace.
I don’t think Western versus non-Western provides absolution. You asked for examples of military conflicts with similar degrees of civilian harm, and I’ve given you three examples that demonstrate that you don’t need to be the world’s primary superpower (or its close ally) to cause damage on its scale.
Consider your own case: China has done plenty to immiserate minorities within its own borders, has made it clear that civilian harm comes secondary to its own development (cf. indirect financing of the Ukraine war), and has geopolitical designs on Taiwan, etc. that entail putting civilians in harm’s way. Unique virtue is not a thing among countries, nor is the capacity or desire for the kinds of violence that affect the world’s innocents today unique.
(Or in other words: having nuclear weapons is mostly a red herring, given that most civilians in conflicts die from the kinds of conventional weapons that have been killing civilians for hundreds of years.)
This century, China has lifted a billion people out of poverty into what we would consider ‘middle class’ conditions .. while the west has waged war and created conditions, for example, where 36 million refugees from our wars clog the worlds borders.
The order of magnitude of ‘help versus hurt’ is, rather astonishing. And, frankly, sad.
I don't think you get a free pass for doing bad things if you also do good things. The US imposed domestic shortages for a decade following WWII to keep Europe fed while also rebuilding it; this doesn't somehow offset everything else we've done over the last 80 years.
China has done remarkable things for its citizens, much like the Soviet Union did. It did those things while doing terrible things, both to its own citizens and to those within its sphere of influence (looking, for example, at China's willingness to ignore atrocities in North Korea). This is a universal theme with country-level activity: there is no uniquely good country, only shades of (dis)reputability across history.
To tie it back to the original question: with enough perspective into global affairs, it's almost impossible to discern the West and non-West in terms of brutality towards civilians during conflicts. Differences in wealth and power are real, but are not immediately relevant to civilians being harmed with the same basic weapons (rifles) and techniques (privation, exposure, insecurity) that are present and readily accessible to every country on Earth.
Throughout this thread you have refused to address the actual topic and (since the root comment) deflected any criticism of Israel (however well-founded) because you feel like it's not fair relative to other countries. You might want to take a break from responding to these comments if you're going to repeat the same whataboutism whenever people discuss Israel's issues in earnest.
None of the questions you just asked have any relevant salience to what the parent just said. Nobody is forcing you to keep responding here, you might as well leave the discussion where it is if you can't engage without getting emotional or changing the topic.
What you're missing is that this isn't a relative position. Nobody in this thread (or much of anywhere on HN) is defending Europe or America's misdoings with the same rhetoric. The reason is that people are willing to accept that their governments make mistakes, and they reflect on these problems and fix them democratically.
Israel, currently, is in a position where a extremely nationalist and conservative ruling party has given all sorts of lawbreakers complete impunity. Violators of internationally recognized borders are ignored because it's a boost to morale. Hackers that sell their services without scruples are given a safe haven in exchange for access to their digital arms. And many people rush to defend their actions (or distract from them) because they tacitly approve these behaviors.
When you refuse to acknowledge or in any way address the countless and even admitted ways in which Israel violates international law, you somewhat tip your hand and reveal that you have no intention of holding them accountable even at their most reprehensible. This thread is about Israeli complacency in breaking the law. You are the one crying whataboutism apropos of... Israel being criticized in a public setting.
Very few companies’ work results in outright murder of the targeted victims.
If you know of any other cyber criminal organizations like the NSO, where governments use their tools to select and murder targets, please describe them.
so many more i love being on HN for the same reason i live marvel movies everyone believes in rights n shit lol
once you meet your first transnational human trafficking ring with full fledged dev teams etc NSO seems very ethical among its ilk if you hear about it in the news its the tip of the iceberg
