About total surveillance, moral relativism and Israeli hackers

Today I will try to bring to the historical level of generalization the main planetary neurosis of July. We are talking about the story of the PEGASUS program created by the Israeli company NSO Group. With the help of Pegasus, the authorities of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Mexico, the UAE, Rwanda and Saudi Arabia followed citizens who did not fit into the idea of ​​respectable. As the ruling elites of these countries understand it.

At the same time, the list of people who were carried out by total electronic surveillance included three current presidents (French Emmanuel Macron, Iraqi Bahram Salikh, South African Sirkhoza), three acting prime minister (Pakistani Imran Khan, Egyptian Mostafuli and Marorkan Sad-Eddin El Seven), seven, seven Former prime ministers (I will not be listed with your permission) and one king (Moroccan Mohammed VI).

The international scandal, however, erupted not so much because of politicians, but because of 189 journalists who were also followed, although, according to the NSO Group leadership, their Pegasus is used exclusively by “government structures” to “prevent terrorist attacks, violence with weapons, and explosions arranged by terrorists and suicide bias”.

You must admit that it is not clear how 189 journalists who are almost without exception in the opposition to the ruling elites of their native states fit into the struggle, according to the same NSO Group, "with pedophilia, drug trafficking, sexual slavery and kidnapping."

However, it is even more incomprehensible how all these journalists, presidents, prime ministers and kings, as well as 50 thousand others, for the most part of the nameless, poor fellow, world media, ranked the victims of Trojan Pegasus and bloated the sensation, which Edward Snowden already called the “history of the year”.

It was this last “misunderstanding” that made me, at the request of the “new”, to devote several days to the study of the materials in the PEGASUS and NSO Group case. I want to share my discoveries with readers. But first of all, because the situation, following the results of the express investigation, seems to me not so much ambiguous as it is completely irrelevant in the context of the real problems of our time.

I will not fill up readers with a pile of facts, which they probably are already known to them, but I will try to structure the information in such a way as to exclude party and ideological deformations as much as possible.

PEGASUS: Fabula

For several months, the French non -profit organization Forbidden Stories (registered under the name Freedom Voices Network) conducted an investigation into which 80 journalists from 17 organizations were involved. The Washington Post, as well as The Guardian, Haaretz, Suddeutsche Zeitung, the human rights organization Amnesty International and the Center for Corruption and Organized Crime (OCCRP), acted most actively.

The reason for the investigation was a list consisting of 50 thousand telephone numbers without accompanying information (that is, without specifying names, addresses, mobile operators, etc.), which fell into the hands of journalists, according to Forbidden Stories itself, directly from the NSO Group.

Based on the assumption that the list is authentic, the journalists first of all tried to identify numbers. They managed to combine numbers with the names of more than a thousand people from 50 countries of the world, among which were the same 189 journalists, as well as 85 human rights activists, 600 politicians and 65 companies.

Then the most interesting begins.

To prove that each specific number was infected with a Trojan Pegasus and it was monitored, it was necessary to get direct access to a mobile phone,

in which a SIM card with the corresponding number is installed.

Forbidden Stories and partners were able to access only 67 mobile phones (out of 50 thousand). 23 of them were infected with Pegasus, attempts at infection were recorded at 14, and the infection was not confirmed on 30 smartphones. Since the initial list of 50 thousand numbers is dated 2016, we can assume that Trojan was not discovered, since one of the users changed the phone during this time. Well ... or just no one has ever infected these numbers by Trojan.

The last assumption allowed Forbidden Stories to slightly modify the formulation of the accusations in their final conclusions: a list of 50 thousand numbers is not a list of those who have been attacked and monitoring, but this is a list of potential objects for observation by NSO Group state customers.

It is very important now to draw the attention of readers to the fact that a statistically insignificant amount of infections (23 confirmed + 14 attempts = 37) out of 50 thousand numbers in the list does not change anything in the statement of the very fact of violations by the NSO Group violations established by the NSO Group itself-the use of the PEGASUS Troyan exclusively for noble purposes (Life-Saving Mission, according to the NSO Group itself, mission to save lives). The owners of 37 smartphones tested for infection were neither terrorists, nor pedophiles, nor drug dealers.

The result of the described study was the information bomb, which exploded on July 17 after the tradition of publicizing the collected materials.

NSO Group answers to The Washington Post Publishing

The most resonant accusation, how could you guess, sounded from the pages of the American The Washington Post, so the Israeli company NSO Group publicly reacted primarily to the texts of this publication.

In the first response, the NSO Group was mainly limited to disavowing the journalistic investigation on the merits and without going into details.

The position of the Israelis is as follows:

• No documentation confirming the involvement of the NSO Group in the so -called “list of potential surveillance” cannot be and cannot be;

• The assertion that the Israeli government has access to data collected by the NSO Group state clients - from the field of conspiracy, distributed by “our critics” ( we must understand this, we are talking about critics of the Israeli state . - S. G. );

• NSO Group technologies have never been used in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi;

• Never and under any circumstances NSO Group did not provide sanctions to his customers to survive the US citizens ( that is, if one of these clients followed the Americans, he did this in violation of the rules of the manufacturer Trojan. - S. G. );

• Be that as it may, the NSO Group has always been closely monitored and will continue to strictly monitor the compliance by customers with the rules for the use of spy technologies, and if the audit proves violation of these rules, "client systems of tracking will be disconnected."

A few days later, the second response of NSO Group followed the publication of The Washington Post. His key points:

• Interpretations and conclusions made by journalists of the publication are deprived of meaning, since they are based on a “list”, which has no relation to the NSO Group and, moreover, the list of those whom the company's customers are already tracking, or are only going to track. All 50 thousand numbers presented in the list are taken from easily accessible and inexpensive sources, in particular, from HLR (Home location Register), a register of subscribers that every mobile operator leads to which any state and even private structures around the world have access;

• The number itself - 50 thousand - “leaked numbers” indicates the absurdity of the prosecution, since this number is unrealistic for surveillance carried out by government structures using Pegasus;

• The statement that the list was received directly from the NSO Group servers causes laughter because such a list never existed on our servers ( for me, this is the most unconvincing refutation from all the Israeli company, since it contains a logical contradiction . - S.G. ).

Such is the general outline of events that I deliberately presented the positions of both parties. As for the NSO Group, to which the Forbidden Stories and journalists involved in the investigation, turned to comments, turned out to be diverse.

Hungary, India, Morocco and Rwanda said that no structures of these states have never used PEGASUS to track people listed in the list. The government structures of Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the UAE did not want to comment on anything.

I think I only had to add the last - technical - a touch to the picture, before moving on to the very most important and interesting one, in my opinion.

PEGASUS: Technology

For the introduction of the PEGASUS Trojan, undercurled vulnerabilities are used, which Apple and Google consciously preserve in their mobile operating systems. Similar vulnerabilities are called Zero-Day Exploit (or 0Day), because they have de facto no history of operation.

For the first time, carefree humanity learned about the sowing of Olympus himself (that is, about the “holes” created by the OS developers themselves), in early 2017, when the hacker gang of Shadow Brokers calculated such vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows OS. The American National Security Agency (ANB), as usual, "to combat international terrorism" used vulnerabilities.

Inexperienced optimists believe that even Microsoft herself did not know about the holes discovered by Shadow Brokers,

In addition, of course, those employees of the company who secretly did these holes in the OS for their subsequent use of the NSA.

Microsoft then quickly lay a patche, however, not quickly enough, because the Wannacry worker, launched on May 12, 2017, blocked 500 thousand computers belonging to private and government organizations in 200 countries.

It is funny that even before the Shadow Brokers stole information about the vulnerability of the ANB, the other hacker group - the Equation Group, acting under the auspices of the NSA itself, created the exploit of Eternalblue and Backdor DoublePulsar, which successfully infected the computers of the "enemies of the people." The American people, of course, are also in the representation of the NSA.

As for the Israeli Pegasus, it is introduced into iPhones allegedly through a 0Day-vascularity built into the standard Imessage messenger. A specially formatted message is sent to the smartphone, which without the knowledge of the user starts the installation of an exploit for further control. PEGASUS is introduced into androphones (smartphones on the Android OS) through a similar 0Day-rack in the WhatsApp messenger.

It is quite funny that WhatsApp found that the Israeli NSO Group is operating an unknown to the messenger developer vulnerability last year. WhatsApp lay a hole, and then sued the NSO Group to the court. The company demanded from the Israeli details about hacking, as well as information about what user data merged to “state clients”.

The NSO Group refused to provide any information to the court, hiding behind the immunity that she relies according to the law-as a structure acting in the interests of one of the US friendly US, states.

It will be useful for the reader to find out that the lawsuit with the NSO Group continues for a long time and still, with the difference that the position of WhatsApp is now supported by a huge IT-coaling, which includes Microsoft (along with his divisions LinkedIn and Github), Google, Cisco, VMware and Internet Association, which, in turn, represents the interests of giants such as Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. All of them severely condemn the Israeli spies and require the prosecution of the NSO Group. As I understand it, not so much for the commercial operation of their PEGASUS product, but for what state clients of the Israeli company do with this PEGASUS.

I want to complete the story about the technological aspects of our history with a dry transfer “Fich”, kindly provided by PEGASUS “State Customer” after the introduction of Trojan to the “Ward” smartphone: the customer receives absolute access to all photos, videos, files, documents, postal services, password lists, as well as to a complete exchange of messages in any messenger.

The latter is especially piquant, because the developers of Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram proudly assured users in the absolute confidentiality of our communication in messengers, protected by a full -fledged through encryption (P2P).

The problem is that our messages are encrypted after they leave the smartphone and go on a trip on the Internet. And before that, all the texts that we are typing, Trojan PEGASUS is remarkably read from the keyboard, and the messages that we receive from the interlocutor are removed from the screen, again, after it was deciphered, upon arrival.

In short, Pegasus and similar programs to him (of which, there is no doubt, there is more than one dozen in the world) - this is a second pair of eyes that is constantly present behind the user, sees and knows absolutely the same thing that the user himself sees and knows.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. PEGASUS can remotely turn on and turn off the recording from the video cameras and cameras of our smartphone, as well as record audio and track the GPS geo. The only way to neutralize Pegasus is to turn off the smartphone and never turn it on again.

PEGASUS: Morality

Now we are approaching, in my opinion, interesting in this whole story.

I leave the reader to independently decide how convincing the investment of Forbidden Stories looks about the “list of potential customers” of the NSO Group, which out of 50 thousand presents evidence of infection or attempts to infect only 37 smartphones.

I can only say that I personally had a scandal around Pegasus seemed completely lean and uninteresting for the reason that at one time I studied the work of Edward Snowuden a lot and thoroughly. And I did not forget anything, unlike the world community, which, for incomprehensible (although, of course, understandable) reasons prefer to prefer to pretend that there was nothing like that.

Then, in 2013, the heroic employee of the NSA and the CIA raised a non -meaningless list of incomprehensible origin, but 200 thousand secret documents (!), Including the completely monstrous and unprecedented Prism program, which American and foreign citizens lead both on the Internet and on mobile communications.

Documents transmitted by Snowden were irrefutable that invaluable assistance to the NSA in the noble business of tracking citizens of their native country and foreigners provided the whole color of modern it: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, Aol, Apple.

So tell me the mercy: is it really to understand what world we all have been living for a long time, we lack some unfortunate Israeli Pegasus?

I am not at all trying to belittle the scandal caused by the Trojan NSO Group. I just want to go beyond the scope of the philistine lamentations around the next illustration of the wrong world, which we built together. To do this, I will need to focus the reader's attention on the key, as it seems to me, the concept is wrong.

The Fleur of extraordinary gives the story of Pegasus not the plot itself with surveillance, but an exotic plumage of technology, which is incomprehensible and therefore causing horror and admiration in one bottle.

As for the plot, for journalists, politicians, oppositionists, competitors in business and even spouses, they began to monitor, compromise, hidden and openly poison, adjust accidents not yesterday, not the day before, and not even 10 years ago. So it was 50 years ago, 100 years, 1000 years, 5000 years (according to the Bible, of course). It was always so. Before us is one of the stable norms of social relations among Homo sapiens.

How far such practice can go, the reader is free to learn from one fascinating book of the 16th century - is called "Divine Comedy." The author is a poet and political activist Dante Aligieri. The whole first part of the poem - “Hell” - is devoted to the description of the well -deserved suffering of those whom the author considers to be his political opponents and traitors (starting with Judas of the Ivariot).

We remembered the Bible and the “Divine Comedy” is not by chance. These works brilliantly bring our history to the level in which it is only possible to find constructive solutions.

The fact is that all surveillance, compromises, persecution, murder, suicide, betrayal and other illustrations of what is usually called funny words - “violation of human rights” were not happening from evil, but in the name of the fight against evil!

If we want to adequately evaluate the motivation of NSO Group, which created Pegasus to combat “pedophiles and terrorists”, and the national security agency, which created Prism to combat the same “world terrorism”, we must do this not in the false dichotomy of “good-eastern”, but exclusively in terms of acceptance or fingering of macauli, then There is a principle that the depravity is corrected by the purity of the goal (the formulation, however, I took Blaz Pascal from the “letters to the provincial”).

If we look at how this eternal dilemma refracted in the modern world, we will see that almost always modern Machiavellism is reduced to protective ideology.

У всех современных сторонников «исправления порочных средств чистотой цели» — что в Израиле, что в Индии, что в Венгрии, что в Китае, что в Польше, что в Мексике (перечисляю лишь «государственных клиентов» NSO Group, но очевидно, что список смело можно пополнить и Соединенными Штатами, и Евросоюзом, и Россией, и Украиной и вообще всеми государствами без исключения) — ход мысли непременно один и тот же: существуют некие Высшие Ценности, ради которых можно и даже нужно нарушать любые правила общежития, то есть жизни социума. Можно подслушивать, можно врать, честно глядя в глаза, можно подбрасывать улики, можно придумывать несуществующие обвинения — всё это оправдано чистотой целей. А эти цели и есть Высшие Ценности, которые мы должны охранять.

Посему горько заблуждаются те, кто считает, что в случае с охранительной идеологией мы имеем дело непременно с безнравственной практикой безнравственных личностей. Опираясь на историю этики, несложно доказать, что охранительная идеология — это как раз и есть квинтэссенция нравственности. По крайней мере, в том смысле, в каком нравственность понималась на протяжении всей истории человечества.

Соответственно, либо мы должны полностью отказаться от традиционных представлений об этике и релятивизировать понятия Добра и Зла (то есть признать, что они не абсолютны, а относительны и обусловлены частными обстоятельствами), либо мы обязаны согласиться с тем, что защита так называемых Высших Ценностей является нравственным деянием.

В последнем случае нам остается только определить: существуют ли какие-то границы, как далеко можно заходить в деле защиты этих самых Высших Ценностей. Выпороть плетью? Fine? Отправить на месячишко-другой на нары? Отравить, расстрелять, повесить? Или, по доброй английской традиции, предателей родины можно привязывать к салазкам, тащить по городу лошадьми, вешать, не давая задохнуться до смерти, кастрировать, выпотрошить, четвертовать и обезглавить? (Поверит ли читатель, что любимая британская забава Hanged, Drawn and Quartered была упразднена лишь в 1870 году, то есть девять лет после того, как в варварской России отменили крепостное право!)

И тут нас поджидает новый парадокс: оказывается, что определение пределов для защиты Высших Ценностей ничего не меняет в глубинной сути самих этих Высших Ценностей! Потому что те или иные конкретные пределы позволяют нам оценить лишь каждого конкретного Охранителя, но никак не сами эти Высшие Ценности, которые по определению оплодотворены непременно благими намерениями. По крайней мере, в головах Охранителей.

Pegasus: финал

Если наложить сказанное на сюжет нашей сегодняшней реплики, то получится следующее. Каждый из «государственных клиентов» NSO Group исходил из благих намерений и защищал собственные Высшие Ценности. С той лишь разницей, что одни Охранители дошли до расчленения Джамаля Хашогги, другие всего-то расстреляли мексиканского журналиста Сесилио Пинеда Бирто, а третьи тихо и безобидно следили за тем, с кем спит в Турции азербайджанская журналистка Хадия Исмайлова.

Однако ни первый, ни второй, ни третий предел каждого из государственных Охранителей ничего не говорит о нравственности или безнравственности самого факта слежки с помощью Pegasus! Потому что сама по себе эта слежка оправдывается охранительной идеологией, призванной защищать Высшие Ценности, нравственные априорно. Ибо эти Ценности соответствуют историческим представлениям о нравственности и этике в традиционных обществах — что Запада, что Востока!

Скажу больше: сегодня подавляющее число стран и народов в мире разделяют и идею защиты Высших Ценностей, и принцип макиавеллизма. Чтобы читателю было проще смириться с этой мыслью, предлагаю заменить неприятное иностранное словечко «макиавеллизм» более близкими для понимания народными перифразами того же самого: «лес рубят — щепки летят», «на войне все средства хороши», «чтобы продать ведро воды, нужно устроить пожар», «чтобы приготовить яичницу, нужно разбить яйца», «игра сто́ит свеч».

Мне остается лишь внести конструктив в выстроенную ментальную конструкцию: что с этим всем прикажете делать? Мириться или воевать? Идти на компромисс или искать более радикальный выход?

В моем личном представлении есть только один способ решить эту сложнейшую проблему нашего времени: добиться общественного консенсуса в приятии или неприятии представления об этике как универсальной высшей ценности, для защиты которой любые средства хороши.

Консенсуса по правомерности макиавеллизма человечеству не удалось достичь даже после столетий интенсивных исканий. С учетом современной глобальной схизмы общественного сознания о консенсусе говорить вообще не приходится.

Ни сегодня, ни завтра, ни в обозримом будущем в сложившемся статус-кво не изменится ровным счетом ничего: половина населения Земли будет говорить, что ради защиты Высших Ценностей любые средства хороши, другая половина будет подобный подход осуждать. А раз так, то остается смириться и приготовиться жить дальше бок о бок — и с PRISM, и с Pegasus, и со всеми остальными их аналогами.