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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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Random rumors from the internet:

https://twitter.com/realpepeescobar/status/1711973752924455254

Mossad is now blaming Huawei.

Hamas used Huawei smartphones with no Western backdoor.

That completes switching the blame to the new "axis of evil".

Russia-China-Iran.

The source is a twitter account named @RealPepeEscobar, so do your due diligence, but if this is true it's absolutely hilarious: Western intelligence agencies spend their time and money breaking into their own side's hardware rather than that of the enemy...

One of the replies to the tweet says he'll go and buy a Huawei now, and to be honest who can blame him, just like how having western rather than Chinese backdoors in your hardware protects you if you're living in China, having Chinese rather than western backdoors protects you if you're living in the west.

It seems very unlikely. The release of various Pegasus/NSO Group stuff shows that they very much weren’t exploiting deliberate back doors (which would have made things much easier) but obscure vulnerabilities in iMessage etc. I find it hard to believe that Huawei phones running on Android or their own weird HarmonyOS (which is cobbled together out of a lot of different things, including a fork of Android 10, and which is pretty new anyway) are more impenetrable than latest model iPhones. All the extensive evidence points to the reverse being true.

If there are backdoors in Apple and Android phones, wouldn't they be ordered by the government and not be shared outside of intelligence agencies?

NSO, OTOH, appears to have developed remote hacking tech and is selling it far and wide, by contrast.

I see NSO as more of a play so that police departments and other minor state security services can try to phone hack too.

This is all assuming NSO isn't a cute little Mossad front, of course.