In a searing post on his blog, ‘Continuing Ed’, the NSA whistleblower pointed to the Pegasus scandal as a “turning point” that exposed the “fatal consequences” of private-sector companies like the NSO Group that are part of this “out-of-control” industry – whose “sole purpose is the production of vulnerability.” “The phone in your hand exists in a state of perpetual insecurity, open to infection by anyone willing to put money in the hand of this new Insecurity Industry,” Snowden noted, adding that its clients range from countries to “sex-criminal Hollywood producers who can dig a few million out of their couch cushions.” The entirety of this industry’s business involves cooking up new kinds of infections that will bypass the very latest digital vaccines (security updates) and then selling them to countries that occupy the red-hot intersection of a Venn Diagram between ‘desperately craves the tools of oppression’ and ‘sorely lacks the sophistication to produce them domestically.’ As news of the Pegasus scandal broke last week, it emerged that over 50,000 phones were infected by Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group’s flagship malware. Many of the numbers on the leaked list reportedly belong to political opponents of these client countries. The former US intelligence contractor described the mobile ecosystem as a “dystopian hellscape of end-user monitoring and outright end-user manipulation.” Similarly, he stated that the world is “in the midst of the greatest crisis of computer security in computer history.” If you want to see Microsoft have a heart attack, talk about defining legal liability for bad code in a commercial product. To give Facebook nightmares, talk about making it legally liable for leaks of their unnecessarily collected personal records. https://t.co/9ahiR1MOz4 — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) July 26, 2021 https://www.rt.com/news/530356-snowden-skewers-insecurity-industry-pegasus-leak/

? ? ?