Comment by janmo 2 days ago
If the mossad was able to plant explosives without being caught, I wouldn't be surprised if they also planted bugs (indiscriminately) in many electronic devices delivered to Lebanon such as TVs, computers, phones etc...
Similar to the spy chips implants within the Supermicro server motherboards.
Until a few hours ago there was "zero evidence" that thousands of pagers and walkie talkies had been tampered to explode via a remote command.
That's not how any of this works. If you investigate extensively and fail to find evidence, then there's probably no evidence. If you weren't looking for any evidence and didn't find any, that does not mean there's no evidence.
I wouldn't be surprised if this went well beyond Lebanon. It's time to start really scrutinizing our tech supply chain. I won't use any Israeli tech going forward.
Glib defeatism and the automatic surrender to any entity more powerful than you is sad, pitiable even.
The main way states exercise power is by making large enough shows of force that people behave exactly as you do, and roll over in submission. State powers may be able to silence, extort, or kill anyone, but they damn sure can't get everyone.
> They've cracked down hard on anti-war protesters inside Israel
huh? There's been weekly protests for almost a year now and last week's was the largest yet with around half a million attending
https://www.timesofisrael.com/organizers-claim-largest-ever-...
Protesters, not protests.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-human-rights/inside...
What history? I don't even normally comment but this was crazy and horrible. I'm aware that companies have offices in Israel. I think that's quickly going to become a bygone era though. In fact, Intel just canceled a new Israeli office.
Yes, the supply chain is very clearly compromised.
How much of it is an excellent question. It's remarkable that apparently (?) none of the devices went off prematurely and tipped off the targets. That implies a higher degree of QA than you'd expect from a more ramshackle organization.
The Supermicro story was never proven to be anything but bullshit, though. The more you looked into it, the less it added up.
Given the embarrassingly bad security practices of hardware vendors (see recent secure boot key leak) do the spy agencies require deliberate backdoors anymore? I have lost count of the number of times Cisco has shipped a hardcoded admin password.
Supermicro never happened. Zero evidence. The reporters and the paper (Bloomberg?) have never retracted it, which is a reflection of their crappy reporting.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/02/12/bloomberg-big-c...