EU funds are flowing into spyware companies, and politicians are demanding answers An arsenal of angry European Parliament members (MEPs) is demanding answers from senior commissioners about why EU subsidies are ending up in the pockets of spyware companies. The group of 39 politicians referred to recent investigations that revealed countries such as Italy, Greece, Hungary, and Spain have funnelled millions …
@Paul_Crawford
Quote: "...pushing for backdoors..."
I'm fed up with this type of misdirection.
NSO/Pegasus and Paragon/Graphite are dropped on a target, and then EVERYTHING on the target is available to the snoops IN PLAIN.
Note: Even if the user is using Signal. Signal only protects messages IN TRANSIT.
See: https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/apple_imageio_exploit/
Quote: "...the point of targeted operations is to make sure victims never notice..."
A wise user drafts plain text material OFF LINE. A wise user encrypts OFF LINE. A wise user use private encryption (see Daniel Bernstein for details).
Ditto for decryption.
So....everything on any network is encrypted with private encryption.....no plain text anywhere.
....hence the chatter about "backdoors" is moot!
Well one can discuss the nature of the path: a backdoor, an unsecured window, or a vent that can be crawled up, but the end result is largely the same. Unwanted entry.
The latest wheeze for "client side scanning" might not be a direct weakening of a cryptographic algorithm but it still weakens the cryptographic system. The acid test which shows the true nature is how it is not to be applied to politicians, etc, even when the plebs are assured it will only be used against bad people. I can think of at least one UK MP who was a paedophile so there is a good argument for applying it to MPs first.
Backdoors are potentially FAR more powerful than NSO type stuff. NSO has to be targeted at an individual phone, and the more times it is targeted the greater chance it will be discovered, Apple/Google will learn about the flaw, and 0 day fixes will be pushed out forcing them to move on to another of their small and finite number of exploit chains they currently possess.
A backdoor could potentially let them scan everyone at once, so rather than attacks limited to a maximum of a few thousand people they could rope in many millions. That's their dream, to have the level of intercept that has for decades been possible on the telephone network.
@DS999
Quote: "...A backdoor could potentially let them scan everyone..."
You really don't get it do you! Some of us use private encryption BEFORE our messages are sent over Signal.
(Look up Daniel Bernstein for a primer.)
Good luck with any "backdoor" which Signal might allow.
Good luck with any flaw in Signal's Diffie/Helman scheme allowing the snoops to read the message.
The snoops can scan away as far as I'm concerned!!
Of course if your device is compromised, it doesn't matter when you apply encryption because they're getting plaintext from a keylogger. Unless of course by "offline" you literally mean using an air-gaped system, which sounds really inconvenient. Bravado about the measures you could be taking to protect your communication is one thing, but actually manually transcribing ciphertext from an air-gapped system to a networked system doesn't sound like something anyone would go to the trouble of doing unless they had reason to believe the government was actively looking for an excuse to arrest them. And if they really are, then they have ways to compromise even an air-gapped system.
Of course the real Holy Grail for these people is brain computer interfaces so they can literally scan your thoughts. It's doubtful that there's anyone alive who never has a thought which could be considered as incriminating when taken out of context, so that'd get them an excuse to arrest basically anyone they found inconvenient.
@AC
Quote: ".....really inconvenient...manually transcribing ciphertext from an air-gapped system to a networked system..."
Whoah up there....thumb drives were invented a while ago!!!
Quote: "....compromise even an air-gapped system...."
Whoah up there.....the idea is to make it VERY DIFFICULT for the snoops. No one said "impossible to snoop"....just VERY DIFFICULT.
Some of us use private encryption BEFORE our messages are sent over Signal
If the government was scanning all Signal messages, a tiny tiny portion of them being encrypted would stand out as a sore thumb "deserving" further review of who is sending those and why they might be willing to go to all that trouble.
I'm not saying that SHOULD happen, I'm saying that if you have a government that was scanning all Signal messages then you WOULD be singled out and treated as a suspect if they learned you were going to all that trouble to send already encrypted messages they can't read.
You're not going to say "we're a spyware company". You're going to sugar coat it, and make your business sound normal and legit. Ditto if you're applying for some sort of government subsidy or whatever is "flowing" EU funds into these companies. Probably just telling them "look at this list of government contracts we have" is enough without even going into what your business actually does.
It is easy for them to point fingers after the fact, but short of producing (and updating) a blacklist of companies I'm not sure how they expect to stop it.
Like any huge organisation money is made available for one thing and is distributed accordingly. Those lower down the food chain dispense different parcels of funding with scant interest in where it goes or accountability.
It is not their money and they probably have to only show that it has been allocated. I am old enough to remember the EU Wine Lakes, Butter Mountains and so on. All funding given to farmers to produce stuff that nobody wanted to buy but the goal was to give the money to farmers.
The Butter Mountain was particularly good as there was a scam where a barge could be loaded up then shuffled up and down the Rhine or Elbe claiming VAT rebates on a cargo that was never actually delivered. When it all went rancid you just disposed of it (probably in the river) and filled the barge up again.
More recently in the UK we have the incentives to help bus operators buy electric busses. The intention being that the incentive would mean they bought British vehicles. Due to the way the procurement works all that has happened is over £400m of Tax Payer's money has gone straight to the Chinese as those vehicles were cheaper. When the tender came in Yutong was cheaper so that was the successful bidder. The incentive that should have been used for the British vehicle was applied after tender evaluation, not before. Net result that Chinese is even cheaper.
