cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/63197390
found this on some telegram channel:
In February 2026, an employee of Paragon Solutions published a photograph on her LinkedIn profile depicting the operation of the Graphite spyware. The post has currently been deleted.
Reut Yamen holds the position of Chief Legal Counsel and Director of Compliance at the Israeli company Paragon Solutions, which specializes in cyber-surveillance technologies. The company was founded in 2019 by a group of former employees of Israeli intelligence services — among them Ehud Schneorson, former commander of Unit 8200 (Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency), as well as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
The post was first noticed by technology researcher Yurre van Bergen, who tracks the use and proliferation of spyware worldwide.
The image apparently shows a demonstration interface of the Graphite system. An operator can view messages intercepted from a surveillance target in various services, including WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Line, and TikTok.
According to the results of a large-scale investigation conducted by The Citizen Lab in 2025, in 2024 in Italy, dozens of journalists and private individuals were attacked via the WhatsApp messenger using Graphite. A “zero-click” exploit (one that does not require user interaction) was used for this purpose.
Paragon Solutions has (or previously had) contracts with U.S. government agencies, in particular the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
I’m starting to feel sceptical to anything electronic
First avoid the major social apps. They are designed to give their companies access to your private information for advertising and selling, so of course these have lots of ways for nefarious attacks without user intervention since they aren’t likely to spend money keeping them out. Also, wouldn’t hurt to move to an OS that better isolates apps (like GrapheneOS) and avoid background services with administrative privileges like iOS or Google Services. GrapheneOS isolates Google services a bit or allows never installing them. IPhone has no real way to mitigate risk outside of the basics like encrypting your device and online data, but the admin services still have access. Not sure how easily they are hacked these days since they haven’t really been promoting privacy anymore, but have also started wanting to profit from your data. Still slightly better than google, but way less control over the device which means you’re at their mercy. I want even get started on Samsung administrative services…and I don’t know the others well.
At some level, you have to accept that there’s no panacea to the panopticon. At least, none at the retail level.
Ffs, flock cameras and facial recognition make even MeatSpace a shitshow of privacy violations.
Ultimately, the real defense against spying is irrelevance. 99.99% of people simply aren’t interesting enough to monitor in a way that matters.
But security through obscurity is no security at all. On top of that, as companies continue to automate spying and the price for spying on an individual falls, we’ll be spied on more and more whether we’re noteworthy or not
The survivability onion disagrees.
Just because I can read your email doesn’t mean I can distinguish what’s important from what’s spam.
The most important element of the flock camera system is your DMV’s license plate record system. Without that, none of it works. Even with it, you need an enormous ground presence to make it meaningful.
Looking unremarkable is absolutely critical in a surveillance state. You should be aware of what takes you off the radar relative to what makes you stick out.
And that’s the real point.
Make irrelevance desirable and notoriety risky and you’ve got a compliant people
even if 99.99% of the populace is irrelevant to them they are still going to collect the data and use it against you if they need to.
Massively easier to find/create relevance now that LLMs can be run against the data. Now imagine all the mistakes it could make.
We don’t have to imagine, it’s already making those mistakes. But don’t worry, taxpayers will fund the settlements…
But also make notoriety a source of revenue and irrelevance a job security risk.
You’ll get enthusiastic compliance, as evidenced by the last two years.
But you’ll also get a groundswell of nobodies who are super pissed at you. All this surveillance is ineffectual when defiance occurs at scale.
When everyone’s acting in opposition, nobody gets punished.
Those 99.99% of “uninteresting” people who make up the trillions of the Big Tech data market
It’s not the technology tho - it’s capitalism
You must assume that anything you communicate electronically can be traced back to you. Even if it’s encrypted, if they just hack your OS and read the messages from a screen capture they can still access it.