Samsung embeds IronSource spyware app on phones across WANA

I suspect a strong link between mass surveillance (by corporations for advertising or by states for intelligence purposes) and the very recent targeting of the senior Iranian nuclear scientist and military officers at their homes in Iran.

Wherever you are from or whatever side of the conflict you are on, I think we can all agree that it’s never been easier to infer so much about a person from “semi-public” sources such as companies selling customer data and built-in apps that spy on their users and call home. It allows intelligence agencies to outsource intelligence gathering to the market, which is probably cheaper and a lot more convenient than traditional methods.

“Privacy is a human right” landed on deaf ears but hopefully politicians will soon realise that it’s a matter of national security too.

The truth is far outside the Overton window.

Yes, privacy is a question of civil defense in the drone age. But the existing crop of states will never acknowledge that; their structure and institutions presume precisely the kind of mass databases of PII that create this vulnerability, as well as institutional transparency for public accountability. This makes them structurally vulnerable to insurgencies that expropriate those databases for targeting. The existing states will continue to clutch at their fantasies of adequately secured taxpayer databases until their territorial control (itself an anachronism in the drone age; boots on the ground can no longer provide security against things like Operation Spiderweb) has been reduced to a few fortified clandestine facilities.

Things are going to be very unpredictable and, I suspect, extremely violent.

I used to feel this way until I learned about counter-UAS tech.

That's wishful thinking. Flying drones aren't the only threat, or the main threat, and there isn't such a thing as "counter-UAS tech", only counter-yesterday's-UAS tech. Radio jamming was "counter-UAS tech" until the mass production of fiber-optic-controlled FPV drones starting five months ago, for example. You can still find vendors marketing it as such.

30 milligrams of high explosive is enough to open your daughter's skull, or, more relevantly, your commanding officer's daughter's skull, and there are a thousand ways to deliver it to her if she can be tracked: in pager batteries, crawling, swimming, floating, waiting for ambush, hitchhiking on migratory birds, hitchhiking on car undercarriages, in her Amazon Prime deliveries, falling from a hydrogen balloon in the mesosphere, and so on. And if 30mg is too much, 2mg of ricin on a mechanical ovipositor will do just as well.

All of this is technically possible today without any new discoveries. At this point it's a straightforward systems development exercise. And you can be sure that there are bad people working for multiple different countries' spy agencies who know this; they don't need me to tell them.

> 30 milligrams of high explosive is enough to open your daughter's skull, or, more relevantly, your commanding officer's daughter's skull, and there are a thousand ways to deliver it

While we are talking about flying drones, we are not far off from Slaughterbots becoming reality.[0] Why bother with surgical assassinations if you can blanket entire regions with with swarms of autonomous seek-and-destroy explosives?

After all, as last two years have so amply demonstrated: people are fine with genocide.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU