2/ Per @R3Dmx, #Pegasus victims were infected while working on:
❌Connections between Los Zetas Cartel & Mexican Army
❌Official misconduct in investigations into #Ayotzinapa forced disappearances
❌Human rights violations by Mexican Armed Forces.
Chilling.
3/ Mexico was first rocked by #Pegasus scandals in 2017 under President @EPN.
9/ A key detail: while previous Pegasus cases @citizenlab investigated in #Mexico involved finding SMS messages and 1-click attacks... these latest cases were zero-click attacks.
No action was required on the part of the victims to be infected.
10/ Of course NSO has a response that is not serious.
YIKES: @perplexity_ai is flexing that they have OS-level access to 100M+ Samsung S26s.
Zero mention of:
Privacy
Security
Encryption
What will Perplexity do with this growing stash of personal data from deep inside Samsung phones? What jurisdictions will it live in? Who will it get shared with?
Here's the thing: Android's current security & privacy model involves sandboxing 3rd party apps from each other. TikTok can't read your private notes, for example.
Sandboxing is good & it narrows the attack surface against your private stuff.
But this #Perplexity integration breaks that baseline sandbox model, making a kernel-adjacent data bridge for Perplexity into your personal stuff.
Will users understand the structural shift in privacy?
Meanwhile, the risk of prompt injection & other attacks against an agentic AI that has OS-level access to personal stuff is also real.
Lots of speed, no signs of caution.
2/ Multiple agents & flows each with their own distinct security & privacy issues and levels of OS-level access to private stuff.
I doubt users have the cognitive spare room to parse privacy & security downsides each time they want to ask a question.
NEW: When Kenyan cops arrested activist & presidential candidate @bonifacemwangi they took his devices.
When he got his personal phone back, the password was gone.
We @citizenlab found they'd abused @cellebrite to break into it.
Here's why this abuse matters 1/
2/ Your phone holds the keys to your life, and governments shouldn’t be able to help themselves to the contents just because they don’t like what you are saying.
But everywhere you look, cops are getting phone cracking technology from companies like @cellebrite.
Many abuse it.
3/ @Cellebrite's abuse potential is clear.
Now, Cellebrite says that they have a human rights committee & do due diligence...
Because even Cellebrite knows that if you sell phone cracking tech to security services with bad oversight, you have a problem.
So why are there so many sales to questionable security services?
2/ Companies like Paragon (founded in Israel, former Israeli intelligence ppl, recently sold to a US owner) make hacking American technology companies their business model.
And then selling these capabilities to foreign governments.
How can this be?
3/ Honestly it is astonishing that a company that works tirelessly to hack & undermine the security of American products is now US-owned.
The missing factor: building contracts with the US government & lobbying.
The goal of these contracts, I believe, isn't just profit. It's getting protection & building government dependency on their technology.