What's happening at the #Titanic site will likely be a tragedy.
@OceanGate's page on why they didn't seek certifications / classing for the Titan submersible & that design safety regulations are slow & constrain innovation... reads differently now.
Imagine if a car manufacturer told you: this car isn't crash certified because it won't prevent people from driving the car badly.
"No other submersible currently utilizes real-time monitoring...we want to know why"
Hubris from @OceanGate even as they dismiss the existing standards derived from many tragedies that came before.
There's a nuanced, necessary risk balancing whenever you push at edges.
Innovation is hard if you over-constrain yourself to old rules... but scrap them all & you should expect to experience some irreversible lessons.
Nowhere more so than in the sea's unforgiving depths.
Exploration & adventure have unavoidable risks.
This is fine.
But I sincerely hope that the souls on that submersible truly understood them, and that @OceanGate objectively explained them *without* being colored by the kind of rhetoric found on their website.
"if you are lost so are we"
Comms failed & the #OceanGate submersible was lost for several hours on an earlier #Titanic dive.
The dark irony of what is unfolding is not lost on maritime historians
Those familiar w/marine environments will find the consumer grade electronics beyond puzzling.
Salt water, condensation, humidity, etc. are kryptonite to electronics.
And exactly the kinds of things you'd find in a submersible diving into cold places.
Thinking on @mercoglianos' point that the #Titanic is what got us the first convention on Safety of Life at Sea aka #SOLAS.
It continues to save uncountable lives.
101 years later & an outcome we can hope for is a fresh focus on safety regs for subsurface adventure tourism.
While the game controller (CEO said they had spares) is something we can all understand...
I think it's important to think of it as a indicator of the overall risk management & minimum-viable-submersible philosophy that seems to have been at work all over.
Pics: ballast.
"#OceanGate offers you the the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity ...[of] SAFELY diving to the Titanic wreckage site"
The breathless 2023 #Titanic dive promotional video puts safety in the first sentence.
UPDATE: an #OceanGate employee was allegedly fired for refusing to greenlight manned tests over safety concerns.
"the current 'experimental' approach... could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic) that would have serious consequences for everyone in the industry"
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.
Here are some more damming revelations as Intellexa, the shady, sanctioned spyware supplier gets exposed by @AmnestyTech & partners.. /1
2/ First, a mercenary spyware myth has just been busted.
Because the leak shows an Intellexa employee directly accessing a customer deployment.
Prior to the #PredatorFiles leak, spyware companies basically always claimed they couldn't access customer deployments & didn't know what was going on there.
They used this to avoid responsibility & claim ignorance when faced with abuses.
3/ And it gets crazier. The leak shows Intellexa casually accessing a core backbone of Predator deployment of a government customer.
Seemingly without the gov's knowledge.
Suggests that Intellexa can look over their shoulder & watch their sensitive targeting.