And it’ll never ever be used against law-abiding, tax-paying, god-fearing, naturalized citizens ever—hand over heart, fingers crossed.
It shouldnt even be used on people who arent any of that.
You know the saddest part of this? ICE paid for that. If I made something that blocked that tool from working or even just made a knockoff that does the same thing, they would just seize it.
So that company has more rights and protections than actual humans do.
And that’s considered okay.
Citizens United strikes again.
Non-expert opinion: it’s dangerous.
They were already dangerous when Trump told them to stand back and standby. They became significantly more dangerous when he deputized them and instructed them to wear masks and avoid being identified while they rounded up opposition. They became even more dangerous when Doge gave them access to everything the government knows about citizens to improve the effectiveness of their harassment and intimidation. They need became more dangerous when they arrested blue-state politicians for asking questions and nothing came of it. And yeah… the better their tools get, the more dangerous they become.
But simplifying this to “experts say it’s dangerous” under sells reality so badly.
Paragon’s “zero-click” Graphite program can quietly invade the mobile phone of its target and extract its contents, even from encrypted apps.
How? Screen scraping? That would involve installing malware on each phone.
Looks like they use 0-day exploits to indeed install spyware on targets
Meta shared information with WhatsApp that led them to identify, mitigate, and attribute a Paragon zero-click exploit. On January 31, 2025, WhatsApp sent notifications to approximately 90 WhatsApp accounts they believed were targeted with Paragon’s spyware, including journalists and members of civil society.
Lol. It relies on WhatsApp.
Weird that they would target one of the biggest mainstream chat apps in whole of Europe
Oh. I have no doubt that a lot of people are vulnerable to the exploit, but I’m entertained by the fact that you can stop the exploit by simply removing a chat app.
Um… one problem for Mr. NSA:
I don’t have friends. Zero groupchats. Don’t even have any mainsteam comms apps. Not even a Lemmy client (I use browser lmao). How am I supposed to get the .pdf?
😁
I mean if you’re a genuine target they’ll find a way.
(Also a nitpick, Paragon is originally an Israeli corporation, altho they do have an US division since 2021)
I hope there’s some technological way we can use to foil these attempts to violate citizens’ privacy en masse.
It’s called GrapheneOS
I’m aware of GrapheneOS, but I don’t know how their tracking works, so I also don’t know if GrapheneOS can offer enough protection.
Reticulum is gaining momentum. I’m planning on investigating how viable a shift off cellular would actually be for my uses and it actually looks pretty doable.
What area do you live in that reticulum has enough coverage to remove the dependency on cell service
It doesn’t have the ability, not completely anyway. But it can actually do the thing and by putting the pressure on myself that way I can ensure I do my part to improve the situation. At its start all I need it to be able to do is notifications and text messages. If I can’t get it to do that much it’s already successful for me me.
Its honestly going to get to the point where to rid yourself from The Eye of Sauron you’ll have to make the data centers defunct.
Does Nokia still make a solid feature phone?
My biggest use case for a smartphone is MFA for work, so if I can convince them to give me a yubikey instead, I’d be interested.
Alternatively, you can carry a phone only for 2fa with no internet connection. I think there are tokens that have the totp screen on them too
Gestapo. They’re going to start kidnapping and killing whoever they feel like soon
I wonder when is EU gonna open up to US Refugees, right now they aren’t gonna take an American’s asylum claim seriously, I have yet to see any American actually been able to obtain political asylum in any western democratic country.
They also are buying the NSO group
