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Meet the Tiny Startup That Sells IPhone and Android Zero Days To Governments (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The story of Azimuth Security, a tiny startup in Australia, provides a rare peek inside the secretive industry that helps government hackers get around encryption. Azimuth is part of an opaque, little known corner of the intelligence world made of hackers who develop and sell expensive exploits to break into popular technologies like iOS, Chrome, Android and Tor.
Important differentiation. This makes it sound like they are the original or only startup doing this.
This has literally been done for a decade for smartphones and probably 2-3 decades for computers (Hint: Israel has a *HUGE* computer security industry which runs off this exact type of business. I am sure there are places in every major nation doing the same, albeit most of them not as well.)
And this is ethical because...?????
They do claim to only sell their uncovered secrets to a "select group of countries and not repressive" ones.
provides exploits to ... the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
That's how they answer this ethics question. Which may or may not work for you.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
So we have azimuth, can I have the correct elevation, too? I'll take care of the rest, then...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While the trade is commonly painted as a wild west full of mercenaries who sell hacking tools to whoever can afford them, over a dozen well-placed sources described an overlooked section of the industry that focuses on supplying to a select group of democratic governments, rather than authoritarian regimes.
Phew! I'm glad that there are still people who can tell the difference between "democratic governments" and authoritarian regimes, especially in the field of violating basic human rights.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Ethics, in a nutshell, is "Do the right things for the right reasons". Figuring out and agreeing upon what the right things are and what the right reasons are, is the hard part. Everything with ethics depends on context. Lying may or may not be ethical depending upon the situation at hand. Lying to a man who has a school full of children as hostages, ethical. Lying to your spouse about cheating, unethical. And the lying part of the unethical example I just gave may have other situational conditions that make it ethical.
Context is key and ethics are in the eye of the beholder...
--I like turtles...