Much of the terrain is similar to Afghanistan. Tribal islamic alliances are resilient against loss of central governance. There is a massive porous mountainous border to 2+ countries that conceivably will look the other way for certain islamic militants.
I know everyone wants to gobble down the campaign about complete air superiority and toppling of leaders, and that WhatsApp may be separating the regime from 52 virgins, but realize this is a propaganda campaign. This initial propaganda only serves to manufacture consent long enough to buy citizens in to blood so they can't back out. We're in the process of being tricked.
It wouldn't be a cake walk. But America could topple the government in Tehran about as easily as it did in Baghdad or, frankly, Kabul. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't a failure to decapitate the opposing state. It was in filling the vacuum that left.
This seems so exceptionally counter productive.
Anyway we have plenty of people here that hate the US and are far more likely to actually create a problem.
Furthermore I'd argue the deficit spending (a very large portion of which is defense) is a much more serious existential threat.
So does the US.
> They also call for the annihilation of the Big Satan (USA) and the Small Satan (Israel)
You are literally calling for the annihilation of their state here.
> All the while running for The Bomb.
Only one country has ever used nuclear weapons in war.
There is definitely a cold war going on between Israel and Iran. I'm not sure if it escalating to a hot war would be better. The 20th century Cold War had all the same things you mentioned, with both sides fighting proxy wars, calling for the annihilation of the other side, and had atomic weapons. And I think everyone agrees that the end of the cold war that we had was definitely better than nuclear Armageddon.
And I don't know if the 20th would have been better if only the US had atomic weapons. MAD might have saved millions of lives in both sides.
nope.
> You are literally calling for the annihilation of their state here.
Nope, people are only calling for the unpopular regime to be replaced by a popular one.
> There is definitely a cold war going on between Israel and Iran.
Hezbollah is an actual arm of the IRGC so it's a hot war and has been for 25+ years.
I'm guessing that doesn't include Turkey or the rich oil arab states.
https://x.com/clashreport/status/1935078004230865094
https://www.aei.org/op-eds/israel-iran-war-dry-run-for-a-fut...
Turkey's president has vowed to "liberate Al-Aqsa mosque" from Israel https://www.newarab.com/news/hagia-sophia-resurrection-paves...
Turkish President Erdogan did not hesitate to issue a rare threat to Israel in a party rally, speaking on the ongoing war in Gaza: 'Perhaps we will invade just like we entered Karabakh and Libya' https://www.i24news.tv/en/news/middle-east/levant-turkey/art...
you are going to compare what somebody random says to what head of state (that is member of nato) says ?
I don't want to speak to the other foreign governments, and I think there is a LOT of room for healthy criticism of how the USA handles its foreign policy, past & present.
But to answer the question directly with respects to Iran, specifically: the leadership has been repeatedly chanting "Death To America" for its 45 year history and have been actively trying to develop a nuclear weapon program. It calls Israel the "Little Satan" and America the "Big Satan." A mantra often repeated: "First we come for the Saturday people, then we go for the Sunday people."
Say what you want about the USA. I'll be the first to join you in criticism of many of it's foreign policy actions, including the 1953 CIA-backed Iranian coup that arguably led to the Islamic revolution in 1979 and got us the Iran we have today. And if people want to express concern for what evils could fill the vacuum if the current regime falls... fair.
But I'm certainly not going to blame any free country for responding to an enemy state vowing to destroy it while actively trying to develop the means to do so. If there is ever any moral justification for going to war - that's it. It's defensive. That's arguably the only justification for going to war.
Feel free to disagree with me about the threat that Iran poses to the western world. Maybe it's all propaganda and overstated. You're welcome to that theory. But this is the answer to the question: "Why should the USA get involved?"
I think the difference is that Iran has been actively trying to follow through with its threats and this has been demonstrated through its actions towards an American ally over the past year. This gives reason to believe that Iran's threats are both credible and, while a full-scale war between Iran and the USA might not fare well for Iran ... you don't need to demonstrate that you are capable of wiping out a population or winning a war in order to represent a credible threat. If only one of Iran's missiles manage to land in a densely populated area... people die. And that's enough to warrant a response IMO.
And what about that ally's actions towards Iran? Like assassinating political and military figures inside the country? Which would traditionally be considered an act of war. If anything, Iran has been too passive.
I'm going to share a personal world view. Some may find this controversial or strongly disagree with this world view and that's fine. This is my opinion, not yours.
What gives a nation-state legitimacy is how well adheres to what is, in my personal opinion, the only moral justification for having a government in the first place: the protection of individual rights.
Human beings have two fundamental ways that we can deal with each other: reason/diplomacy or force.
When reason is chosen, life flourishes. People live together peacefully and we create things, start businesses & families and build communities and thrive.
When force is chosen we get war, destruction, poverty, misery and death. We get gangs, thugs and instability.
The need for a government comes from this dichotomy. Government exists, fundamentally, to remove the element of force from civil existence.
My definition of liberty is "An environment in which all interpersonal relations are consensual."
No country, even the freest in the world today, adheres to this principle perfectly. But we can certainly say that some do it better than others. We can even say that some do it a HELL OF A LOT better than others to the point where there is no rational basis for comparison.
Therefore, the question "And what about that ally's actions towards Iran?" places Israel and Iran on equal moral footing.
I reject that wholeheartedly.
On the one hand you have a nation state that is a liberal democracy. It's not perfect, but people can live and pursue their lives there in relative peace and freedom. You can believe what you want to. Live your life as an LGBT+ individual without interference. Start a business. Own property. Have a family and pretty much do what you want with your one and only shot at this life.
On the other hand you have a religious theocracy that murders women for not covering their hair and throws LGBT+ people off of rooftops and executes people just for criticizing the government.
So, what ABOUT Israel's actions towards Iran, exactly?
To point the finger at a free country taking action against a dictatorship is to suggest that that dictatorship has rights.
It doesn't.
The entire basis for a country's right to exist is the recognition and protection of rights. You can't, on the one hand, say "I have the right to exist and to defend myself" while routinely infringing on the rights of your own citizens. You can't violate peoples' rights and then go and hide behind the concept of rights. That concept is based on the mutual recognition, respect and value for reason and diplomacy over force.
So you think the US doesn't have a right to exist?
They could hit any number of US bases, they also have ICBMs "estimated to be at least 15,000 km (9,300 mi), allows it to reach targets anywhere in the contiguous United States."[0]
"Kim announced a Five-Year Defense Plan that said the country would field a new nuclear-capable submarine, develop its tactical nuclear weapons, deploy multiple warheads on a single missile, and improve its ICBMs' accuracy, among other goals. The plan includes development of an ICBM with a range of 15,000 km for "preemptive and retaliatory nuclear strike," and ground-based and sea-based solid-fueled ICBMs. Some analysts predict an increase in missile testing this year in order to meet these goals by 2026." [1]
They are also working with Russia now. "Russia is increasingly supporting North Korea’s nuclear status in exchange for Pyongyang’s support to Moscow’s war against Ukraine."[2]
The threat assessment[2] says about Iran: "We continue to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-19
[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10472
[2] https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/...
This is a good read: https://www.mypersiancorner.com/death-to-america-explained-o...
The phrase is ugly, but it's how you say "fuck the US government" in a very melodramatic and poetic language where the most common way of calling your friend's baby cute translates to "let me martyr myself for this child."
Nonetheless... they've had 45 years to figure out what it sounds like to us. Those 45 years started with actual violence, and has continued with various forms of proxy conflict. So I don't think it's 100% on us to de-escalate the situation.
(That said... they had been working on that de-escalation, and we're the ones who threw that in the bin about a decade ago. So I'd say the burden has shifted substantially back in our direction.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad_infiltration_of_Irani...
I'd understand if it showed that Iran was failing to live up to the JCPOA. But to withdraw based on what it had been doing back in 1999-2003, a decade before the agreement? That, I can't follow.
But it does show that, from the wiki:
According to journalist Yonah Jeremy Bob and nuclear expert Jeffrey Lewis, much of the key contents were already reported in past IAEA reports. However, the trove provided more clarity about Iran's specific goals for its arsenal,[12] and it proved that Iran violated the JCPOA, which prohibited Iran from engaging in any research and development activity and required full disclosure of all of Iran's nuclear program, including documentation
> can't follow
Actually it is hard to follow! Both governments made it as if because the evidence was found, US withdrew from the pact. However, the operation to gather the evidence was launched so as to give the US a valid reason to withdraw from the pact. The cause-effect is the other way around. Of course, everyone suspected that Iran wasn't keeping up the promise with or without evidence anyways. The evidence was needed solely to give the US president a political reason to dump a deal set by his predecessor.
The US Director of National Intelligence testified to congress a few weeks ago that no US intelligence agency believes that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, and that they believed Iran was at least 3 years away from having the ability to build a nuclear bomb even if they tried.
What you are saying directly contradicts what US intelligence agencies have said.
A couple sources: https://jewishinsider.com/2025/03/gabbard-iran-is-not-curren... https://www.newsweek.com/tulsi-gabbard-iran-nuclear-weapon-2...
* on the former, NT has an example of the crowd who want to stone someone, instead being convinced to leave; and the latter NT contains the origin of the phrase "to go the extra mile", which is about helping foreign soldiers occupying your territory and ordering you to help them (Matthew 5:41)
There are thousands of Ayatollah, you mean specifically the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Catholic Church used to be powerful, but it too has had mismatches between even ex cathedra teachings and what people actually do: see also US politics having occasional arguments about if being Catholic disqualified someone from politics because they submitted to the Bishop of Rome over the people.
And that's without the way government leaders often tell bold faced lies (and less obvious lies, too).
Meanwhile, he's the only megalomaniac in the region with a Bomb.
We also remember the IDF "discovering" a weapons cache stored next to... an MRI.
Some of us have seen the pictures of Gaza.
But, to be honest, I am grateful that intercepting missiles and drones is giving IDF pilots something to do other than bombing Gazans.
Just sayin'
The US Director of National Intelligence (Tulsi Gabbard) has a very public history of backing Assad and Iran during the Syrian Civil War, and any mention of the DNI without mentioning it's currently Tulsi Gabbard is clearly a bad faith discussion.
Furthermore, the DNI is at the lowest rung of the intel hierarchy on the Hill, as it is a post-9/11 invention, and faces inter-service competition from the CIA, FBI, and NSA.
The DNI is by law [0] the head of the intelligence community; the role was created to separate that function from the CIA Director (formerly, "Director of Central Intelligence"), who previously was the head of the intelligence community as well as the head of one of the major constituent agencies within that community. The CIA, FBI, and NSA or components of the intelligence community, not "competitors" with the DNI.
(And all of those are executive branch positions, so not in any hierarchy "on the Hill", which is a metonym for the Legislative branch because of the location of the Capitol complex on Capitol hill.)
[0] 50 U.S. Code § 3023(b)(1) Subject to the authority, direction, and control of the President, the Director of National Intelligence shall— (1) serve as head of the intelligence community; (2) act as the principal adviser to the President, to the National Security Council, and the Homeland Security Council for intelligence matters related to the national security; and (3) consistent with section 1018 of the National Security Intelligence Reform Act of 2004, oversee and direct the implementation of the National Intelligence Program. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/3023
> which is a metonym for the Legislative branch because of the location of the Capitol complex on Capitol hill.
IK. I used to work there. It is the general denonym for working in either the Executive or Legislative.
> And all of those are executive branch positions, so not in any hierarchy "on the Hill"
Strongly disagree from personal experience. Just like any organization, resourcing gives certain groups or agencies more heft and leeway than others.
[0] - https://www.axios.com/2025/06/10/trump-camp-david-iran-gaza-...
And that it should be no one's concern about a regime that is stretched for resources yet has over a dozen very expensive facilities working on militarizing nuclear technology that also publicly and repeatedly calls for the destruction of not just Israel but also America ?
Some of us are old enough to remember.
In honor of W. "fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twice? Well you cant fool me twice"
In other words, this is not a civilian energy program.
Maybe they can build a bomb in 1 month, maybe three years. You may not agree whether or not action should be taken, but I do not see that agreement/disagreement based on the difference.
In any case, our "intelligence" community has lost a lot of credibility, and has been politicized for decades. I would not bet my life, let alone an entire nation, on what they have to say.
Common sense also needs to take into account that Iran already does have a working civilian reactor, and its fuel is supplied by Russia. Given the state of Iran's economy, there is no rational reason for it to be spending vast sums to build so many facilities simply to supply fuel to a reactor that is already supplied by someone else. They would be far better off spending their much needed resources building additional civilian reactors.
Is Iran close to producing an actual bomb ? Don't know. Is Iran investing huge sums to produce weapons grade nuclear material ? There is quite a lot of information to indicate that this is so, and there is only one reason to do this - to produce a nuclear bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_facilities_in_Iran
Long list of nuclear sites, cross referenced from many diverse sources. Assume half is misinformation, there is a lot of evidence of a wide ranging program
https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/analysis-of-iaea...
Analysis of the many IAEI reports. I am not sure of the reputation of the authors, but I have read through similar findings from different sources.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/12/nx-s1-5431395/iran-nuclear-en...
"Iran isn't complying with its nuclear obligations for the first time in 20 years" from an IAEI report, reported by NPR
I believe that Iran is and has been trying very hard to produce enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. I do not know how close they are to an actual bomb, but I also do not believe the technical know how is beyond them, they have smart people, funding, and a technology infrastructure to make it happen. The hard part is the enriched uranium.
I also do not believe that Iran getting close to a bomb is the real reason for Israel's current offensive. Neither do I believe that Israel "acted alone", the US is complicit. Neither do I believe that Hamas and Hezbollah acted alone, Iran is complicit. The past 20 months has always been about Israel/Iran and US/Russia/China.
You may believe differently.
[0] https://www.thedailybeast.com/tulsi-gabbard-admits-to-asking... - forgive the crappy source, i'm not super serious about this line of discussion :)
Myself, I think they already have a bomb. Or actually don't want it for moral reasons. There is no universe where Pakistan and N. Korea have it and they're "working on it"
Then the USA created the Saddam regime in Iraq to fight the Iranian regime and that went great.
And now the USA is supporting Israel to terrorize the Middle East in their name and with their bombs and that’s going swimmingly too. Top job everyone.
US itself is not a representative democracy either.
But the Islamic Republic wasn’t an American creation. Neither was Saddam’s Iraq or the Mujahideen or Al Qaeda. We variously facilitated, opposed and ignored these elements, mostly the last. Ignoring the Soviet history in the region, together with the fact that Iranians aren’t automatons, but human beings with agency and preferences, continues this tradition of American fatalism that ignores how complicated (and independent of ourselves) these systems are.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9ta...
Imagine if someone installed a puppet king in the USA to exploit the resources of the US for their gain, would you think that would be dramatic?
As for the Islamic revolution, it was a reaction to being colonized and subjugated, and I would argue it’s still around because the only other option is being a puppet of the US.
Literally the colonial governors.
> it’s still around because the only other option is being a puppet of the US
Iran didn’t have to become a hardline theocracy, or a state sponsor of terror, or a nuclear pariah. The IRGC didn’t have to be corrupt and autocratic [1].
The tragedy of the present is it still doesn’t have to be. And while we contributed to the malaise that gave rise to the Islamic Republic (and continue to contribute to its geopolitical insecurity), it’s a step too far to say we caused it.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_th...
I'm unsure as to how the US installed him in 1953. He had been Shah for 11 years.
Sorry, you’re correct. We installed him as an autocrat in ‘53.
Iran was not a British-style constitutional monarchy. The Shah was not a ceremonial position. His father ruled with even more power than he did. He was just an absentee ruler for the first part of his rule until someone tried to assassinate him.
Never mind that Prime Minister Mosaddegh had dissolved parliament and had been ruling by decree for a year also acted as an autocrat. Even his own party turned against him for abuse of power.
At best, one could argue the British installed the Shah. They are, after all, the people who made him Shah in the first place.
Operation Ajax
It’s not defending or supporting but pointing out that not every foreign policy choice made on the planet is a result of our actions. There is a mixture of culpability, credit and thus obligation to fix things.
And I’m not going off on a humanistic arc. The criticism is in line with that of Big Man historical models, or conspiratorial ones involving all-knowing shadow governments. These models are simpler to apply than reality, which involves imperfect (and changing) actors acting through the fogs of war and history.
Saddam's Iraq was, though; Saddam's rise to power in Iraq was backed actively by the US because he was seen as a useful anti-Communist, and once in power he was backed by the US government (to the point of rushing Donald Rumsfeld out as Reagan's special envoy to assure both Saddam and the world of our support for him after he used chemical weapons) in its long war of aggression against Iran in the 1980s.
Thank you for the opportunity to engage in healthy criticism of rogue states.
People may disagree on the ethics of who is the "right" side, if the war was fought "fairly" and according to the "ethics of war", but you would have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to believe that Hamas and Hezbollah and Houthis were not Iranian proxies armed and funded by Iran and acted independently from Iran's goals.
As a corollary, I do not buy into the idea that this Israel/Iran war was/is being fought (only) because of the nuclear issue. It is being fought because it is the last (hopefully) part of the larger war of Israel vs Axis of Resistance, which can only be resolved through the defeat of either Israel or Iran.
If Israel is defeated, the Muslim world can then go on to fight their Shia vs Sunni war, if Iran is defeated, Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Iran in Iraq, and Houthis will basically go away and those nations/territories will need to determine their future, both internally and their relationships with Israel and the Muslim world.
I think the best way to fix Israel is to bring in refugees from an unrelated conflict, like Sudan, and once the Sudanese have a significant minority then Israeli politics won’t be ethnofascist anymore.
Did you see any of ME countries helping Iran?
N. Korea has said mean things to us too.
The only thing we care about is Iran's resources and support for the Palestinians.
What’s with the Palestinian distortion effect?
We sanctioned Iran’s oil. And to the degree we consider the Palestinians, it’s in mostly ignoring their interests. (But still caring to learn about them more than the North Koreans’ or Pakistanis’.)
The difference is Pyongyang has behaved rationally. It doesn’t sponsor terror groups across the region. And most importantly, it’s already a nuclear power with the credibly ability to destroy an ally. (Pakistan does the terrorist thing, hence “ally from hell” and the pivot to India, but it at least does a halfway decent job of keeping its proxies from directly targeting Americans in a way Tehran has failed to do with e.g. the Houthis and its proxies in Iraq.)
Iran is none of those things. Most importantly, one of our allies it threatens initiated the attack. If Seoul or even New Delhi initiated a render-safe operation against their enemies, there is a good chance America would at least consider joining to finish the job.
We killed one of their top generals, unprovoked, 5 years ago. Israel bombed their embassy in Syria a year ago. Both times, they sent telegraphed, calibrated missile barrages that let them deescalate situations they didn't create.
Now we're in a third instance of them being attacked. Who's the irrational party?
(Edit: and in Iraq, we invaded their neighbor while loudly saying "youre next", their actions in Iraq were also rational and calibrated given that context. Bog us down there, deniably, smart move.)
Tactically, in this war with Israel, and broadly since October 7th, I agree.
Strategically, by putting themselves in a position where they're sending heavy munitions to e.g. the Houthis so they can take pot shots at U.S. warships, no. That's destabilising in a way that frankly the Kims have never been.
Their big picture strategic posture WAS to try and have a deal with us and normalize, but we've made it clear that we won't have that. Nurturing a bunch of proxies in the region is kind of their only option if they want to have allies.
Pray, when has Iran behaved irrationally? Except when trusting us, which Kissinger pointed out is really dumb.
We'd be irritated if we weren't consulted, but not much more than that. India isn't a whole-hog Russian ally, they just buy weapons from Russians among others. (Increasingly, others.)
Note, for instance, how the U.S. is keeping an arms length from the ongoing Indus waters dispute. Or how the U.S. across two administrations has basically turned a blind eye to India importing Russian and Iranian oil while threatening secondary sanctions when China does the same thing.
Also, I said render-safe operation. Not a decapitating strike. The former is what Israel has so far done. Even Trump objected to the latter in Iran (so far).
> when has Iran behaved irrationally?
Continuing to arm the Houthis after they targeted U.S. warships was dumb. Hell, the entire proxy war through terrorist organisations nonsense is dumb; the proximate cause of this entire mess is Hamas and the Sinwar brothers' October 7th genius move.
None of that is a reason for America to go to war with the IRGC. But it's a good reason for treating them differently from Pyongyang and Islamabad. (Underlined, again, by the difference between a threshold nuclear state whose missile capabilities and air defences have been defanged and an actual nuclear state.)
Russia considers that Ukraine being part of NATO is an existential threat to it's territorial safety. Therefore it has invaded Ukraine. Was that justified then? After all this was a defensive move that was meant to keep a buffer between Russia and NATO.
If all you need to do to justify a war is to have a defensive moral justification and because we agree that the best defense is offense, then ergo war is peace.
Just to add to this, I briefly worked with an Iranian and asked him if this was serious or a mistranslation*, and he confirmed that it was totally serious.
* the etymology of "satan" ultimately being Hebrew שָׂטָן (satán, “adversary, accuser”: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/שטן#Hebrew), and both Israel and the USA are definitely adversaries of Iran
If we're being extremely generous, the goal of regime change would be to bring a new stability with economic prosperity and inclusion as well as more meaningful political inclusion, so as to reduce the amount of marginalized population with nothing to loose that are easy to recruit for terrorism.
Of course, when the nation building fails or is never even tried, it's pretty easy for recruiters to say "look around, they destroyed our country (with bombs or embargoes or tariffs or resource exploitation or offensive media), we have nothing to live for, and it's their fault; let's make them pay"
I don't think you can stop all terrorism, but if you want to put a dent in it, you need to give the broad population hope for prosperity, and you need to fulfill that hope on the regular.
I’ll never understand the mentality of people who confidently yap about things that they don’t even have a basic understanding of. Iran didn’t fund ISIS, they are the ones who defeated it. ISIS was trying to destroy Assads government (Iranian ally), why would Iran fund them.
Seriously impressive level of ignorance and hubris on display here.
1) we want to control oil and oil prices because it’s crucial to our bank accounts. 2) if the Middle East unites we will lose control over oil 3) we must make sure they never unite 4) we need to support varying regimes to increase instability in the region. If we keep the Middle East fighting we can continue to extract oil.
Lots has changed since 50s so one would think this strategy would get updated, but it seems it has not.
(Also for the record I think this is abhorrent, but I think some people do think like this)
All of those cases involved a whole lot of troops on the ground, which is something that I see as notably missing from any plans discussed so far. Outside troops invading seems like a very bad idea, because Iran's population is about that of those other three combined. Operating sufficient outside country ground troops to topple the existing government would quickly lead to friction between civilians and the outside troops, which would almost certainly quickly turn into a revolt of some kind, and fatally undermine any government they attempted to put in place. Also, it would take a very long time for sufficient US force to topple the Iranian government to arrive in the area, and then either launch a D-Day style opposed amphibious assault or operate from one of Iran's neighbors with sea access (2). But because there is no preexisting Iranian civil war, there is no local source of ground troops either.
I don't think we've ever seen a government toppled by external air-strikes alone. The general consensus from research is that being bombed makes citizens support the government more, not weaken their resolve.
1: It didn't lead to change of government, but Operation Allied Force- the NATO bombing of Serbia helped the Kosovo Liberation Army achieve their independence- again air-power supporting troops on the ground to achieve an aim, not air-power alone. What eventually toppled the government of Serbia was the Bulldozer Revolution a year later, with no outside military force involved.
2: Your choices are not going to be good ones. Iraq? Turkey through Kurdistan? Pakistan?
Oh absolutely. I compared it to Kabul and Baghdad (and not Libya) for a reason. There is not a mobilised resistance in Iran.
The lack of boots-on-the-ground plans is why I don’t see us teetering towards Iraq 2.0, but instead the U.S. eventually using bunker busters at Fordo and calling it a day. (To the extent we’re seeing the right recipe “liberation” rhetoric, it’s in respect of domestically deploying the military.)
There will be no nation building component. Israeli leadership has no interest, nor does American leadership. And the Gulf States, Turkiye, Russia and China lack the capacity and/or manpower.
Sadly, I feel Iran will most likely teeter into a Libya or Myanmar style Civil War with the Army, IRGC, Basij, and local police at each others throats in the heartland, and ancillary regions like Iranian Azerbaijan, Iranian Kurdistan, Khuzestan+Ilam, and significant portions of Balochistan and Khorasan becoming de facto autonomous and meddled in by regional powers.
A number of meetings / manifestations of expatriate Iranians happened around the world, supporting the Israeli actions. The current regime earned no love from most of the population, it seems; massive anti-government protests happened in Iran for last few years, sometimes lasting for months.
If there is no civil war and no actual troops on the ground, the regime may still be unstable enough, its pillars like IRGC being paper tigers, and willing to defect. It can still fall. An example: the Soviet regime fell in 1991 within a week, basically without any war, and the USSR split into its formal constituent republics, most of which stayed peaceful since then. Another example: the Portuguese regime fell within a week in 1974, with zero shots fired.
Thanks to historians, we can understand things like the collapse of the USSR better (my favorite English language book- I am sadly monolingual- would be Plokhy's _The Last Empire_) and see the personal and impersonal forces that ended up tearing the country apart, and doubtless some of those are present in Iran right now. But I personally would not bet on these strikes helping to topple the existing government.
Iran had a very violent succession crisis in the late 80s-early 90s, but the titans of the revolution and rallying behind the flag due to the Iran-Iraq war helped ensure some base amount of unity.
There is a vacuum in Iran's elite, as most of the upper and mid-level echelons are those who solidified their fiefdoms in the 1990s.
this is not true. they bombed residential buildings in the capital city of the country. children have died in these bombings.
Iranian Regime has strong backing from Brics and others.
The BRICS meme from a security standpoint is hollower than the financial one.
Russia and China have no interest (the former, ability) in getting enmeshed in another Anglo-Iranian war. Most of the oil travelling through the Strait of Hormuz goes to Chinese refineries; they really don’t want this to escalate. Both would probably make the occupation phase painful for Americans. Like we did for the Soviets. And the Iranians did for us. But that’s again post-regime change, the part we’ve never figured out how to do since the Marshall Plan, and not in the toppling of the regime bit, which we’re ridiculously good at.
The evidence for the above is the current lack of military or intelligence support anyone is providing Iran.
Chinese planes with transponders being turned off are landing in Iran with unknown Cargo on board. (Reported across the news). Iran is supplying Russia with Drones for Ukraine so strategic partner.
Russia recently lost Syria as an ally with the change in government, they will not want to lose Iran to the USA too.
If the West can back Ukraine to the level they have done, then no different for Iran's friends to do the same.
There is really only one thing Iran would sell its soul for right now, and it’s Russian or Chinese troops announcing that they’ve stationed themselves at Fordo. (Thereby turning an attack on the regime’s nuclear ambitions into an attack on a nuclear state.)
> If the West can back Ukraine to the level they have done, then no different for Iran's friends to do the same
Excluding China, orders of magnitude of differences in capability.
Maybe half a dozen transports did so after filing false papers about flying to Luxembourg. Whatever military kit is flying is in in practice inconsequential. It’s more likely shuttling something important out, or deploying surveillance equipment to get SIGINT on B-2s.
Maybe this was a question that should have been asked before these regimes were toppled but nobody bothered so here we are. Instead the US and it's allies come in with their big boots and try to give people "democracy" without thinking that maybe this is just not the right thing to do at this time. But we know better right?
As if there aren't enough problems in the US and in Europe, we need to keep involving ourselves with conflicts that mostly do not concern us. This is a conflict in the middle east and the countries of this region should be in charge of trying to find a solution to it.
Everyone wants to gobble down... I.e. here’s another invasion war but it’s our ally this time so it’s good actually. They’re gonna dezanify^W de-islamism Iran.
Whatever the case, the current Iran regime hasn't given nuclear material, chemical weapons, or biological weapons to these terror groups.
If the current Iran regime is eliminated from afar, with some fly-by bombings or whatever, what happens in the chaos that follows? Nuclear material and other weapons do not poof out of existance when the government that created them falls. Which group will control the nuclear material going forward? Roll the dice to find out.
I suspect what Israel is hoping for is that if they disrupt Iranian internal security enough, Iran wont be able to put down protestors. In the past there have been protests that Iran had to put down violently, so its not crazy. At the same time, hard to imagine anyone going out to protest while bombs are falling, and external threats tend to increase support for incumbants. So probably a long shot.
What they will probably settle for is blowing up their nuke stuff and missles, hoping that the economic disruption of the war is enough that its too expensive for iran to rebuild it.
Of course, nobody really knows.
The parent poster is correct. It is much easier to convince you into this if I tell you "We can solve the middle-east issues with just one click(bomb)!". That would get people in a FOMO where we have to act NOW and have this resolved quick and easy; or choose to be complacent and lose this opportunity.
Of course we don't know how this will play out since we don't have any history except for the last 50+ years or so.
50+ islamic factions are unlikely to be able to coordinate enough to produce advanced weapons. While its an unideal outcome, its not clear that it would be worse from the israeli perspective, and they are the ones dropping bombs.
> Of course we don't know how this will play out since we don't have any history except for the last 50+ years or so.
There are plenty of examples historically of coups and popular revolutions where the new gov takes over the existing state roughly in-tact. There are also many examples of what you are saying where the country decends into a civil war. If you want to use history as a guide i think you need to analyze things more closely.
“We do not track your *PRECISE* location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the *PERSONAL* messages people are sending one another," it added. “We do not provide *BULK* information to any government.”
There's also supposedly a key transparency service deployed (similar to Certificate Transparency), but I haven't looked into that in detail.
Would you even know if you got a special copy of Whatsapp (still signed by Meta and valid) that has this explicit code?
Absolutely for archiving: https://androidapks.com/whatsapp-messenger/com-whatsapp/old/
Reverse engineering to some extent as well – it's an extremely popular app, and as such attracts both security researchers and bloggers that just want to get scoops on new features behind feature flags etc.
> Would you even know if you got a special copy of Whatsapp (still signed by Meta and valid) that has this explicit code?
Given the above, it's feasible – at least on Android, it's fairly easy to hash the .apk you've received and compare it to publicly know versions.
The threat of somebody finding unusual code on their phone will probably not deter targeted deploys by sophisticated/state level actors to specific users, but it goes some way towards making it implausible that everybody is running a backdoored version, potentially backdoored by Meta themselves, which is arguably the goal.
The shit app has 60 MiB compressed. I was not even able to find where in the code it works with the damn secrets it uses for TOTP.
Now do WhatsApp with its zillion features.
If you mean that it's hard to explain away for the devs themselves, then people do much worse things in this world, and are able explain it to themselves just fine as something good, even.
https://transparency.meta.com/reports/government-data-reques...
They can't see your messages but then can give ips or accounts that can be inferred to be related given the info meta has access to
The backdoor in Lotus Notes (differential cryptography) wasn't a secret. It was public information. Ray Ozzie used it as a way to circumvent US encryption export laws. Today companies have to be more discrete.
[1] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/hacks/lotus-nsa-key.html
Camera: https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/facebo...
Audio: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41424016
Conversations: https://www.vice.com/en/article/facebook-said-it-wasnt-liste...
Mass surveillance: https://thehill.com/video/facebook-spying-on-users-new-repor...
Across the web: https://www.wired.com/story/ways-facebook-tracks-you-limit-i...
Beacon: https://www.wired.com/2007/12/facebook-ceo-apologizes-lets-u...
Apps: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analy...
People who aren't even on facebook: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profi...
Others do it too, e.g. Amazon: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone...
But Facebook has always been on a whole other level
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/17/facebook-...
The alternatives are also probably up to the same sketchy shit, so your choices are to be a hermit, or accept that your services will spy on you.
If you want to participate in society, you have to either trust a very large list of untrustworthy people... Or acknowledge that they are untrustworthy, and mitigate accordingly. Part of that mitigation is accepting the possibility that if the Mossad want to murder you by blowing up your toaster, nobody's going to stop them.
There's social media use and there's social media use. Hacker News, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, EMail, and my phone's SMS systems all serve dramatically different purposes, and all of them are a varied mix of pros and cons and risks.
---
[1] Any Arcanist worth his salt knows that copper has no name, and thus cannot be turned against you.
I do, however, believe that you aren't engaging with what I'm saying, or recognizing some very obvious logical holes in your arguments. Your argument seems to be one of dogma, not one of reason.
Sure, I can also avoid putting chemicals on my body by washing my hair with apple cider vinegar and baking soda, and I can also churn my own butter by hand…
There are a lot more of them, and they are kind of integral to its meaning.
jokes aside, I did read your entire post and I don’t disagree with a single word you wrote. I still don’t understand why anyone in their right mind would install a Meta-owned application on their PHONE. Lots of people overall and number on this thread go with “hey, the GOVERNMENT is already spying on you so why don’t I also let one of the most evil corporations in the history of mankind access to all my everything too… I don’t expect privacy in general, it is 2025 after all and we are talking on HN but these silly “plate reader excuses” are really too much… like saying “well the government can obviously break into my home whenever they want (in 2025 without a warrant as well) so why don’t I leave the door wide open, if government can enter why would I care if someone else does :)
> I have been off social media for years now and my life and health and relationships and career and … have improved so much I cannot put it in words.
It sounds like you personally had a problem. Congratulations I suppose on solving it. However, I have no such issues. My life, health and relationships are all already where I want them to be, and are not impacted by occasional interaction with others through technology as luckily, I have had no such struggles with self control or moderation.
My relationships would be impacted on the other hand if I was to throw a big toddler tantrum about using whatsapp for two weeks whilst i'm overseas with my employer and twenty other people. So i'm probably not going to do that.
People are not accepting that possibility, they are assuming it will not happen to them and that they are not a target of interest.
Change that assumption and attitudes toward privacy also change.
Imagine that times a billion.
That ends with them mostly not communicating with me, not with them switching apps.
If you think that your phone provider isn't spying on you, I would like to cut you into an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime investment opportunity in some Louisiana waterfront property.
All I need is your phone number, mother's maiden name, ...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/chinese-hackers-stole-...
Nor the inability to add people to groups. sms doesn't have groups; it has pools of numbers. And it works terribly when, eg, one of you is traveling or living outside the US.
You're definitely in a minority. Most people send and receive zero non-MFA related SMS.
Are you going to suggest to me that I should force them onto Signal and a pile of other DIY platforms? I dare you. Look a burned out parent in their bloodshot eyes first.
- tell parents and teachers I can be reached at xxx-xxx-xxxx if they need anything
- absolutely never had meta-requirement to volunteer. if I did I would 100% know my time there is better spent elsewhere
I am not going to suggest you anything except to tell you that you can live a beautiful live outside of the meta-world. it is super easy
Great it is super easy for you, but why do you think your individual experience is valid for other people (who might be thousands of km away in a very different setting)?
I have three kids. Sure it's not easy, buying used local things is basically impossible, but it's not terribly hard. You just work around it
Eventually, I decided to step away. This was partly because I was not willing to engage more deeply just to make the platform work properly, and partly because of personal circumstances, such as having twins. After deleting my account, I noticed a significant reduction in stress.
These days, my children’s kindergarten uses a dedicated app to communicate with parents, and their sports club uses another (Spond, which seems fairly common in Norway). However, when I try to connect more informally with other parents, the conversation almost always leads back to Facebook, Messenger, or "insta". Even when people express understanding or sympathy for my choice to avoid those platforms, exchanging phone numbers or using alternatives rarely leads to real communication. It feels as if, socially, I cease to exist if I am not part of those groups.
So no, I would not suggest trying to push others onto Signal or similar platforms. I relate to your experience completely. Although we may have made different choices, the underlying challenge is the same: wanting to participate meaningfully, but finding that the tools we're expected to use often come with a cost we are not willing to pay.
For the second one in particular, Meta never listened to anyone's mic. I would know, I worked on this stuff there at that time.
Do you consider misrepresentation a lie?
If there's a lawsuit which determines that Meta misrepresented something, do you consider that a lie, even if Meta says it was merely on honest mistake made in good faith?
If the European Commission "fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover" and that "contrary to Facebook's statements in the 2014 merger review process, the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook and WhatsApp users' identities already existed in 2014, and that Facebook staff were aware of such a possibility" then that statement was not actually a lie, right, because no one at Facebook said they lied, correct?
Can you give an example of any company which has lied, but where the company officials have never agreed with that conclusion?
There is a long history in the US of companies having to pay a fine but never accepting responsibility. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/paying-a-fine-bu...
Large public companies do not lie very often because it's incredibly easily for lies to be discovered, and the penalties are high. There are many examples where the popular narrative is the the company lied, but when you look at details it becomes clear that no lying occurred.
For example, David Rainey probably did not actually lie about the extent of the BP oil spill even though most people still believe he did. He was acquitted by a jury who had access to far more information, and more time to think about it, than anyone else.
They even paid them to do transcribe chats: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-13/facebook-...
And this is just the publicly known stuff. So perhaps you weren’t privy to everything?
So Facebook (not Meta at the time) just “forgot” to turn off the camera after they were done with it? Sounds reasonable… except wait, they were actively re-activating it while you were scrolling, and until iOS 14 users were none-the-wiser. If it was an honest mistake, do you think FB testers would have not caught it during the MONTHS between iOS 14 developer preview and release? And yet, for this one I do think it was probably a bug about when to activate the camera.
https://medium.com/macoclock/apples-ios-14-catches-facebook-...
You're confusing the audio calls with secretly listening to microphone, which never happened
People did find out.
Imagine if Snowden decided to just do his work and move on? How much longer would it have taken for these facts to be revealed to the public?
So literally no downside to putting a backdoor and lying about it
Just like lots of people want universal healthcare, a clean environment, an arms embargo on Israel, affordable housing and education, etc.
It can hard to believe these are majority views sometimes, but that's what you get when the entire media landscape is owned by like 10 people.
And you're not even talking about Meta
The bragging wasn't about their lawyers' ability in court, it was about their lawyers' ability to draft Terms and Conditions such that they could not be caught in a lie.
And yes, not Meta in this story, but come on.
The privacy settings also did not obviously do what their wording suggested - accidental over-sharing was their goal, and the wording was carefully crafted to deceive and confuse. Is that lying? It's a technical argument, and not really relevant - they are shady AF and always have been.
They are also uttered on TV, in public talks and to a far lesser extent in court. Court is a formal process. Outside it's not. There's a big difference.
But the statement itself is technically not a lie, they did say “upto”, lol. That is how corporate speak works
The European Commission has found that Facebook provided “misleading information” about its 2014 takeover of WhatsApp following an investigation into the deal.
The commission’s complaint relates specifically to the sharing of user data between Facebook and WhatsApp. In a submission to the EU made in August 2014, Facebook said it would not be possible to create a reliable automated system for matching users. In August 2016, WhatsApp announced that it would be linking WhatsApp user phone numbers with Facebook user identities.
The fact that they successfully got the book removed from sale for a while speaks volumes. They not only lie they are encouraged to.
It is rather shocking seeing how rapidly the US is shifting from all of its historic norms. Trump sees the US as a "store" where he dictates the terms, he directly has control over US Steel after the Nippon Steel "takeover" -- straight out of the communist central control dictums -- and now US major corporations are embedded in the US military.
It is insane. This is stuff people accused China of for time eternal but apparently it was taken as a good lesson to learn from.
But absolutely no one outside the US -- whether enemies or allies -- should trust anything from US corporations now. The country has fallen.
group messages and messages (metadata),
messages to business accounts (these they can read in full as the client send to a meta owned private key),
and who forwards media to who (deduplication and cdn)
and links (thanks to previews)
and it scans and uploads your contact list in full all the time.
The real question is where they draw the line, not if they do it ever.
When you use credit or debit cards your transactions and data related to it is collected and sold. When you apply for mortgages and close on a house all that information you put in there is collected and sold.
When you put your address in for the post office, when you apply for a drivers or fishing license... Your local governments collect that information and sell access to it.
Meta tries to then tie in your online and app/phone activity with your legal/financial identity it can obtain through partner data brokers.
This is Facebook's businesses model.
So, yes, this data is available to pretty much anybody that is willing to pay for it. Which includes governments.
None of this should be surprising to anybody at this point. Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.. all of these companies will do this to greater or lesser extents nowadays since has worked out so well for Meta's bottom line.
Zuck dribbled and 3D Chessed the Law
META DATA. Literally they did say truthfully they "only" read all the Meta Data, which is actually all data of the company Meta.
Mixed metaphors aside, you can't cheat the law by naming yourself something.
Well, you can try, but the courts take a dim view of it.
> Mixed metaphors aside
Zapp hit that bullseye, causing the rest of the dominoes to fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
And on top of that if you want make any money with company like X, you need to send your biometrics to some company in Israel. What is this Israel and surveillance capitalism? Or has this always being the case, and I am just now start to realizing it.
just selected people then?
"This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service."
Surely they must, how else are the messages… you know… available when you use the app?
From https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967/?locale=en_US:
> In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages. Undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. As stated in the WhatsApp Privacy Policy, we may collect, use, preserve, and share user information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to (a) keep our users safe, (b) detect, investigate, and prevent illegal activity, (c) respond to legal process, or to government requests, (d) enforce our Terms and policies. This may include information about how some users interact with others on our service. We also offer end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated. End-to-end encryption means that messages are encrypted to protect against WhatsApp and third parties from reading them. Additional information about WhatsApp's security can be found here.
Note specifically "information about how some users interact with others on our service", which contradicts their claim they don't keep logs of which people are messaging each other.
> Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who made that search query.
> Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who had that cellphone around that cell tower. Could have been anybody. I could have been hacked.
Judges always allow those evidence and jury always views it as incriminating. What makes more sense, that some unknown hacker hacked into your account and googled something about the thing you're here for, or that you actually just googled it yourself?
On Android, push notifications were always processed by the receiving app, so it can just decrypt a payload directly (or download new messages from the server and decrypt these); on iOS, this isn't as reliable (e.g. swiping the app out of the app switcher used to break it in several iOS versions), but "VoIP notifications" and the newer "message decryption extension" [1] are.
The same principle applies to Web Push – I believe end-to-end encryption is even mandatory there.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...
Now I don't know the exact details of which governments had which access (was it just for warrants, which nations, what was the line between actual terrorist versus persecuting journalists), but there was absolutely bulk export and the fact that they are lying about it makes me inclined to presume the worst.
The US agency would type in the gmail address of the subject (ie the primary key/identifier) and somewhere between the agency and Google a decision would be automatically made as to whether the owner of the account was a US person* or not.
If yes - FISA warrant was required
If no - the US agency user would have immediate access to the entire google account (think Google Take Out).
In other words, if you were not a US person there was no duty to protect data.
* = US Person is either a US citizen located anywhere in the world or anyone of any nationality who is physically in the US (current interpretation includes visa holders, visitors and even undocumented but that's shifting)
Microsoft shared data early on with IDF to help target their users (would have to check their ToS to see if there's a clause for that there).
I doubt there's any need to hide anything inside these kinds of companies. Leaders there likely believe they're doing the right thing helping "the good cause" by supporting extrajudicial executions of people. At worst they'll have to kick out employees who'll raise their voices, like they already did many times. No biggie.
While I can totally imagine that governments would mass-export data, and I don’t doubt your friends claim, I can also imagine more innocent interpretation of this work.
I once worked on a large company’s GDPR data-export project. It was a large enough company that it also had a dedicated team to handle legal requests regularly from government(s). GDPR exporting needs to work “at scale” for all accounts, without human-in-the-loop work, and without causing any load issues to running services. The same system also handled legal requests, where the legal team could get an export for a user (almost) identically to the process of a user getting their own data. The legal team had tools set up to work with warrants, subpoenas and similar (internationally) legal data requests from courts and law enforcement. It looks like a “mass export” system, because it was, but it wasn’t used in “bulk requests” from the legal system.
If however they said something more authentic like "We export data in all these cases, in all these countries, and it's never more than .01% of users in a given country, and it never includes freedom-of-speech crimes, and ..." or something then maybe I'd be inclined to consider that.
I'm much more inclined to believe they track everything in high precision and also MITM all the messages. Especially now that they are inserting ads.
I'm no apologist for Facebook, none of whose services I use. But get your facts straight. They are not 'inserting ads' in your chats, as you imply. AFAIK they are adding adds to the never-used 'Updates' tab.
Annoying from an ad perspective, no doubt. Vastly different from a are-they-MITMing-your-messages perspective.
"WE don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging..."
"We don't KEEP logs of everyone who is messaging..."
"We don't keep logs of EVERYONE who is messaging..."
Etc.
> We do not track your PRECISE location
If they log IP addresses, they can't say they don't log location at all.
> we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging
Seems like a pretty strong claim
> we do not track the PERSONAL messages people are sending one another
I don't know much about their business offering, but it seems likely it's not e2e encrypted or has some kind of escrow. Businesses often multiple people to be able to access an account and that is best done without e2e encryption... let alone auditing requirements.
> We do not provide BULK information to any government
Because they are subject to subpoena and search warrants. They are legally required to provided tailored information to governments.
====
All in all it's pretty much what you'd expect for Whatsapp's "e2e but otherwise conventional saas" approach. If you want better, use signal.
Though I must say, the regime itself seems to really believe this, for example there was some news that high-ranking officials are now banned from using electronic devices that connect to the internet like mobile phones.
I take my chances for a probable dysfunctional government rather than a definitely dysfunctional one.
Hostile foreign countries are however much more likely to pour resources into fomenting a revolution if you have nukes as this would avoid conventional warfare which has the potential to escalate to the point of nuclear deployment.
In the context of Iran vs. North Korea which this discussion is in reference to, Iran is very likely to fall from internal forces which overwhelmingly disapprove of the government, compared to North Korea which seemingly has overwhelming support from its people, and has been cut off from the rest of the world since before the Internet was available.
It's unlikely another country will ever be capable of instituting the same degree of isolationism that North Korea has, owing to the prevalance of internet-capable devices everywhere else in the world. And honestly I don't think the North Korean government would have survived as long as it had without this policy.
You don't need to guess as to what happens; there are examples.
I hear tickets to Libya are cheap lately. You can visit and compare.
I agree with others here that regime really needs to go but I of course share your fear of what could happen to Iran once the central government is weakened. Currently there are multiple tiers of special forces keeepinf various groups in check, however once this is gone, things could get ugly.
I worry about my family living there, we have been having a hard time time reaching there since the attacks started and there is no way of telling what is going to happen next.
I do not think it would be to the benefit of people who live in Iran, even if they were Christian, to live through the bombings and mass destruction of the proposed war in exchange for life under US territorial administration, which has not been very good historically.
But an American occupation isn't even on the table. Nobody is interested in that. The most anyone wants at the moment is for the US to drop a MOAB on fordo and mop up the rest of Irans military from the air.
Yes.
> The world is certainly a better place with him gone. Even if America didn't handle the subsequent occupation too well, i would argue (and you are free to disagree) that Iraq was still better off.
That is mad talk. Things have been much worse, so much worse for almost everyone in and around Iraq since that war.
ISIS for one thing, was a direct result of the perfidious actions of foreigners in Iraq.
So much chaos was created, there is no way the invasion of Iraq improved the world
For an average individual going about their day, lack of political freedom is a 100x better option than lack of food or security that Iraq (or Libya or Afghanistan) went through.
I couldn't agree with you more. I can think of at least one excellent example of this.
But in the case of Iraq there is no question in my mind that deposing saddam was the right thing to do.
If anything the person i was replying to was lecturing op, apparently an actual Iranian, about why American involvement is bad for him.
The clerics are a paper tiger. Their domestic support base has been almost fully eroded. The Islamic Revolution had proclaimed the hijab as a cause célèbre; today, Iranians generally ignore it when the government isn't looking, after decades of protest and suppression.
But the Iranian military controls a vast amount of the country's economy (by comparison to normal countries) and retains popular support as an opponent of the West. It won't go quietly, and Israel lacks the resources and the United States lacks the will to dismantle it, which anyway would be a Herculean undertaking and cost millions of innocent lives. Military dictatorships are usually pragmatic on social issues, economically protectionist, and politically repressive — making the hypothetical new Iran look more like China's ideal ally than America's.
The most likely vector of regime change is a military coup that produces a government which sues for peace. They may agree to dismantle the nuclear program, but there will be a sense of "for now", and they will cultivate alliances with an eye to protection from the West. We may then see real nuclear weapons in Iran, but with red flags and yellow stars on them, instead of the imaginary nuclear weapons that were invented to keep Bibi out of prison.
That bloody civil requires resources from somewhere, so a bi geopolitical power with interests in that chaos is necessary
What's your take on it ?
It's true that new soldiers are not conscripts, but I'd assume there's still some survivors from the earlier mobilisation and as far as I know once you're in, you're in, until death, incapacity or the war ending.
but what happens, it's that conscripts are convinced/forced to sign contracts to serve in army, and in this they are sent to face ukrainian drones.
those that were mobilized, iirc not released.
I wouldn't put any weight on how much the population of a autocratic country pretend to support its regime.
To me, the most interesting thing about this conflict is the side-choosing of the other nations, because that reveals what kind of games they're playing.
Could you elaborate on that? Is anyone behaving out of the totally expected?
"It banned WhatsApp and Google Play in 2022 during mass protests against the government over the death of a woman held by the country’s morality police. That ban was lifted late last year. ( https://apnews.com/article/iran-social-media-whatsapp-google... ) "
So more than fearing Israel, they actually fear the public that has an encrypted communication channel that can't be tapped by their police. Explains a lot.
Could be some other mechanism (e.g. Google Drive or some other kind of malware), hard to be sure in the world, where since 2011 Snowden's revelations, bugs are placed my NSA and CIA everywhere, starting from hardware and firmware.
if it was it would be true for telegram as well.
I do not know for sure if there are leaks from Telegram, but I think that Durov was pressed for enabling backdoors for CIA when he was arrested in France.
It's not like there's a registry of compromised apps in Russia that is available to public. When there were WhatsApp leaks it was widely published on Russian news channels, that's why I know about it and tell everyone to not trust WhatsApp.
But I don't closely follow every news item from the front, I know that some other apps are also considered compromised (mainly some navigation apps), but I don't know the whole list or if Telegram is being used on the front.
I guess the safest option is to not use telephone at all at war, since there are probably backdoors everywhere starting from cell modem firmware. I guess that since about middle-end of 2022 all military personnel has the same opinion and stopped using smartphones altogether or use them in flight mode with communications disabled.
Durov was pressed from every side from the beginning, no doubts about this. But CIA or FSB cannot demand it legally even with secret court orders. There were news that since arrest in France he started providing some info on criminals. Not sure how far did he go. But it's good to know that Whatsup is fully cooperating with governments even when they don't have to. Putting people at risk.
As for smartphones, there are so many security holes that it's impossible to secure. Many harmless applications are calling home, pictures are geo-targeted, cell towers can request info from connected phones, every update can turn OS or app into trojan. If infected it's a perfect audio and video collection device. Put together with soldiers' IDs it shows where the unit is. Add to that CIA and alike working with weakening everyone's security and getting priority access to sensitive information.
Russian soldiers participating in the invasion of Ukraine. FTFY.
This was back at the start of the war. Now this bullshit mind trick employs too much cannon meat best allocated on the front.
Also car tech and cameras. Literally a wet dream if I worked at a three letter agency, real time surveillance of streets which is actually extremely difficult normally. Can't think of how many times I've wanted a recent picture of a street or house miles away, with 360 car cameras you can track people, see changes maybe from just minutes ago.
I don't know why these countries don't block or mandate these features are completely turned off.
A common sentiment in this thread. My gut and practical experience both tell me this is true on some level, but how do folks distinguish tinfoil hat conspiracy from legitimate speculation?
The UK now has laws to gag domestic companies and force them to implement backdoors.
I vote thusly.
Plausibility and evidence, for which there's plenty in this case.
Although it seems less likely to me that Western apps have backdoors and more likely that Western law enforcement and intelligence have free access to the data, but it's probably both.
This I have firsthand experience with and agree. Why invest effort when agencies can simply take what they want?
I don't know i agree. The article didn't cite any evidence, and Iran would have lots of motivation to lie here. E.g. it could be a face saving move, trying to shift blame for the war going badly from a failing military to being the fault of traitors who installed whatsapp. It could be a ploy to prevent citizens from having e2e encrypted comms, lest they plot a revolution (from what i understand Iran has blamed whatsapp for protests in the past). It might just be a desperate regime with a crumbling military that is out of options and willing to grasp at any straw no matter how slight.
Not to say that i think its impossible. Israel has certainly pulled off crazier things in the past, but right now we have zero evidence and lots of potential motives for Iran to make shit up.
The NSA, and it's partners, capabilities and the lengths it is willing to go to are staggering.
I mean, nothing Snowden revealed was shocking to anyone in IT at the time. He just brought receipts.
they don't. that's the whole point
The IDF's Unit 8200[1] can probably hack most phones in Iran. And if not any of the private companies selling spyware software like the NSO Group[2 and 3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSO_Group
[3] https://mepc.org/commentaries/israeli-cyber-companies-overvi...
I recommend the documentary Zero Days from 2016 to anyone remotely interested on this.
While the PCs used to program the PLCs were running XP, the 0-day that Stuxnet exploited affected all versions of Windows, at least from 2000 onwards, including 2008 and Vista.
EDIT: to clarify, the PCs "programmed" the PLCs indirectly, in that while they ran the Siemans STEP 7 IDE to design the centrifuges' control process, the resulting PLC programs were manually transported to the PLCs via USB devices, so there were two airgaps: the XP-running PCs airgapped from the outside world, and then another airgap between the PCs and the PLCs they programmed.
It wasn’t a bunch of known vulnerabilities affecting unpatched machines. Quite the opposite.
By "chance" the rightful crown prince (Pahlavi dynasty), an exile, is now making a comeback on social media, saying that the current iranian regime shall fail.
There are talks online as to how the current regime is falling: and there are a lot of people who would be very happy to see those bearded men ruling by sharia law gone.
The last thing the religious cracknuts at the helm of that islamic state want are iranians themselves using the opportunity to topple up the regime.
When they say: "Delete WhatsApp to not help Israel locate you" what they really mean is "Do not share the vids of the crown prince announcing he'll give you a life without sharia punishment".
How do you send an "invisible" SMS to other country's cellular network undetected? Especially on a mass scale...
I know about OMA DM, and FOTA update/access, and binaries certain US operators pre-install into phones/modems for remote access, etc. since I was reverse engineering this stuff. I just don't see how this would be invisible from the targetted country's cellular network operator.
I wish this meme that "whatsapp is secure because it uses e2e encryption" would die.
Why does it matter if the messages are e2e encrypted if the messages are managed on the two ends of the channel by a closed source binary that does who-knows-what.
The whatsapp app itself sees the clear text message. What it does with that information... or what "metadata" it extracts to send to their servers.. who knows.
Right into my veins
Would you prefer your dissident messages be read by Meta Corporation or the Islamic Republic of Iran? That's the difference.
No, there's no technical difference in the sense that neither solution can be verified to be probably secure vs. third party inspection. But in the real world the specifics of who the actors are are and the tactics they are known to employ are absolutely part of the threat model.
Neither please! Corpos can obviously sell out or be pressured into giving out info to all sorts of agencies
Repression in Iran is real, not abstract. It happens, the state wants to monitor internet use to enable it, and the linked article is very specific about them wanting to disallow Meta's product.
I'd prefer my messages to not be available to an actor shown to be using AI to select targets for bombing campaigns.
Because WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, any backdoor must necessarily be on the client side, and all client-side code can ultimately be reverse-engineered. This makes such backdoors very tricky to implement.
With that said, while I think a "general backdoor" (one that weakens the crypto algorithms so much that all messages can ultimately be read by Meta) is super unlikely, a "vulnerability" in some image parsing library, designed and implemented by the NSA, and only used on the most interesting targets... now that's a different story.
True, but it might be a part of an update that only hits a white-list of users, so you won't find the actual code that steals your private keys if you're on that list.
iOS apps aren't allowed to run arbitrary code that hasn't been signed by Apple. What goes in the AppStore is what runs on your device, and apps are physically incapable of writing data to executable memory. Safari / the built-in Javascript interpreter (and I guess third-party browsers in the EU) are notable exceptions here, as they need JIT.
Sure, Apple could develop special infrastructure to push fake updates to a predesignated list of targets, but at that point, you don't even need collaboration from Meta, and open source apps like Signal are just as vulnerable.
If Apple was willing to go that way, they wouldn't even need to bother with app updates. Ultimately, your messaging history has to be stored on your device in a way that your device can decrypt, and Apple could just steal that info.
I can't speak to what the situation is like on Android, but I presume similar mechanisms exist.
The meme/trope is that you can't possibly know what such an app does without the source. It just isn't true. There'd be no meaningful phone vulnerability research if it was.
Imagine if they pushed an update of the app out with the vuln to only some users, or users in {country} in their app release configs
"Imagine an arbitrarily powerful adversary operating in arbitrarily narrow, undetectable ways" is not meaningful threat modeling beside being a kind of Universal Goalpost Moving technique. It is not a 'meme' that WhatsApp is e2e encrypted if that's the form and content of your objection. The other thing is still the meme!
Imagine reading the docs. It's a literal thing you can do by pushing code down to the mobile client from your server. We do this all the time for our app. I'm not sure what you're arguing.
The classic approach, airlifting the Ayatollah to a dacha in Moscow while the IRGC saves face and plots a forever path to new elections, falls apart when you consider how Iran’s internal security and geopolitical alignment would need to be sculpted in a way that would satisfy the great powers. (Iranian crude fuels China’s refineries.)
Mainly because they don’t have one and never had one. Hard to dismantle something you don’t have. Even harder to do so credibly.
They had programs to obtain a nuclear deterrent. They can dismantle those programs. But they never had the actual nuclear deterrent itself.
You are mixing up "working on opening a bakery" with "having bread". They are related, but not the same.
Honestly, I don’t think the American people have the stomach for another Middle Eastern war, and Israel has shown in the past that if you recognize their right to exist in some form, they’ll leave you the hell alone - see Egypt, Jordan, etc.
So if he pulled back from those two rivalries, I doubt that hurts him much. I’d see it as riskier because of internal power struggles and possibly from regional rivals, but who knows.
Guy’s in his mid 80s and there’s a decent chance Mossad knows exactly where he is. He’s got one foot on a banana peel and the other foot in the grave regardless.
We don’t. That’s why the only plausible escalation here is we bomb stuff and go home.
> if he pulled back from those two rivalries, I doubt that hurts him much
Hmm, I wonder if this could work together with IAEA denuclearisation. Possibly with Chinese help. They, too, have an interest in Iran remaining deradicalised and flowing.
Sure they do. It's another faraway TV war. Trump is just pretending like he s hesitating to ease his fundamentalist MAGA base into it.
No, we're not. Not wanting war isn't the same as being willing to sacrifice your livelihood to stop it.
Nobody wants war. We've re-labelled military maneuver with words that aren't spelled W-A-R. Because, in a perverse way, both "preëmptive strike" and "genocide" are less loaded--emotionally and historically--than war.
But it's still war. War means you die. War means everything you love will die. The things you spent a lifetime building, from paintings to companies to relationships with neighbors and children and pets. They will all die. War means the entropy we ought to have bequeathed to our successors gets spun up to-day.
Then it's over. New generation. Nobody remembers. The drums start beating again. Almost as if by design. Pulses of competition, if one had to be generous.
If there is a single adjuvant to reviving these martial tones, it's the notion that this time is different. That everyone, this time, is just pretending to want to kill each other. That the consent is manufactured. It's not. It's real. We're singing it together.
It’s likely that any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis would roughly look like how things were before the Six-Day War.
However, I’m getting more at the fact that Iran is unwilling to accept a two-state solution because necessarily, one of those two states would be Israel.
sounds good
this is what 1967 borders are. feel free to check maps, wiki, etc. There are no palestinian territory on map at 1967 borders
But neither Egypt nor Jordan want anything to do with them now because of the internal instability it would inevitably result in.
Israel isn't giving up the Golan Heights for basically any reason, and the Druze living there don't really seem to want to be part of any other country either.
WhatsApp heavily nudges users into backing up their chats to iCloud or Google Drive. These backups are, by default, unencrypted (or at least encrypted using a key known to Meta). And most users just use the defaults.
It's exactly the same story with iMessage: If "iCloud Backup" and "iMessage in the cloud" are activated (again, Apple nudges users into these by default), all received messages get uploaded to Apple using a key available to Apple, unless "Advanced Data Protection" is also enabled (decidedly not the default).
Users can deviate from these defaults (and both parties to a conversation need to, for the conversation to actually be private!), but they can already also just use Signal if sufficiently motivated.
For the population in general though and in special those who don't like the people in charge of the country, WhatsApp is a great tool. I have to worry about WhatsApp and Meta as I'm in the "west", but there's no chance in hell Meta's going to provide data on any user to the Iranian government... it's a good option for Iranians.
The real issue is that we’re still guessing. Does anyone actually feel confident about any of this?
Potentially they might be worried about anti-regime activists organizing on whatsapp and want to push people to more easily monitoriable alternatives.
If iran knew meta was doing this for a long time, then it raises the question of why they are just asking people to delete it now. One would presume that such a serious opsec issue would require immediate action.
If they just figured this out right now, its a bit hard to imagine how that happened given how disruptive the bombing campaign has been.
The timing just seems really suspicious to me.
This is the perfect time for an uprising.
The Kurds are already starting whatever they’ve been planning.
Why trust a US company when the US helped Israel attack Iran while in negotiations ?
> Why trust a US company when the US helped Israel attack Iran while in negotiations ?
Potentially. However given that whatsapp/meta is just one random american company that is already banned in Iran (afaik) it seems like that would be a really random action if it was purely about retaliating against usa.
We'll probably have to wait for the dust to settle before we have a good idea what was or wasn't bombed.
And to be clear, im not saying this because its iran. I also would be cautious of e.g. initial reports during ukraine vs russia. It simply takes time for people to pick up the pieces and figure out what actually happened.
Unlike Israel's Arab neighbors, Iran didn't attempt to destroy Israel (and kill all the Jews) in 1948. Before the IRGC took over, Iran and Israel had no problems.
The IRGC has made it clear that destroying Israel is one of their primary foreign policy objectives. They have said this, and it's why they funded Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.
Don't get me wrong, Katz is a douchebag, but this was specifically a threat to retaliate in-kind of Iran continued to target arbitrary Israeli population centers.
I haven't seen any evidence of Israel targeting civilians (nuclear scientists aside), despite having complete air supremacy over Tehran. Air supremacy means Israel could carpet bomb the city if they wanted, but they don't want this. Not only would it be a horrible thing to do and of no military value, they simply don't blame the people of Iran for the IRGC's actions.
So then it’s remarkable that it’s nevertheless occurring.
I posted this elsewhere ITT but the parent comment is now flagged so it may be difficult to find. I post it below.
> Shock, fear in Tehran after Israel bombs residential, military areas
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/6/13/shock-fear-in-tehra...
> Today, Iran is once again under heavy bombardment with Israeli air strikes targeting residential areas, civilian buildings, hospitals, media offices and military sites.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-iran-mideast-war-news-06-1...
> Health authorities also reported that 1,277 were wounded, without distinguishing between military officials and civilians.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-attack-iran-civili...
There are countless reports of this nature.
Israel has air supremacy over Tehran. The facts don't support your narrative that Israel is flattening Tehran.
However that's different than saying they are targeting residential areas themselves. That's the part that i think the other poster is objecting to. Air supperiority matters here because it means Israel has the ability to target basically anything they want (so you could assume things not targeted are by choice and not lack of ability).
If total wounded (not even killed, just wounded) of both millitary and civilians is ~1200, that kind of suggests that Israel is not targeting residential buildings in general, since just a few apartment building would likely have more casualties than that.
Not to say this is iron clad reasoning. Maybe Iran is downplaying casualties for propaganda purposes (otoh i think they would be splashing photos of destroyed residential buildings everywhere if Israel was destroying them in general, as that makes for great PR). I don't really know, but there is enough doubt here that I don't think its confirmed Israel is targeting residential areas in general.
The Israeli government views non combatants affected as expendable targets with zero value. This is what we are seeing with the strikes on residential areas. It’s not that they are “flattening” Tehran in the initial stages of war, but that Israel military policy so disregards the lives of non combatants that attacks on residential areas are justified in its view.
Thus, the notion that the Iranian people are supposed to unite with the Israeli government to overthrow the “common enemy” (the Iranian government) is absurd; the Israeli war machine should be viewed as having zero regard for the Iranian people; they are expendable as long as Israeli military objectives are furthered; that is an established pattern now and that is what is evidenced by the strikes against residential areas considered against the backdrop of the atrocities in Gaza.
There's certainly more work to be done to fix food insecurity in Gaza, but aid distribution challenges are hardly evidence of genocidal intent.
[1] https://imemc.org/article/child-dies-of-malnutrition-amid-wo...
The insufficiency of these aid points is also evidenced by the people dying of starvation in this hell hole. Low numbers of people dying from starvation indicates its early stages. It takes a while for people to starve to death. Typically a population suffers malnutrition for some period before the death toll rapidly balloons. The famine deaths, far from pointing to the absence of famine, indicate we are in the early stages of mass starvation brought on by Israel’s policy.
Do not forget that the Israel government created this famine and is blocking all aid except for the aid to can weaponize. And starvation is just one of the many weapons it is using to ethnically cleanse Gaza.
[1] https://www.fcnl.org/updates/2025-06/gaza-humanitarian-found...
> Prior to October 2023 there were 400 aid stations in Gaza requiring 500 truckloads of aid
Why are you focused on these particular metrics? Meals or calories distributed per day seems more relevant.
> Typically a population suffers malnutrition for some period before the death toll rapidly balloons.
For how long of a period? It was 32 starvations as of 04/01/2024, and another 26 since then. Nothing in the data seems to suggest an impending spike.
> the Israel government created this famine
There is food insecurity, not a famine. FMR would need to increase by something like 4,000x to meet part of the definition of a famine.
The latest IPC snapshot from May 12 starts that while the entire population is facing acute food insecurity, 470,000 are facing catastrophic levels using the IPC classification. It alerted that under current conditions of military action and blockade a full blown famine under its classification would be occurring now, during the current period (May 11-September) [1].
At the end of May the four GHF stations were opened. However the amount of food supplied could only conceivably feed half of Gaza’s population if distributed equally [2]. Many people are already starving and need much more than 1.5 meals a day; besides, logistically this kind of food distribution is impossible for many reasons not the least of which is the mass destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure by Israel’s military.
As of the IPC report, starvation was worst in northern Gaza and in Rafah (in the south). The GHF aid stations are located in the south; in Rafah the military operations have only worsened food scarcity there.
It is quite telling that people every day attend these stations despite the horrible killings of civilians by the military contractors running them. That in itself shows the degree of starvation the Gaza people are experiencing.
[1] https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipc-country-analysis/details-map/en/...
[2] https://www.ajc.org/news/humanitarian-aid-in-gaza-whats-real...
We've been hearing "risk of famine" almost since the start of the conflict, when the reality is 58 deaths linked to malnutrition during the conflict. Nigera has had over a million starvations in the same period, and even that isn't a famine. There's a real food insecurity problem, but we shouldn't call it something it's not.
To properly evaluate the GHF system we must note:
1) Israeli policy is to provide humanitarian gestures while perpetuating genocide.
2) Israeli policy manufactured this famine in the first place.
3) The GHF system is widely seen as inadequate and inhumane among humanitarian organizations. The inadequacy is corroborated by the IPC reports as I described in my last reply to you, providing token aid in the south that does not address the mass starvation in the north or Rafah.
4) Israeli military are continuing to block all aid except for the GHF stations under the control of the war machine.
5) GHF aid stations are the sites of frequent killings of starving civilians.
6) Mass starvation is occurring (again, we know this from our most thorough picture, the IPC reports).
Thus the purpose of the four GHF stations cannot be to significantly address starvation.
You claim that the stations will ramp up enough to stop the famine that Israel policy has created. However if we soberly assess the situation we must conclude that that scenario would be utterly inconsistent with the facts we have available.
The first two criteria are very likely met. The question is the third piece. Your position is that death rates reported from starvation are low so we have not met the third criteria.
There are a few issues with this argument.
1. it is excess mortality which constitutes famine, not deaths from starvation directly. Admittedly this metric is impossible to accurately determine in the current conditions in Gaza.
2. The starvation numbers we have are from a month ago, already out of date. Deaths in famine balloon, so we are not able to conclude that there is not famine today by IPC criteria. We do know that famine was imminent as of that report so this is a valid concern.
3. Excess mortality due to starvation numbers is what counts, and excess mortality is underreported. Reasons include such factors as poplulation displacements, or the fact that severe malnutrition comprises the immune system and as such deaths can be attributed to proximate causes (disease) rather than the distal cause of malnourishment.
4. The IPC report stated May 12 that famine is “imminent”.
An argument that IPC-defined famine may not be occurring is that the projections were for this period (May 11-September), and that imminent risk of famine may refer to any point during this period.
With all that in mind you are right at least that I should modulate my language. Mass starvation is occurring. We don’t know whether the third IPC criterion for famine is currently met. A better statement on my part would be that famine is imminent as of May 11 with a beginning expected some time between May 11-September, the famine may already be occurring, but we don’t know that the ballooning death rate has yet been triggered in this timeframe. Besides that, becoming aware of the famine (whether it has begun yet or not) won’t happen immediately considering the difficulties of gathering reliable excess mortality numbers in Gaza.
https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20250607-israel-admi...
The death toll in Iran is not really consistent with that. (At least based on what has been reported so far. Admittedly there is much uncertainty)
"Asks" instead of banning? yet the US wants to ban TikTok
Israel will be US/UK's scapegoat, they'll pretend they are the good guy while they force Israel into a war nobody wants
> The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses frequently.
This was an opportunity for Meta to signal that it wasn't in support of its technologies being used this way, to do top-to-bottom public audit of how this came to be and to prevent it from ever happening again.
Instead, Meta had an incredibly scummy response [3]. They said that "WhatsApp has no backdoors". A "backdoor" and a vulnerability are different, and Meta at the time knew [4] that it had a vulnerability which could have been used in that exact situation (since all Gazan telecoms are surveilled by Israel).
Given Meta's senior leadership is pro-Israel, with their CISO being former Israeli intelligence, and with them massively putting their thumb on the scales to shut down pro-Palestinian activism [5][6][7][8] (including shutting down dissent of it internally [9]).
Now, Meta is aligning with the US military [10], and with the Trump administration [11] which is trying to support a war against Iran that Israel started.
Literally any country which is not US/West aligned should be actively moving their citizenry off Meta.
[1] https://blog.paulbiggar.com/meta-and-lavender/ [2] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/ [3] https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240418-israel-using-meta... [4] https://theintercept.com/2024/05/22/whatsapp-security-vulner... [5] https://7amleh.org/storage/meta/Erased%20and%20Suppressed%20... [6] https://theintercept.com/2024/10/21/instagram-israel-palesti... [7] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo [8] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/report-a... [9] https://7amleh.org/storage/Advocacy%20Reports/Delete%20the%2... [10] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-army-tech-executives/ [11] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8j9e1x9z2xo
Cell phones.
While tracking is an unfortunate consequence, cell phones and smartphones have become indispensable aspects of our daily lives. We can lament their prevalence or highlight their negative impacts, but reducing cell phones to “tracking devices people pay for” is an overly simplistic view IMHO.
1. Politics has been getting more freedom here lately, especially if it's the first story about something new. This is, as far as I can see, the first story about this.
2. The story has an interesting technical component, about encryption, privacy, and tracking - things that a lot of HN users care about.
3. It mostly hasn't deteriorated into a flamefest.
Number two on your list shouldn't apply because we've seen many technical articles about Tesla, DOGE, etc flagged in the past months
3 shouldn't apply either because we lose posts every day just because they have the "potential" for flaming.
What really matters is modeling real world threats and minimizing risk at every point in the system. That’s where GOSPL.CHAT stands out. It was designed with context-aware security from the ground up, with critical safeguards like:
No plaintext ever accessible to intermediaries or vendors
Zero-knowledge archives, where only the end user can decrypt their data
No export features or backdoors that can be exploited
These protections mean that even if infrastructure is breached or supply chains are compromised, user data remains unreadable. GOSPL doesn’t just promise encryption — it ensures resilience in the face of real threats. That’s the level of trust we actually need.
ranger_danger•7mo ago
geor9e•7mo ago