I mean, they abuse the system like dictators "abuse" guns to kill people.

If you have a company selling a weapon, it's pretty obvious it's going to be used to harm. That's by design.

And just like we were never able to prevent the guns to arrive in the hand of the wrong people, or make sure people using guns respect any kind of rules, why would we expect NSO clients to be well filtered and behaved?

God invented man, Sam Colt made them equal.

If you are a 40 year old, inactive person, try defending yourself against a knife or a club, especially against a younger person who has had experience using it.

"Harm" is a loaded word.

I'm wondering what kind of check would be good enough. Who decides which governments are corrupt? Even if you limit the customer base to democratically elected governments, who is the final authority on which elections are genuine?

If there's an election in [country] and [politician] decisively wins, and [opposition group] says the election was fraudulent and has some weak evidence and a bunch of protests, who decides if they're legitimate? This describes the 2020 Belarus election, but it also describes the 2020 US election.

Munitions suppliers operate in pretty much every country in the world, producing everything from rifles to nuclear bombs for use by that country's government. If all of that is okay, why are hacking tools going too far?

I can’t speak to Belarus but we have a straight answer in the US: Congress.

Feeding that answer is the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is appointed by the 50 State legislatures and the District of Columbia.

The voters tell them who to select.

In an absolute worst case scenario where the results can’t be certified, we even have a Constitutional fallback: the House elects a President and the Senate elects a Vice President.

For all the noise around what happened in January, the actual lawful process is extremely cut and dry. The former President’s lawyers brought their best legal arguments to bear in jurisdictions across the country, and even the Judges he himself appointed, even the ones that were most forgiving and way more than fair basically laughed them out of the courtroom.

Our election system is solid. It’s messy, it’s debatable, it’s possible to dispute, but it is reliable, lawful and legitimate and we elect the mooks we deserve, not necessarily the ones we would like.

We elect the politicians “we deserve” from a ballot consisting of a selection made by the few thousand richest people in the country - the ones fund the candidates.

https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...

I’ll just put this out here: if the RNC and DNC reverted to a closed primary in every State for all candidates, not only would I not shed any tears but I would be cautiously optimistic that this would be an improvement in our overall electoral politics because I am not a fan of the various flavors of populists that are beginning to realize power.

Regardless of how we get our nominees though, the quality of our elections and the integrity of the outcome is unquestionable. You’re free to disagree with the qualities of the processes we use, but the process is written down in advance and followed.

Not to mention how primary results become conveniently bungled (one party in particular comes to mind) when they favor candidates which are not particularly well liked by the establishment. The fact that the national political committees are private corporations doesn't instill much faith in the fairness of their electoral processes.

In EP 47 of Darknet Diaries the author cites an interview in which they said to have an ethics board which makes such decisions based on a variety of factors. They might find a country having issues with corruption, but still would like to help them catch them so called terrorists.

>a lot of which are authoritarian/corrupt governments

The son of my Brazil's authoritarian and corrupt president is a customer. The son himself is a politician and I have zero doubt that privacy was/is going to be abused.