0-days exploited by commercial surveillance vendor in Egypt
What these 0days teach us is that if you are a person in the crosshairs of powerful adversaries you have to be super-paranoid and reduce your target surface to as small as possible.<p>If you are James Bond and you want to have secure communications with M, you are better off using a custom appliance type mobile device meant only to do that one function and nothing else. You will have to rely on anonymous 3rd-party burner devices to leave messages encoded in pre-agreed sequence of rotating geo-locked codebooks on random message boards. Any less opsec and you are toast!<p>If you are a normal human-being using connected digital devices normally, then you should assume anything you put on those devices is already stolen. If you want to keep things truly private, keep it off digital (paper, old-school analog tape etc). Then, at least they will have to physically steal it from you – which, depending on the situation, might be much harder for them, but not necessarily much safer for you. So, you lose either way.<p>Only real way out is to have well-functioning democratic governments with strong transparency and checks and balances with strongly enforced privacy laws to protect its constituents from both domestic and foreign adversaries and strong support for initiatives like Citizen Labs.