Privacy

Social media users are calling for the mass cancellation of ExpressVPN subscriptions after it was revealed that a cybersecurity firm with Israeli ties owns the popular privacy service.

In 2021, The Times of Israel reported that Kape Technologies, a British-Israeli digital security company, acquired ExpressVPN, one of the world’s largest virtual private network (VPN) providers, for nearly $1bn.

The calls for cancellation intensified after social media users began circulating information about Teddy Sagi, the Israeli billionaire and owner of Kape Technologies. Many shared that in 2023, as reported by The Jerusalem Post, Sagi donated $1m to transport soldiers during the Israeli war on Gaza.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) law enforcement arm Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has signed a contract worth $3 million with Magnet Forensics, a company that makes a phone-hacking and unlocking device called Graykey.

The contract, which appeared on Tuesday in a federal government procurement database, said it is for software licenses for the phone-hacking tech for HSI “to recover digital evidence, process multiple devices, & generate forensic reports essential to mission of protecting national security & public.”

While the contract doesn’t mention the name of the product, it’s likely referring to Graykey, a forensic system to unlock smartphones and extract data from them, which was originally developed by Grayshift. Magnet Forensics merged with Grayshift following an acquisition by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2023.

Source: https://mstdn.ca/@chad/115210303120859445

"Question. For many years, you’ve been trying to get U.S. technology companies to process the data of European citizens according to EU standards. Is that possible with Trump in the White House?

Answer. A legal system has to be stable precisely in situations where you have a crazy president. If everyone were nice and friendly, we wouldn’t need laws. A big issue is how much the whole data economy has become part of this trade war. One of the only things that Europe can retaliate [against] is going to be the digital industry. It’s one of the things where [Americans] make shitloads of money. It’s the financial industry, digital industry… and that’s about it.

The [EU] Commission just fined Meta and Apple… and the former responded with a very Trumpian press release, saying, “Oh, this is a tariff.” You broke the law and you knew you were doing it, so now you can’t just say it’s a tariff. It’s like someone driving their Porsche at 180 miles an hour and, when they get fined, they say, “Oh, you just hate rich people.”

Q. Is the European Commission right to fine two tech giants in the middle of a tariff war?

A. The EC is taking things slowly, because it doesn’t want to be the first to throw a stone. But at some point, you have to enforce your law. We must address the issue of technological dependence. In the U.S., there’s even been talk of American companies not offering their services in Greenland and Denmark. It’s crazy, because then no one would trust those companies again… but we also thought no one would ever start a trade war."

Not much is known about ICE's Mobile Fortify app outside of what's been discovered and reported by 404 Media, which first broke the story of the app's existence, and that's concerning to the Senators.

According to reports, which first surfaced in June, the app has access to more than 200 million images and is able to return data including a person's name, birthdate, nationality, and any dealings with the US immigration system if they aren't a US citizen. The app reportedly also has the ability to capture a fingerprint from a photograph, which can then be run against DHS and Department of State records. Queries can also be performed to connect an identified individual to other people, vehicles, addresses, phone numbers, and firearm ownership, among other data points.

A VPN that grants network-level privacy on mobile by routing app traffic through Tor, assigns each app a separate circuit for improved separation, bypasses app-level censorship, features per-app routing, security via Rust-based implementation, and awaits early adopter feedback.