I’d rather be in the mountains thinking of God, than in church thinking about the mountains.
A man accused of orchestrating an alleged $105 million tax fraud told his alleged co-conspirator it would be "bigger than Ben Hur" if the scheme was uncovered, tapped phone calls played in court have revealed.
Key points:
- Five people have pleaded not guilty over an alleged $105 million tax fraud
- The jury was today played a series of secretly recorded phone calls
- The trial is expected to run for six months
The New yorker: “The inside story of the world’s most notorious commercial spyware and the big tech companies waging war against it.” By Ronan Farrow – April 18, 2022. “…Commercial spyware has grown into an industry estimated to be worth twelve billion dollars. It is largely unregulated and increasingly controversial.
In recent years, investigations by the Citizen Lab and Amnesty International have revealed the presence of Pegasus on the phones of politicians, activists, and dissidents under repressive regimes. An analysis by Forensic Architecture, a research group at the University of London, has linked Pegasus to three hundred acts of physical violence. It has been used to target members of Rwanda’s opposition party and journalists exposing corruption in El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on the phones of several people close to the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas, who was murdered after investigating drug cartels.
Around the time that Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia approved the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to monitor phones belonging to Khashoggi’s associates, possibly facilitating the killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has denied involvement, and NSO said, in a statement, “Our technology was not associated in any way with the heinous murder.”) Further reporting through a collaboration of news outlets known as the Pegasus Project has reinforced the links between NSO Group and anti-democratic states.
But there is evidence that Pegasus is being used in at least forty-five countries, and it and similar tools have been purchased by law-enforcement agencies in the United States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who has led the company’s efforts to fight spyware, told me, “The big, dirty secret is that governments are buying this stuff—not just authoritarian governments but all types of governments…”
Underworld figure charged with directing massive drug smuggling operation from inside prison
Bosses Don’t Follow Their Own Advice in Returning to the Office - Bloomberg: “Bosses are hellbent on getting their staff back into the office. It’s just that the rules don’t necessarily apply to them. While 35% of non-executive employees are in the office five days a week, just 19% of executives can say the same, according to a survey by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by messaging channel Slack. Of the share of employees who are making the commute, more than half say they’d like at least some flexibility, and non-executives broadly report having a much worse work-life balance than their bosses…”
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