Re: BEg2 chapter 15 Igor’s Limo

[Mark Kohut]

Relevant to BE, Pynchon's nailing it as usual. Early if not quite
prophetically so. This pull quote from the paragraphs below which are just
part of a longer NYT article in yesterday's paper:

"The criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going
global."

"Since NSO had introduced Pegasus to the global market in 2011, it had
helped Mexican authorities capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord
known as El Chapo. European investigators have quietly used Pegasus to
thwart terrorist plots, fight organized crime and, in one case, take down a
global child-abuse ring, identifying dozens of suspects in more than 40
countries. In a broader sense, NSO’s products seemed to solve one of the
biggest problems facing law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in the
21st century: that criminals and terrorists had better technology for
encrypting their communications than investigators had to decrypt them. The
criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going global.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from The New York Times
<https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/morning-briefing?partner=msn>

But by the time the company’s engineers walked through the door of the New
Jersey facility in 2019, t
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/technology/nso-group-how-spy-tech-firms-let-governments-see-everything-on-a-smartphone.html>he
many abuses of Pegasus had also been well documented
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/technology/nso-group-how-spy-tech-firms-let-governments-see-everything-on-a-smartphone.html>.
Mexico deployed the software not just against gangsters but also against
journalists and political dissidents. The United Arab Emirates used the
software to hack the phone of a civil rights activist whom the government
threw in jail. Saudi Arabia used it against women’s rights activists and,
according to a lawsuit filed by a Saudi dissident, to spy on communications
with Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, whom Saudi
operatives killed and dismembered in Istanbul in 2018."

On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 1:09 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> “Maxine notices a Cyrillic bumper sticker, which as she is shortly to learn
> reads MY OTHER LIMO IS A MAYBACH, for this vehicle here turns out,
> actually, to be a ZiL-41047, brought over piece by piece from Russia,
> reassembled in Brooklyn, and belonging to Igor….”
>
>
> https://youtu.be/DfcyUecHcVE
> Nice bkgd music!
>
>
> https://1cars.org/10425-zil-41047-specifications-modifications-photo-video-review.html
>
> “The Russian design team chose a different way – they decided to weld an
> armored capsule, and then to build a car around it! Such a device is not
> completely suitable for mass production, in connection with this, only 25
> such armored capsules were made at the Kurgan plant. Of these, 5 were
> designed for fire tests. This unique machine of the Likhachev plant has a
> maximum degree of safety.”
>
>
> Produced in very small numbers for the highest officials / oligarchs.  Igor
> is a big shot.
>
>
> ZIL - auto manufacturing plant near Moscow started in 1916 now defunct,
> demolished & per Wikipedia slated to be a real estate development site for
> LSR, huge construction conglomerate.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>