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As someone who worked in Israel and is familiar with the tech scene there firsthand I can testify to the fact that the entire cybersecurity industry is intertwined with the IDF and the Israeli government to such a degree that any differentiation that could be made would be purely superficial.
The intelligence units of the IDF are petri dishes in which the talent that later creates the very cybersecurity firms whose products are sold under the direct supervision of the Israeli government is cultivated. There is an entire framework focused around funding and training these graduates of intelligence units to create commercial companies that are essentially subsidiaries of the IDF. And these companies don't discriminate when it comes to sales - clients include tyrants, criminal organizations and even Muslim states. Big corporations e.g. Microsoft are also involved, as they usually end up buying these infosec enterprises, essentially funding the Israeli government / military.
It's truly disturbing to see the opportunistic nature of all of this.
As someone who's also worked in Israel and worked with the tech scene there firsthand too I dispute this quite strongly. Israel has mandatory conscription that is rather difficult to get out of, and given their precarious situation in the Middle East I'm not entirely sure I'd blame them. As a result, the entire country spends their lives between the ages of 18-20 working in the military in some capacity, meaning that you can very easily make a case of 'military links' for any industry. The milk you drink from your hotel in Tel Aviv? Owned by a former IDF commando and run by employees who almost entirely all served in the IDF. Tech is no exception, and to just say that because there are IDF graduates who staff the myriad companies in the tech industry so now it's somehow 'controlled by the IDF' is utterly preposterous. Is Tnuva suddenly an IDF controlled subsidiary? If I buy milk from Tnuva, am I suddenly now supporting the IDF and the government?
Your assertion that the IDF, Israeli government, and cybersecurity industry are effectively one unit is also bizarre to say the least, considering that they're entirely private companies who refuse to take orders from the government and have raised a stink about attempts to do so on more than one occasion. Your comment becomes more and more laughable when you assert that these companies are 'essentially subsidiaries' of the IDF. Please, you're fooling nobody. The issue here is about control - whether these companies advance Israeli foreign policy goals at the explicit direction of the government. Yet even a quick look at the clients of many of these groups shows this to be not the case.
> given their precarious situation in the Middle East
That’s an interesting choice of words but I guess settler colonies with apartheid policies do tend to be precarious
What do you mean by settler colony and what are you suggesting exactly - Israel should dismantle itself and send away its citizens to whoever will be willing to take them?
Israel's enemies attempted two wars of annihilation against it before there were any settlements, unless you consider the existence of a Jewish state within the 1948 armistice lines a "settler colony" (which admittedly some do).
> unless you consider the existence of a Jewish state within the 1948 armistice lines a "settler colony" (which admittedly some do).
I'm pretty sure OP means exactly that. In fact there are very few progressive leftists who haven't adopted this line of thinking.
If Israel is a settler colony like you say, play tell what the host country is?
For once there's something to really harshly critique and attack Israel about that isn't "It's a Jewish state in a neighborhood of unreconstructed Arab nationalists who don't want to admit they invaded Jewish land." And of course, no, you can't just let us attack _the actual bad things Israel really did do_. You have to change the goddamn topic to "Jew state bad."
israel isn't the only country to have conscription but it has exceptionally high profile espionage companies
It has many tech companies in general, way more than its relative size.
He doth protest too much, methinks.
First of all, the linked LRB article is just a must read. The cyber beat is often the most underreported in investigative journalism. Probably because its so difficult to crack (hehe) into that subculture. But it's clear it's chock full of 21st cloak & dagger stories that perhaps will one day be told.
Israeli firms enjoy quite a large footprint in the US too, clustered around Route 128 in Boston for example. I've met many engineers from firms like Carbon Black there. And I got the same sense as the article: when it comes to cyber capability, there is no international system at work, it's every party to fend for themselves. And you thus get these situations where nominal allies are infiltrating their fellow so-called allies!
In military budgeting, the requests always come for the next threat. We need an F-35 jet, because our adversaries now have Su-49s. And so the next gen cyber startups are already selling the new: quantum internet. With the tagline: "no eavesdropping over arbitrary distances" ;)
https://www.entanglednetworks.com/
They're "funding the israeli government/military" as much as a purchase from a US firm funds the US military - they're legally required to pay a tax and some of that money goes into the military.
Once released from the military these people have no additional obligation to pay for the military more so than people in more tame business - in fact, they might be seen as owed something for serving in the military, rather than the other way around.
Yes, this is why subsidiaries in the private sector are useful - when something goes terribly wrong with one, like it did with NSO, it doesn't implicate the whole of Israel/IDF - at least not explicitly.
As someone who worked with Israeli companies, there's something to be said about their diverse and relaxed regulatory requirements, which facilitated many essential services that otherwise wouldn't exist due to draconian legislations in many other countries.
To my knowledge, almost all Phishing takedown and ethical deplatforming services are based in Israel.
Could you say a a bit more a about your experience that makes you qualified to “testify” about these things? One of your posts earlier this year noted you were an “undergraduate that mostly deals with front end”
> and even Muslim states
What's wrong with Muslim states? Israel isn't actually in war with the entire Muslim world you know, though some people really wish that was the case.
In past HN conversations about this topic, there have always been some who deny or downplay the relationship between NSO and the Israeli government. This article paints a convincing story to the contrary: NSO and the rest of Israel's cyberoffense industry were/are used as a negotiating chip by Israeli diplomats. NSO only exported their technology/services with the approval of the Israeli government, and Israeli courts have cleared the Israeli government of any negligence in that approval process.
> there have always been some who deny or downplay the relationship between NSO and the Israeli government
But this has been the mainstream trend in major news outlets for years, no? Make no dirt stick to the IDF/Israeli government.
Try to criticise Israel for their war crimes against the Palestinians and see what you get branded as.
Israel isn't criticized on mainstream news outlets? Lol
To the Israeli trolls - downvote me all you want and keep supporting a genocidal state.
_Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken._
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don’t think the word “genocidal” means what you think it does.
Does using white phosphorus against civilian population qualify?
https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/03/25/rain-fire/israels-unla...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/mar/25/israel-white-p...
No. Not all war crimes are genocide. It's better if we call things what they are.
What international authority should be able to ultimately define what Israel is doing "genocide" in your opinion?
Using WP on a school is a war crime, no question. So is raining Qassam rockets down indiscriminately on civilian areas. The Palestinian people are in a crappy situation, but as long as Hamas leaders and plenty of others keep going on about wiping out the Jews, sympathy for the Palestinian cause in the international community is going to have it's limits.
A conflict lasting 80 years with a number of casualties less than 1% of either populations can not be called a “genocide” in any good faith.
Relevant blog post by Ed Snowden.
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-l...
Once again the Israeli model of control will be employed against protests and uprisings around the world, having been perfected in their "lab" of the West Bank and Gaza.
Fun fact: it is deployed now within Israel itself.
Archived:
Back in the 90's Sweden was one of the world's centers of cracking and piracy. I don't remember who it was but it was someone well respected and he said (I'm paraphrasing) "Swedish hackers are amazingly talented why are they wasting their time cracking games and piracy?" It pissed off a ot of Swedish hackers. Think something similar could be said here.
This must be a PR nightmare for Israel, which brings me to my related topic of Israel's other major weapon in its cyber arsenal.
I think this falls under a type of disinformation. I don't know of any other state that has effectively weaponized any/all criticism against it as religious discrimination: antisemitism
Here is a basic example:
(in no way am I promoting antisemitism or encouraging racial stigmas but this example is so common and the least harmless I can think of) "all Jews are greedy" - clearly antisemitic
Israel is guilty of murdering non-combatant children in Gaza - has nothing to do with Judaism. Involves the very sensitive problem of murdering innocent children. Is part of the complex Israel/Palestine political issue. Yet this could also end up being spun as an attack on Jews and being antisemitic.
I think getting labelled an 'antisemite' in a country like the USA is career-suicide. It does play into the conspiracies about Israel's influence, but my theory goes that criticism of Israel in a country like the USA is just wrong-think/wrong-speak. Getting to this level of disinformation is incredible. Hopefully the dictators in the Middle-East(and customers of NSO) don't catch on and start weaponizing criticism of them as Islamophobic ...
All you said is fine as long as you recognize antisemitism is a thing. It is just a branch of racism/xenophobia. Any group with a name can be marked as enemy and attacked if retaliation is not expected.
Now, everything you said.
Indeed, it is a thing, and has been for a long time. But labeling free speech as antisemitic is now quite common.
Here in the US, there is plenty of legislation at the state level that requires individuals and businesses sign agreements in order to gain employment or secure funding (advertisement, in the case of newspapers). For example, the law in Texas prevents an individual from being employed as a teacher (or contractor) if they support boycotts of Israeli companies. I'm not arguing for or against these boycotts but legislation preventing boycotts is now a condition of employment in some states.
There was a good documentary about this recently in DOC NYC:
https://www.docnyc.net/film/boycott/
Antisemitism is definitely a thing, a very bad thing with a very long history and lots of horrific things done to semitic peoples in many places over that long history. For sake of discussion, I will stipulate that it is a branch of racism/xenophobia.
Lots of ethnic groups/races in lots of countries have been victims of racism and xenophobia by lots of other groups in their own countries and in other countries.
Israel, as a country, has been very effective at weaponizing its "victim of racism/xenophobia." The ubitquity of the term "antisemitism" and the staunch defenders of the term are part of this weaponization. I have difficulty identifying other words that represent "a specific group that is a victim of racism/xenophobia" as well as antisemitism does.
"Israel’s leading tabloid, Yedioth Ahronoth"
Huh, Yedioth Ahronot is a tabloid? It's centrist, it's no tabloid. It's probably the most important newspaper in the country still.
Sorry this article is trash and the topic has been beaten to death here on HN. Stop with the Israel obsession please, this should be flagged.
It's a non sequitor to call the article "trash" because of an issue taken with a passing description of Yedioth Ahronoth as a tabloid. (Especially when it's physical format is that of a tabloid rather than broadsheet).
Yediot is _literally_ a tabloid. It is published in tabloid format. That's all that's meant. Every Israeli paper except for Haaretz is in tablet format rather than broadsheet, so the American assumption that "tabloid = trash and fake news" while "broadsheet = real journalism" doesn't port over at all.
Nope not going to stop until they stop exporting cyber weapons for profit.
Hacker News Guidelines
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Seems more off topic to me. It's not new, it's political (arguably also criminal) and it's not a new phenomenon. It has been discussed dozens of times throughout the years on HN.
This is interesting, even if it paints your favourite gang of thugs in a bad light.
There are always other posts you can move on to if this one bothers you.
A tabloid isnt by necessity left or right wing. It's a physical format, and also a style of news writing and delivery.
In the UK the Mirror is more or less left meaning while the Sun is very right wing.
Big red flag. Yedioth is a newspaper along the lines of the NYTimes but for Israel. Nowhere near a tabloid
The term tabloid has a literal meaning besides the pejorative meaning. The format of Yedioth is tabloid, not broadsheet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabloid_(newspaper_format)
Nitpicking, but the equivalent Israeli publication to NYTimes would be Haaretz.
Not really - it was barely read by anyone I knew, and I worked in well read circles. Ma'ariv, Globes, and Yedioth were the most common from what I remember.
Haaretz is about 50% non Zionist (looking at the regular writers like Gideon Levi, Amira Haas, most guest columns and not to mention the Arab writers). It represents the views of maybe 5-10% of Jewish Israelis and I think I'm being generous.
The NYTimes while very progressive, has a much broader base than Haaretz (at least I think. It also changed a lot lately).
If anything, the New York Times is shifting to the Haaretz-type business model of selling chiefly to a political/worldview/educated-class base via subscriptions, rather than distributing across a metro area with ad revenue.
Economics of digital media are basically the same everywhere, especially when you actually face more competition from trying to act as a genuinely local, printed paper than in the digital space.
They are similar publications to the point many articles in Haaretz are translated from NYT.
Both have progressive editorial lines and a similar interest in culture. Elitist is maybe the word.
However Haaretz routinely publishes opinions against the editorial line and has a cadre of right wing writers, whereas NYT has a shit storm and people losing their jobs over an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton. Haaretz is much more neutral as a whole (by allowing both extremes) and still tries to adhere to old school newspaper values; NYT since 2016 became a tool of progressive indoctrination. I never feel that reading Haaretz.
>NYT since 2016 became a tool of progressive indoctrination. I never feel that reading Haaretz.
Then you're not checking Haaretz English against Haaretz Hebrew ;-). Haaretz did this particular business model _before_ the Times did.
> However Haaretz routinely publishes opinions against the editorial line
NYT also has Bret Stephens , up until recently Bari Weiss and I assume there are a few more centrists? Haaretz tries to challenge its readers with opinions from the other spectrum I'd agree with that. But still, every Israel knows it's a left wing and recently a borderline anti Zionist newspaper ( I don't think Haaretz themselves will dispute this. Their writers acknowledge anti Zionism repeatedly).
The fact it has an anti Zionist line, which basically goes against the idea of the country itself, makes it a very niche product.
Also let's not forget the left is now in power in the U.S, and even on a bad day it gets almost 50% of the vote. In Israel what Haaretz would call left is 5%-10% of the votes (Meretz and thats pretty much it).
Imagine the coverage if NSO and the intricately close relationship it had with the government was say Russia or China. The headlines would be like “Putin kills Saudi journalist Kashoggi” or “Xi kills dissidents and human rights activists” instead of the current ones ascribing all agency and blame to just NSO.
> _"[...] instead of the current ones ascribing all agency and blame to just NSO."_
The article does not claim that NSO has _sole_ responsibility for any of the crimes it was an accomplice to.
But NSO (or, by extension, Israel) didn’t kill him. It was Saudis who did.
I stopped reading at the early point the article asserted Bennett propelled himself to premiership though whatever policies he enacted.
This simply ignores the entirety of a 2 year long politicial crisis whose main actor was the former PM Netanyahu, and in which essentially nothing anyone else did mattered. Once Netanyahu was gone, it was a random twist of fate that brought Bennett ahead of at least 3 other parliamentary leaders.
So any reason two different accounts posted this exact message in this thread?
Hi, I tried to create an account and was told the name is already taken, so I choose a different name. I never tried to repost.
The troll made a mistake, good catch. Edit: both accounts are created at the same time ( 2 minute interval)
I stopped reading at the early point the article asserted Bennett propelled himself to premiership though whatever policies he enacted.
This simply ignores the entirety of a 2 year long politicial crisis whose main actor was the former PM Netanyahu, and in which essentially nothing anyone else did mattered. Once Netanyahu was gone, it was a random twist of fate that brought Bennett ahead of at least 3 other parliamentary leaders.
So any reason two different accounts posted this exact message in this thread? (also posting the same question twice).
Looks like he tried to make an account, didn't realize his message went through, and for some reason made a new account (???) to post the same message.
Tl;dr: Apologies, bug/misunderstood UI/UX
I tried to create an account, was told the user name is already taken, and just created another one.
The biggest shock came from Morocco, which was apparently responsible for installing Pegasus spyware on the phones of five French cabinet ministers and for seeking to target Emmanuel Macron.
So much bias, superiority complex and stupidity packed in this statement alone. Amazing.
When you're right, you're right. Did people really think economic growth would bypass the entire MENA region just because the Arab Spring revealed some unsavory things about the governments? Or that anyone in the regional tech sector would hesitate for a second to make money off MENA states getting back at their old colonizers?
Actually, the author's name being Edan Ring (eg: obviously Hebrew) aside, that's the most interesting political angle here! NSO is opening doors for Israel to act _as a Middle Eastern country_, eg: spying, cracking, abusing human rights, trying to fuck with Europe, and making money off the whole lot. To a certain degree, the "shock and horror" angle is because Israeli Leftists and Westerners have _actually bought their own bullshit_ about Israel being a Western implantation into the region, rather than a native growth: they have to at least _pretend_ to be surprised when a Middle Eastern country (Israel) acts like its Middle Eastern peers (Morocco, the UAE).