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Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

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Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#131
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What I find odd is that their staffers may join the company, and leave for the military/intelligence agency again after less than a year What is the source for this?

>> What I find odd is that their staffers may join the company, and leave for the military/intelligence agency again after less than a year > What is the source for this? NSO Group Technologies founders are Unit 8200 alumni (Niv Carmi, Omri Lavie, Shalev Hulio). While the "revolving door" between NSO and 8200 is pretty well understood and undisputed in many security circles, I don't have any other public reference. B…

I know that 8200 veterans[0] are well represented in the Israeli startup/hi tech scene, I'm asking for a source for the other direction which I have never heard of: 8200 (or other intelligence units) veterans going back to the army for anything other than reservist duty.

[0] Of which there are tens of thousands, since 8200 is one of the biggest units in the IDF (maybe the biggest). And if you count veterans of 8200 spin-offs then you're at some 10s of % of Israelis working in software.

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#132
Having worked on Israel/Palestine human rights issues over the years and protected organisations who have been targeted by Israeli private/state intelligence due to their work. Here are just a few other methods our organisation has seen used against well respected human rights defenders (all of these are confirmed by the way, not speculation):

-Sending people to their homes claiming to sell paintings, usually in order to fix their location, get current pictures of them, ask neighbours questions, scope their homes and/or offices etc.

-Sending of verbal and written death threats. Calls on phone, stuff sent in the post.

-Covert entry operations against individual's homes and/or offices

-Following and open photography of human rights defenders (living in European cities) and their children in parks and outside schools.

-Pictures or knowledge of their children, schools etc sent to them.

-Smear campaigns design to make them look like terrorists (even through they were human rights defenders / lawyers) sent to people in their community. Designed to make them either look radical or in some cases attack them on a personal level (sexual in a conservative community). Sometimes this included organised protests against offices based upon totally false representation.

-Overt and covert physical surveillance of them as they travelled to and from their place of work and home.

-Doxing of their personal details online so people knew where they lived and called

-Threats made to them based upon knowledge that likely could only have been gathered through bugging and in other cases insider threats.

-Attempts to entrap individuals with online conversations (personal/sexual information etc)

-Abuse of flight stop lists and other measures to prevent people doing their work and travel.

-Abuse of bank, company, charity, data protection complaints etc to try to harass them in their work

-Abuse of medical healthcare (e.g allowing relatives who live in Gaza to travel to get urgent cancer/heart treatment) to pressure individuals to stop investigating human rights abuses.

-Sending of fake journalists etc as send above.

-Malware etc as above. Also DDoS, orchestrated campaigns online etc

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#133
post #36

To clarify: NSO is a private company, mostly owned by US firm. The involvement of "Israel" in whatever NSO is doing is as follows: 1. As a vendor of security sensitive products, any NSO deal would be approved by Israel's MOD. 2. They naturally employ loads of secret service "graduates" because it's good for business. Consequently, calling an apparently clumsy NSO employee "an Israeli spy" comes across as kind of fake…

> To clarify:

Was it just me, or was it difficult to follow this article without already having a lot of background info on the principals? What ever happened to putting "who, what, where, why, when" in the first paragraph?

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#134
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "the jews" considered offensive? If someone were to say "the blacks" I would automatically suspect them of racist tendencies.

What's offensive is that the OP (or generally people like him - not clear of his exact point) thinks he knows Jewish identity well enough that he can divorce it by whatever line he thinks it is (artificially) separate from Israel. Only a tiny minority of very unrepresentative Jews object to the modern state, and they do so only under an even more extreme ideology of what that country should be and who should live in…

The majority religion of a Nation can be irrelevant when criticizing the nation's actions.

I find it surprising more Jewish people don't get angry at the use of their religion to justify/cast smoke clouds around human rights violations by the Israeli government. What a shield to put up - someone's religion! A history of Holocaust! It seems dirty to me, but I don't practice Judaism so I can only comment from the outside looking in.

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#135
post #62
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NSO is a private company who is US owned and at odds with the Israeli government often. But is stuffed full of ex-officers from Israel's military. Don't you find it odd? Why they seem to keep coming, while at the same time switching back and forth in between army and "civilian" career? That's a rather dumb cover.

> But is stuffed full of ex-officers from Israel's military. Don't you find it odd? I also don't get why this is being downvoted... this is a legitimate question. And actually: I do, and I think it's abuse that private companies have been stealing the army's IP to develop their own infrastructure and sell it for a profit. While the army mass-producing good software engineers is a boon for the economy it has also spaw…

Computers and internet are privatized military technologies. Military technology transfer is the backbone of American industrial development.

Does it enrich the selected few? Yes it does. But enriches the country as a whole as well.

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#136
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the things that annoys me about this debate is that anti-semetic !== Anti Israel I've no issue with the Jews (I don't actually know any) but specific things the Israeli government does sure I do. Of course it's useful for people to conflate the two as they do with Corbyn or anyone who condemns Israel. Frankly I've no dog in the fight, I think Israel and the Palestinian's are frequently in the wrong. It's quite…

Is "the jews" considered offensive? If someone were to say "the blacks" I would automatically suspect them of racist tendencies.

I can't edit the original comment because it triggered the flame war filters, but I'm curious why this is such a controversial question and garnered so many downvotes. I sincerely wanted to know what popular the consensus is.

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#137
post #89
post #14

I personally was approached by what I now believe was an undercover spy agent in San Francisco. I believe he might have been Israeli. How we got there is a long story. But, the person (agent) came to a coffee shop that I frequented and made himself very visible talking audibly about certain areas that were my interest. I'm a very outgoing person so after over-hearing him by the second or third encounter there, I appr…

> Note, the source here might be a biased here That’s putting it mildly: I’m entirely aware that there’s a concerted campaign in the UK to smear Corbyn by fabricating a story from out-of-context quotes and, despite not being a fan of Corbyn, I’m entirely on board with the idea that he’s being unjustly targeted and probably isn’t actually antisemitic. But so far there’s no evidence that Israel is behind this effort. A…

Totally agree here. I worked quite closely with Corbyn for a bit on human rights issues (esp. Israel/Palestine) and though I might disagree with him on a lot of things - he most definitely is not Semitic. It is very clear to me for reasons unfortunately I don't have time to outline that there is a very clearly orchestrated campaign against him. Basically, it follow the exact same methods, people, talking points etc of other similar smear campaigns against people in the UK holding views that the Israeli right wing government doesn't like.

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#138
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea, the Jewish people, judaists insert whatever works for you.

You can just say, "Jews." The article isn't necessary.

Yeah, but it's also perfectly fine to use it. Jews use it, Wikipedia uses it. The commenter also said "the Palestinians" in the very same comment in which they said "the Jews", making this whole subthread slightly silly. Not that dragging conversation into accusing others of "sentiments" they cannot disprove and one cannot prove them to have, before or even instead of dealing with the factual stuff that all parties can examine and elobarate on, is ever not silly.

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#139
post #89
post #14

I personally was approached by what I now believe was an undercover spy agent in San Francisco. I believe he might have been Israeli. How we got there is a long story. But, the person (agent) came to a coffee shop that I frequented and made himself very visible talking audibly about certain areas that were my interest. I'm a very outgoing person so after over-hearing him by the second or third encounter there, I appr…

> Note, the source here might be a biased here That’s putting it mildly: I’m entirely aware that there’s a concerted campaign in the UK to smear Corbyn by fabricating a story from out-of-context quotes and, despite not being a fan of Corbyn, I’m entirely on board with the idea that he’s being unjustly targeted and probably isn’t actually antisemitic. But so far there’s no evidence that Israel is behind this effort. A…

Maybe Corbyn is just not a very good politician who wants to try a socialist experiement in right wing Britain.

I sat down and did the maths based on tax revenues and so on and Corbyn's plans roughly call for £500bn of additional borrowing. I'm not saying don't do it but it's scary this isn't communicated clearly to people the costs of renationalising water/rail/university fees etc. etc.

What makes you think there is a campaign against him or just that he simply isn't that popular apart from with a small section of society for whom he can do no wrong (i.e. Labour party members)?

Re: Undercover spy exposed in NYC was one of many

#140
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ramat Hasharon is less expensive than TA, but kind of marginally so: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/compare_cities.js... (Cf. with Ramat Gan, for instance: https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/compare_cities.js... ) Also people who live there identify it as a “plush suburb” themselves.

I appreciated the data and response. Those prices are entirely off though. Here is a local and more accurate source it's common for Israelis to check (other ones are yad2.co.il , homeless.co.il, newspaper sites and surprisingly a facebook group called "Apartments between friends"): https://www.madlan.co.il/local/%D7%A8%D7%9E%D7%AA%20%D7%94%D... https://www.madlan.co.il/local/%D7%AA%D7%9C%20%D7%90%D7%91%D...

It’s hard to compare apples to apples here: there is, for instance, a 5-bedroom apt in North TA for 4850k and a slightly bigger on on RSh is 4500k, 7% difference. Other pairs with higher percentage difference can be found, but it’s hard to extract the median or average.

But even if your estimate is correct and the difference in prices is “categorical”, the author of the piece could simply have had in mind the streets with private houses, which mostly cost north of 1.5-2 million USD. This is rather plush, I guess.

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