Israel's 8th front: the online and offline war against the population of the West

[RedFox]

Thought I'd start this topic, based on the line of force I think I'm seeing developing.
I'm going to try and connect the dots, as this line of force could be missed without seeing all the main pieces. And I don't think I see all the pieces. I hope others will be able to add them.
It involves the ramping up of online/social media monitoring/control, as well as influencer control, and I suspect more so real life controls/actions.
Both an informational and practical war against the people.

We have the polling that shows most Americans are turning against support of Israel. The demographic is skewed to the younger generations, but I suspect it's high across the board.
I'm posting an extreme headline from the MSM here, as it categorises the media framing (Israeli info-war projection). Now this may be from 2023, so public opinion has likely got worse for Israel since then. It may also be worth looking to see what's been setup behind the scenes since then.

Majority of Americans 18-24 think Israel should ‘be ended and given to Hamas’

51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 said they believed the long-term answer to the Israel-Palestinian conflict was for “Israel to be ended and given to Hamas

nypost.com

Next we have the Charlie Kirk situation: Charlie Kirk is dead... A sad day in history
The TL:DR is that it appears to have been a explosive mic pack that killed him, in the style of the Israeli pager attacks, followed by Netanyahu going on a TV tour to state that Israel had nothing to do with killing Charlie Kirk.
Given his appeal to the youth, and his (recent) questioning of Israel, Charlie would be diametrically opposed to Israel's 8th front.
So I'd argue he was their first victim of this 8th front, and it may be the start of a pattern.

Then we have Netanyahu stating that buying TikTok is part of an informational war, also discussing (in so many words) needing influencers to fight for Israel.

Netanyahu calls social media a ‘weapon,’ eyes TikTok and X to bolster US support - Türkiye Today

Israeli PM Netanyahu claims seeking influence over TikTok and X

www.turkiyetoday.com

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday that his government views social media platforms as a “weapon” to secure support among right-wing audiences in the United States, identifying TikTok and X as key targets.

Speaking at a meeting with U.S. influencers at Israel’s Consulate General in New York, Netanyahu described social media as “the most important weapon … to secure our base in the U.S.,” according to a video shared on influencer Debra Lea’s account on X.

Next we have multiple 'detentions' of online influencers/people of note at UK airports (both left and right) under 'terrorism charges'. The 'terrorism charges' are a tool that allows unlawful/indefinite/unmonitored detention - up to and including 'trail by secret juries' in the UK.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1971960929966280836

Adding also the uptick of detentions of many individuals for 'tweets' in the UK.

UK Social Media post related arrests.

Following on from the very recent arrest of Graham Linehans' arrest at London Heathrow for tweets he posted while in America. Its the turn for Katie Hopkins to fall foul of the UKs online free speech laws.

We have a spate of ICE arrests for pro-Palestinian support in the US.

Zionist Militant Group Responsible for ICE Arrest of Pro-Palestine Former Student

A federal judge ruled that ICE unlawfully detained a former UMass student following a complaint by Zionist group Betar. The case raises concerns about free speech and political targeting.

www.mintpressnews.com

ICE arrests Palestinian leader of Columbia’s anti-Israel protests, revoking student visa and green card: lawyer

A Palestinian activist who led the disruptive protests at both Columbia University and Barnard College has been arrested by ICE agents at his campus apartment, according to his lawyer.

nypost.com

The attack on ICE facilities by 'a deranged lone gunman' who 'hated ICE' and 'mistakenly killed a bunch of detainees'.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-24/shooting-at-dallas-ice-center-leaves-multiple-people-injured

In a social media post, Trump called the anti-ICE wording on the shell casing “despicable,” and alleged that it was tied to “the continuing violence from radical left terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”

And lastly, we're back full circle to Charlie Kirk and the "Christian revivalism" of his funeral celebration at his TPUSA organisation event, along with the narrative of "left-wing terrorists did this".


Some older things of note that line up with all this.
From 2023

Douglas Murray suggests Hamas supporters should be treated 'like ISIS supporters': 'You should be deported' | Blaze Media

British author Douglas Murray told an audience in London, England, earlier this week — then reiterated in a related piece for the Spectator Thursday — that Western nations should tolerate neither violent rhetoric against Jews nor open declarations of support for Hamas, the terrorist...

www.theblaze.com

British author Douglas Murray told an audience in London, England, earlier this week — then reiterated in a related piece for the Spectator Thursday — that Western nations should tolerate neither violent rhetoric against Jews nor open declarations of support for Hamas, the terrorist organization that has in recent days massacred over 1,300 Israelis and at least 27 Americans.

While there are already laws on the books to deal with incitements to violence and support for terrorist organizations, Murray, the founder of the Center for Social Cohesion, thinks jail time is not enough. Instead, he has recommended that his country, home to at least 6.1 million non-citizens, exile for the guilty parties.

While Israel sees to its defense, Murray suggested that "what we can do here in Britain is to keep our own house in order. And our own house in Britain is in disarray. It is not acceptable. It should not be acceptable that the Jewish community among all the communities of this country, in this diverse country, should be the one community expected to accept with equanimity those who cheer on the murder of Jews and those who support the murder of Jews."

"Hamas supporters" are how the media has spun any support of Palestinians. Given the (engineered) migrant issue in the UK, this will fuel right-wing sentiment. i.e. the association of migrant violence, with terrorists, with "Hamas supporters".
So what happens to actual UK natives who are "Hamas supporters"?

Well, you're all terrorists now:

BREAKING: Palestine Action Declared Terrorists, London on Edge! - Breaking News Now

In summary, the Home Secretary's announcement regarding Palestine Action has ignited protests, raised significant concerns about civil liberties, and

countylocalnews.com

Almost 900 people were arrested at London Palestine Action protest, police say

British police said on Sunday they had arrested almost 900 people at a demonstration the previous day in support of Palestine Action, and the government appealed for people to stop demonstrating in support of the banned campaign group.

www.reuters.com

LONDON, Sept 7 (Reuters) - British police said on Sunday they had arrested almost 900 people at a demonstration the previous day in support of Palestine Action, and the government appealed for people to stop demonstrating in support of the banned campaign group.
Britain proscribed Palestine Action under anti-terrorism legislation in July after some of its members broke into a Royal Air Force base and damaged military planes.

It should be noted that a lot of elderly people where arrested at this and similar protests.
We also saw the railroading of the judicial system for protestors of migrant killings in the UK. And the emptying of jails of actual criminals, to make room for them.

I suspect that illegal detention (without trial), violence against and killing of "Hamas supporters" will become more common soon. Both in the UK and US.
I've likely missed many similar incidents in the EU and Australia.

Lastly, we have the collective push for digital ID cards in Australia, UK and EU. And I suspect that this is being fast tracked, as a means to easily 'ban' undesirables from society (jobs, banking, medical care etc).

Palantir in the UK

The new trade deal that was struck earlier in the year between the United States and the United Kingdom was promoted as a success. However very little was detailed of the specifics behind the Trump-Starmer negotiations. And how exactly the trade deal was beneficial to UK citizens. Before the UK-US trade deal negotiations could be brought to the table -it was reported the United Kingdom had to agree to open up it's Citizens' Medical Record data to Private US firms.

Mikey Tayo once again does brilliant journalist work to piece to gather how Palantir managed to get a foothold of the UKs Medical data; how Palantir looks to move to other sectors banking, policing, border control etc. Tayo cites how Palantir gets in cheap; it first offers it services at low price points but once a client has given up enough data the company begins to hike it fees. Clients are left dependant on Palantir because the data is often stored on Palantir servers. Tayo describes the attachement clients have to Palantir as an addiction. Breaking contracts with Palantir means no longer having access to that data and having to build an entirely new system from the ground up- as the NYPD department found out.

Social Media Surveillance for Political Purposes: Palantir Technologies

The analysis of social media data, including tracking political discussions, hashtags, and sentiments, can be exploited to shape narratives or target specific demographics during elections or other…

dnewshq.com

Palantir Technologies (palantir.com), founded in 2003, has gained notoriety for providing sophisticated data analytics tools primarily used by government agencies and intelligence communities. Palantir’s services extend beyond social media surveillance and, in their own words, from Powering AI-assisted decision-making — from war zones to factory floors, its capabilities in aggregating and analyzing vast amounts of data have raised concerns about potential misuse, particularly in the realm of political surveillance.

https://muslimskeptic.com/2025/09/02/palantir-genocide/

What Is Palantir?​

Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 and is primarily a data analytics company that offers its services by managing complex datasets for its customers, i.e., it takes in huge amounts of data and organizes it into understandable systems which can then be used to make decisions. The name “Palantir” is actually a pop culture reference, inspired by fictional crystal orbs from the Lord of the Rings franchise. These fictional orbs allow their users to see across time and space, similar to how the company promises to “see through” vast amounts of complex data and make it easy to consume.

What’s concerning is that this is, in many cases, private data belonging to civilian populations, and among the primary clientele of Palantir are government agencies such as the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the Department of Defense. In fact, as a start-up, one of Palantir’s early investors was none other than the CIA.

The Intercept reports:

Palantir has never masked its ambitions, in particular the desire to sell its services to the U.S. government — the CIA itself was an early investor in the startup through In-Q-Tel, the agency’s venture capital branch. But Palantir refuses to discuss or even name its government clientele, despite landing “at least $1.2 billion” in federal contracts since 2009, according to an August 2016 report in Politico.

And exactly what kind of raw data is Palantir converting into easy-to-understand and digestible graphics? Well, to say that such data is acquired through a serious breach of privacy is quite the understatement, to say the least:

According to Snowden documents published by The Guardian in 2013, XKEYSCORE is by the NSA’s own admission its “widest reaching” program, capturing “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” A subsequent report by The Intercept showed that XKEYSCORE’s “collected communications not only include emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.” For the NSA and its global partners, XKEYSCORE makes all of this as searchable as a hotel reservation site.



But how do you make so much data comprehensible for human spies? As the additional documents published with this article demonstrate, Palantir sold its services to make one of the most powerful surveillance systems ever devised even more powerful, bringing clarity and slick visuals to an ocean of surveillance data.

This information about Palantir’s “Big Brother” behaviour isn’t anything new. It’s more than a decade old. Just imagine how sophisticated and intricate Palantir’s surveillance tech is now with the major advancements that have taken place in technology, especially with the ongoing AI revolution. And due to how it was streamlining data for the US government, it wasn’t long before other foreign governments also started employing Palantir for its services:

However anxious British intelligence was about Palantir’s self-promotion, the worry must not have lasted very long. Within two years, documents show that at least three members of the “Five Eyes” spy alliance between the United States, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were employing Palantir to help gather and process data from around the world.

How Palantir Is Helping Israel to Commit Genocide in Gaza​

In recent times, one of these foreign governments which has become a client of Palantir is the illegitimate State of Israel, which the company has been assisting a great deal in perpetrating a genocide in Gaza:

Palantir Technologies Inc., the data analysis firm that provides militaries with artificial intelligence models, has agreed to a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry to supply technology to help the country’s war effort.



The agreement followed a Thursday meeting between Israeli defense officials and Palantir co-founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp in Tel Aviv, according to Executive Vice President Josh Harris, who was also in attendance.

In the article on Peter Thiel, we also discussed how Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians aligns closely with the core values espoused by Thiel and how, in his eyes, anyone playing any part in hindering technological progress is essentially the Antichrist (which is precisely what he calls Greta Thunberg for her activities as an environmental activist). This, of course, also includes the unforgivable “crime” of being pro-Palestine, as being pro-Palestine means being against Israel’s technological progress.

First, let’s examine how Palantir is directly involved in the genocide in Gaza:

Immediately after the talk, Karp traveled to a military headquarters where he signed an upgraded agreement with Israel’s Ministry of Defense. “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions,” said Executive Vice President Josh Harris.



The project involved selling the ministry an Artificial Intelligence Platform that uses reams of classified intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack. In an understatement several years ago, Karp admitted, “Our product is used on occasion to kill people,” the morality of which even he himself occasionally questions. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’”

Notice how they attempt to sanitize the term “genocide” by describing it as “war-related missions.” This is just a small glimpse at the kind of whitewashing that will take place at the hands of these Silicon Valley military-tech corporations as a way to dress up their war crimes as harmless corporate jargon.

For those that might remember, this system of using an AI to generate kill-lists sounds awfully similar to the Lavender AI being employed by Israel’s Unit 8200 against the Palestinians. And just like Lavender, the decisions are made based on the private data of Palestinians, which is then used as an excuse to label them “Khamas” and bomb them to pieces.

RELATED: Corporate Genocide: How Israeli Marketing Dehumanizes Palestinians

Using Palantir’s Predictive Policing to Combat “Terrorism” and “Antisemitism”​

Unlike Lavender, however, Palantir will also indirectly aid Israel in conducting its genocide by suppressing all the pro-Palestinian voices in other countries that use Palantir, including the US. And what will help majorly in this process is the fact that Palantir has already dabbled in forms of tech that can be used to persecute pro-Palestine activists. I’m speaking, of course, about predictive policing technologies:

Algorithms take in data on the location, time and date of previously committed crimes and this data is superimposed to create hotspots on a map for police officers to patrol. A 2013 video about “predictive policing” by the National Science Foundation features an officer explaining how they used one of these maps to prevent an assault “before it happened”.



Military-grade surveillance technology has now migrated from Fallujah to the suburban neighbourhoods of LA. Predictive policing is being used on illegal drivers and petty criminals through a redeployment of techniques and algorithms used by the US army dealing with insurgents in Iraq and with civilian casualty patterns.

So, Palantir had first developed this predictive technology in Iraq, and then they tested it back home in America. In this case, the main pieces of data were related to previous crimes. However, when it comes to arresting potential “terrorists,” i.e., pro-Palestine activists, they will likely utilize a Zionist-crafted set of prerequisite criteria, under which it will be sufficient for a person to have been labeled “antisemitic” for Palantir to flag them as a hateful extremist Khamas-supporting terrorist. Things like attending pro-Palestine protests, condemning the IDF on social media platforms, exposing dark truths about Judaism, not believing Zionist propaganda, and in general just having anything negative to say about Israel could be enough to land citizens in jail. And if you think something like this could never end up happening, Palantir has already shared this specific type of tech with Israel:

IBM and Microsoft provided software used to monitor West Bank border crossings. Palantir offered predictive policing algorithms to Israeli security forces. Amazon and Google would sign over cloud computing infrastructure and AI systems. The result was a surveillance and policing dragnet that could entangle innocent people alongside those who posed credible security threats. Increasingly, right-wing ruling coalitions allowed it to operate with less and less restraint.

And what makes matters worse is that Palantir is currently building a software that will sift through the social media accounts of immigrants and then flag them as terrorists and antisemites:

According to recent reports, Palantir is building ICE an “immigrationOS” that can generate reports on immigrants and visa holders — including what they look like, where they live, and where they travel — and monitor their location in real time. ICE will use the database combined with a trove of other AI tools to surveil immigrants’ social media accounts, and to track down and detain “antisemites” and “terrorists,” according to a recent announcement by the State Department. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in a speech at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix earlier this month, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

Trump Orders Palantir to Assemble Data on the Entire American Population​

Imagine Palantir being used to establish a super-surveillance state where all pro-Palestine voices are hushed, where criticising Israel in any way whatsoever is akin to blasphemy that can render a person liable for deportation or worse. And ironically, this AI-powered crackdown on “terrorism” will not be applied to Christian and Jewish Zionists who support the genocide, killings, rapes, and forced starvation of children in Palestine. They will also not be applied to the calls for genocide found within the texts of the Bible and the Talmud. Nope. They’ll all be completely safe, protected by the law as victims of violence and hate. Any semblance of justice that might still remain within the US will be erased completely.

And just how much data do you think Palantir has access to? Recently, Trump ordered government agencies to assemble all the data that they have on the American population into one single place:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:



Section 1. Purpose. Removing unnecessary barriers to Federal employees accessing Government data and promoting inter‑agency data sharing are important steps toward eliminating bureaucratic duplication and inefficiency while enhancing the Government’s ability to detect overpayments and fraud.



[…]



(c) Immediately upon execution of this order, Agency Heads shall take all necessary steps, to the maximum extent consistent with law, to ensure the Federal Government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all State programs that receive Federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.

And guess who the US government will be employing to carry out this grand task of assembling all the available sensitive information on the American population in one place?

Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.

Now, re-imagine the scenario I mentioned earlier about Palantir. This time, though, their AI knows pretty much everything about everyone, including who they are, what they look like, where they are, etc., and it constantly monitors their social media activity across all platforms. Anyone who so much as breathes a word against Israel is flagged immediately as a potential terrorist, and they must be arrested pre-emptively to prevent them from potentially carrying out another Holocaust.

Through this carrot and stick method, society will be re-engineered to praise Israel and Judaism and to condemn Palestine and Islam.

RELATED: Israel’s Post-Gaza Plan: Deepening Israel-UAE’s “Abrahamic” Authoritarianism in the UK

Creating Super-Surveillance Smart Cities with Palantir​

Aside from playing a role in the military, Palantir can also be used to carry out pretty much every governmental task. For instance, during the lockdown era, the US government used Palantir to disseminate the Covid vaccines, and they did the same again with monkeypox:

Some states are now using Tiberius — a custom tool developed by Palantir for managing the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine — for tracking the allocation of monkeypox vaccines, Insider has learned.

This, coupled with the fact that Palantir has also been known to use actual DNA samples in the data they collect, bears dark implications for the future. It means it’s possible that Palantir might one day store entire genomes of populations, which will enable them to identify whether or not a person has all the state-mandated drugs in their system. Of course, such a system will be hailed as a medical miracle. Medical “experts” will claim this technology can be used to conduct all sorts of research on a grand scale like never before; and that diseases can be detected in people super early on. Of course, this will all just be an elaborate ruse for the government to get their hands on people’s DNA. Another justification could be the super-convenience that comes with such technologies designed to streamline processes, a justification that has been used to validate many forms of advanced tech.

Eventually, governments will undoubtedly want to integrate Palantir within all systems and infrastructures, granting it access to everyone and everything, convincing society to give up their freedom and rights in exchange for super-convenience. Countries like Israel have been very interested in the concept of “smart cities,” i.e., cities run mostly or entirely by AI. And for such a city to exist, you would need a master AI that oversees everything and manages all other AIs. Palantir could very well serve that role one day, since, at its core, the company markets itself as a problem solver and decision maker. So, if such an AI developed by Palantir is able to manage an entire city, creating a totalitarian super-surveillance smart city will be within reach for genocidal countries like Israel, who plan on developing smart cities to completely and utterly suppress, oppress, and control Muslims in the Middle East.

RELATED: Smart City Projects in the Middle East Will Pave the Way for Greater Israel

Palantir and Advanced Military Drone Tech​

Another of Palantir’s projects that will aid in the fruition of super-surveillance and advanced military combat is its partnerships with modern drone companies like Sky-Watch:

Copenhagen-Palantir Technologies Inc. is teaming up with Danish drone manufacturer Sky-Watch by entering a Cooperation Agreement announced at Danish Defense Annual Conference (DDAC) in Copenhagen.



The companies will utilize their individual expertise to multiply the effort of the Sky-Watch drones. The power of data from the Sky-Watch drone RQ-35 Heidrun will be unlocked by being integrated to Palantir’s software platform. The Palantir platform gathers and analyses immense data fusing intelligence collected from platforms at land, sea, air and space giving the end user a strong real-time operational picture. This, also known as multi-domain operation, is crucial in modern warfare – efficiently illustrated in Ukraine, where both Palantir and Sky-Watch are present.

Yet another drone company that Palantir is working with is Shield AI, which is excelling particularly in autonomous weaponry:

At the heart of Shield AI’s appeal is its proprietary Hivemind autonomous software platform. This sophisticated system enables drones and aircraft to operate independently without relying on GPS, communications infrastructure, or human pilots. The technology has demonstrated particular value in GPS-denied environments and contested airspace scenarios.

So Palantir is effectively paving the way towards thousands of autonomous lethal surveillance-drones flying through the city skies while being fed data that allows them to know where everyone is at all times. What do you think will happen if a group of people even attempted to organize a pro-Palestine protest while living in such a dystopian environment? I have a hunch that the Middle East will be the testing ground of choice for such Orwellian technologies before they’re ever unleashed in the US.

So it's not just about Israel, but any questioning of our leaders. However I suspect the main push is from Israel.

 

[Cosmos]

Thank you. I think a big part that also plays into all of this is the Russia/Collective “West“ situation. Or the emerging multipolar world being at odds with the old world, if you will. I would think especially big European countries could be the target of ever increasing totalitarian control because of that situation.

 

[RedFox]

The latest from Max Blumenthal

Or if you prefer reading/more info:

Israel to spend up to $4.1M to bolster support among Christians in western US, filings show - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

San Diego firm contracted to geofence churches, recruit pastors and tour an “October 7th Experience” exhibit as part of Israel's expanded global outreach efforts.

www.jta.org

3rd Oct 2025

Israel to spend up to $4.1M to bolster support among Christians in western US, filings show​

San Diego firm contracted to geofence churches, recruit pastors and tour an “October 7th Experience” exhibit as part of Israel’s expanded global outreach efforts.


With its popularity in the United States crashing, Israel is bankrolling what organizers say will be the largest campaign of its kind to bolster support among evangelical churches, until recently seen as an unshakable base of support for the Jewish state.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has hired an American firm to run the campaign, with plans to spend as much as $4.1 million on marketing aimed at Christians across the Western part of the country, according to newly filed federal disclosures.

The documents, filed last week under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, reveal that Show Faith by Works, LLC will execute what it bills as the “largest Christian Church Geofencing Campaign in U.S. history.”

A newly formed company with a San Diego address, Show Faith by Works is run by Chad Schnitger, a prominent Christian conservative activist in California.


The initiative is designed to reach churchgoers with digital ads that are explicitly “pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian,” while dispatching a mobile “October 7th Experience” exhibit to church parking lots and Christian colleges.

The campaign adds a new prong to Israel’s U.S. communications blitz, complementing a $1.5 million-per-month contract for AI-driven social media activity with former Trump campaign strategist Brad Parscale and a contract with a firm called Bridge Partners to create an influencer network called the Esther Project.

The PR blitz was anticipated after Israel’s Foreign Ministry was allocated $150 million in this year’s budget for public relations efforts.

Public attention to Israel’s efforts surged last week following reporting by an online outlet called Responsible Statecraft, which is published by the Quincy Institute, a dovish foreign policy think tank in Washington DC.

Together, the deals underscore how Israel’s government is deploying unprecedented resources to shape American opinion amid what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has described as the country’s “eighth front”: the battle of narratives and public opinion around the world.

The campaign comes at a time when Israel’s once-reliable support among U.S. evangelicals is showing cracks with recent surveys showing that younger evangelicals are less likely to support Israel than previous generations. Americans. Though initiated months earlier, the campaign also comes shortly after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who was perhaps the most prominent evangelical pro-Israel voice speaking to young Americans.

According to invoices attached to the filing, Show Faith, which was formed on Aug. 5, expects to receive more than $3.25 million over five months, paid in equal installments routed through the global ad giant Havas Media, while also floating an “ideal additional budget” of $835,000 for equipment and expansion.

The firm reported receiving an initial payment of about $326,000 on Sept. 18, days before it formally registered with the Department of Justice Department as a foreign agent. The arrangement mirrors the structure of the Parscale and Bridges contracts, which also list Havas as an intermediary, pointing to the company’s role in coordinating Israel’s foreign-agent activities in the United States.

Show Faith’s scope of work blends high-tech targeting with old-fashioned religious outreach.

Campaign documents detail plans for geofencing, a technique to target ads to worshippers’ phones within specific geographical boundaries around churches and Christian campuses in California, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado.
[*note* the system will then track the phones afterwards]

The firm has pledged to recruit pastors to write op-eds and distribute “Pastoral Resource Packages” by mail, to hire social media influencers and produce television-style commercials, and to tour a branded trailer exhibit featuring tents, virtual reality headsets and kiosks designed to immerse audiences in narratives of Israel’s conflict with Hamas for a program that will be called the “October 7th Experience.”

The filings project 47 million ad impressions across display, audio and connected TV channels over the course of a year.

The filings name five people involved with Show Faith, led by its founder, Schnitger, who is listed on LinkedIn as a managing partner of Graystone Public Affairs, a political consulting and grassroots organizing firm based in Riverside, California. Schnitger also leads the state chapter of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a conservative Christian political advocacy group.

Among the others are Melissa Lundie, who reported recent volunteer work with the Los Angeles County Republican Party and contributions to the California GOP, and Richard Tuong Do, who disclosed paying $350 in dues to attend a California GOP convention this month.

In its pitch materials, Show Faith by Works also floated the idea of recruiting celebrity spokespeople to amplify the campaign. A presentation slide attached to the filing lists figures such as actors Chris Pratt, Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, televangelist Joel Osteen, and former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow as potential endorsers who could bring star power to pro-Israel messaging in Christian communities. It is unclear whether any outreach to these celebrities has taken place, and the names appear in the documents as aspirational targets rather than confirmed partners.

Presentation slides outlines a series of talking points divided into two sections: pro-Israel and “anti-Palestinian state.”

The campaign’s pro-Israel messaging is designed to speak directly to pastors and Christian audiences about Israel’s biblical and historical significance. The materials emphasize the Jewish presence in the land before 1948, the state’s legitimacy and record of protecting non-Jewish populations, and Israel’s efforts to uphold civilian safety and “moral superiority” in wartime. Other talking points highlight Israel’s democratic freedoms, its partnership with the United States, and its place in the Christian New Testament, suggesting a Christmas message about the birthplace of Jesus. One bullet point says to “question the longstanding policy of a 2-state solution.”

The “anti-Palestinian” section of the plan characterizes Palestinians chiefly through the prism of Hamas. It asserts that Palestinians are complicit in Hamas’s leadership, financing and military operations, and accuses them of sheltering terrorists, hiding weapons in schools and hospitals, and celebrating the Oct. 7 attack. The materials stress that there has never been a Palestinian state, that Hamas’s and Iran’s goals are “genocidal” rather than “land-focused,” and that Palestinians have squandered opportunities for modernization in favor of violence. The filings also note attacks on American Christian aid workers in Gaza.

The new campaign is the latest in a string of foreign-agent registrations linked to Israel’s Foreign Ministry this month. On Sept. 18, Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X LLC, registered as a foreign agent, committing to produce 100 ads per month, with 5,000 variations, to combat antisemitism in the United States. Documents revealed plans to deploy AI-driven search engine optimization tools and shape outputs of GPT-based chatbots.

Days later, a newly registered firm called Bridges Partners disclosed that it had been retained to run the Esther Project, a code-named influencer campaign designed to recruit five to six social media personalities at a time, each posting dozens of pieces of content monthly across Instagram and TikTok. Both firms were also contracted through Havas, which appears to be serving as a hub for the ministry’s U.S. spending.

Report: Israel to spend over half a billion shekels turning ChatGPT into public diplomacy tool

Foreign Ministry’s $145 million global campaign enlists US firms, influencers, and AI platforms like ChatGPT to shape pro-Israel narratives online and counter growing criticism among young Americans

www.ynetnews.com

6th Oct 2025

Report: Israel to spend over half a billion shekels turning ChatGPT into public diplomacy tool​

Foreign Ministry’s $145 million global campaign enlists US firms, influencers, and AI platforms like ChatGPT to shape pro-Israel narratives online and counter growing criticism among young Americans
​

Israel’s Foreign Ministry has launched one of its most ambitious public diplomacy campaigns in the United States since the war in Gaza began, according to newly filed documents with the U.S. Department of Justice. The documents, submitted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), reveal that Israel has contracted the U.S.-based firm Clock Tower as part of a wide-reaching effort to influence online discourse, including generative artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT.
The campaign, coordinated through the Government Advertising Bureau and implemented by Havas Media Network, focuses heavily on digital platforms. The ministry’s goal is for at least 80% of the content produced to be tailored to Generation Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and podcasts. The exposure target set in the contract is unusually high for social media campaigns: 50 million monthly impressions.


The project comes amid declining support for Israel among young Americans. A Gallup poll published in July found that only 9% of Americans aged 18 to 34 support Israel’s military operations in Gaza. Another survey commissioned by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, while somewhat more favorable, found that 47% of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide.
The most controversial and technologically novel part of the plan is Clock Tower’s initiative to influence how artificial intelligence systems respond to queries about Israel and related topics. The filings describe an effort to build “websites and content to provide GPT framing results in GPT conversations.” In effect, the company aims to create online materials that could shape the data used to train large language models like ChatGPT, X’s Grok and Google’s Gemini, potentially affecting how they present or frame issues involving Israel.

Experts say the approach, sometimes called “GEO” — short for “Generative Engine Optimization” — mirrors the principles of search engine optimization but for AI systems. “Just like SEO maps which websites shape search results, GEO maps which sources influence AI responses,” said Gadi Evron, CEO and co-founder of the Israeli cybersecurity firm Nostick, which specializes in artificial intelligence. “It’s a new field, and some call it GEO for GenAI, but the terminology is still developing.”

At the center of Israel’s partnership stands Brad Parscale, former campaign manager for Donald Trump, who also hired the now-defunct data firm Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Parscale heads Clock Tower and currently serves as chief strategy officer of Salem Media Group, a Christian conservative broadcasting network that owns radio stations across the United States. In April, the network announced that Donald Trump Jr. and Lara Trump had become significant shareholders.
According to the FARA filings, Clock Tower was hired to “conduct a nationwide campaign in the United States to combat antisemitism.” The Foreign Ministry’s contact person listed in the filings is Eran Shiovitz, the ministry’s chief of staff for strategic communication. Shiovitz leads a broader initiative called Project 545, named after a government decision to allocate 545 million shekels ($145 million) to Israeli public diplomacy in 2025.
The campaign follows the ministry’s decision to end a $600,000 contract with the American public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker, which is associated with the Democratic Party. SKDK had reportedly managed a “bot farm” project promoting pro-Israel narratives online, including stories related to the Bibas family, whose relatives were kidnapped in Gaza. The firm declined to explain publicly why the contract ended, saying only that “the work has concluded.” American media outlets later reported that the deal was terminated after it was exposed and drew public criticism over the use of a family tragedy for paid advocacy.
In addition to the Clock Tower campaign, the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office are expanding outreach through social media influencers. A new initiative called Project Esther is designed to support a network of U.S.-based influencers who promote pro-Israel content, funded by the Israeli government. The project was developed quietly, but its budget and the involvement of top Israeli officials underline its significance as a parallel digital front alongside Israel’s military and diplomatic efforts.
According to the filings, Bridges Partners LLC, a Delaware company founded in June by Israeli strategists Uri Steinberg and Yair Levy, was also contracted for the campaign. The agreements allow payments of up to $900,000, with a potential monthly budget reaching $250,000. The plan includes a detailed schedule: recruiting five or six influencers in the initial phase, each required to publish 25 to 30 posts per month on TikTok, Instagram and other platforms. Later phases are expected to expand the network, including collaborations with Israeli content creators and American agencies. Influencers are expected to earn between tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for their participation.


Beyond influencer payments, the contracts cover content production, legal advice, analytics and professional distribution support. The scale of the effort was reflected last week when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with a group of pro-Israel influencers at the Israeli Consulate in New York. Among the participants were Lizzy Savetsky, who has become a prominent online advocate since the war began; businessman Ari Ackerman, grandson of Israeli-American tycoon Meshulam Riklis; and digital creator Zach Sage Fox, known for producing pro-Israel videos.
When asked at the meeting how Israel should respond to declining international support, Netanyahu said, “We have to fight back. How do we fight? With influencers. They’re very important.” He added that “the most important weapon today is social media.”
Netanyahu has described the online arena as “Israel’s eighth front,” alongside its military, economic and political challenges. In his remarks in New York, he compared “woke culture” to Nazism and urged investment in TikTok and cooperation with Elon Musk to “ensure victory in the most important arena.” His comments drew criticism in the Arab media, which portrayed them as evidence of an Israeli attempt to influence American public opinion during the Gaza war.
Reactions to the influencer meeting were divided. Some social media users accused the participants of insensitivity toward families of Israeli hostages who were protesting outside the consulate at the same time. Others argued that Jewish voices online were essential to counter rising antisemitism. Influencer Shay Sabo, who took part in the meeting, said the purpose was “to strengthen Jewish advocacy, not replace the families’ struggle,” adding that “what we need now is unity, not mutual blame.”

New CBS owner David Ellison met with top Israeli general in scheme to spy on Americans - The Grayzone

Israel's former top general sought donations from David Ellison and his father, Larry, as part of a billionaire coterie to fund digital paramilitaries aimed at sabotaging pro-Palestine activists. The leaked documents show one planner explaining, “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less...

thegrayzone.com

6th Oct 2025

New CBS owner David Ellison met with top Israeli general in scheme to spy on Americans
​

Israel’s former top general sought donations from David Ellison and his father, Larry, as part of a billionaire coterie to fund digital paramilitaries aimed at sabotaging pro-Palestine activists. The leaked documents show one planner explaining, “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF.”

With Paramount and CBS News now under his control, the younger Ellison has installed self-described “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.​

The new owner of Paramount, David Ellison, participated in an Israeli government-led plot to surveil and suppress pro-Palestine activists in the US, leaked emails show. Originally dubbed “12 Tribes,” a reference to the dozen Jewish billionaires solicited to underwrite the operation, the scheme sought out American faces to fund surveillance firms run by Israeli intelligence veterans on behalf of Tel Aviv, as it targeted American citizens participating in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The emails documenting the foreign influence campaign to counter BDS were first identified by journalist Jack Poulson, who discovered them in a trove leaked by the Handala hacking collective in 2024. The files show former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was tasked with recruiting wealthy Westerners to fund surveillance firms operated by Israeli intelligence veterans as they stalked and harassed people whom the government of Israel suspected of harboring pro-Palestinian sympathies.

In the emails, Hollywood talent agency executive Adam Berkowitz identified Ellison as “very interested” in “helping out with [undermining] the BDS movement.” Berkowitz introduced Ellison to the Israeli general in a group email: “Benny meet david. David meet Benny,” Berkowitz wrote on December 23, 2015, explaining that he “told david briefly about your [Gantz’s] 12 tribe idea which you can expound on to him which he seemed very interested in.”

Two days later, Ellison replied, “Mr Gantz it is a pleasure to meet you over e-mail. I very much look forward to discussing everything you are working on, and in the mean time hope you are enjoying the holiday season.” He added, “I will be back in LA on January 3rd and look forward to connecting in the New Year.”

A planning spreadsheet names other Zionist billionaires sought for the Israeli effort. They included David’s father, Oracle founder and Friends of the IDF board member Larry Ellison; Israeli-American billionaire and top Democratic Party sugar daddy Haim Saban; and Google founder Sergey Brin, whose “Israel-support” was still “tbd.” One of those named, Canadian bookchain owner Heather Reissman, had “already agreed” to donate.

The document also listed other hyper-wealthy Zionist activists as potential 12 Tribes members, alongside the following descriptions:

• Eli Broad ($5.7 billion, real estate giant, philantropist [sic] supporting pro-Israel causes),
• Selmo Nissenbaum (Art collector, Partner of Personale Investimentos Ltda since 2008. Director of Uhf Incorporated; financ. supports Weizmann Institute)
• Dorothea Steinbruch ($5.8 b, steel industry)
• Safra family
• Kevin Bermeister (technology innovator, real estate investor, philanthropist, founding investor of Skype)
• Frank Lowy (co-founder of the Westfield Group, operator of over 100 shopping centres in Australia, NZ, the US and UK, net worth US$4.60 bn)
• Anthony Pratt (a net worth of about US$7.1 billion, packaging industry)
• Édouard Cukierman (French-Israeli business man)
• Rotchild [sic] family (Banking dynasty)
• Lord Stanley Fink (Net worth $180m, former hedge fund manager, pro-Israel philantropist [sic])
• Sir Ronald Cohen (British businessman and political figure, known as “the father of British venture capital)
• Lord George Weidenfeld (British publisher, philanthropist, newspaper columnist; pro-Israel supporter)
• Poju Zabludowicz (Finnish-born London-based business magnate, investor, art collector and pro-Israel philanthropist (one of the main supporters of UK pro-Israel group BICOM))

Those afforded the dubious honor of being selected to donate $1 million to the official Israeli propaganda slush fund would be anointed one of the “12 Tribes” of Israel, all of whom would be guided directly by the Israeli government, according to a promotional document.


“Funding for this initiative shall be provided by an exclusive group of the twelve most influential Jewish philantropists [sic], symbolizing the twelve Jewish tribes; Israel’s government shall act as a thirteenth, facilitating ‘tribe.’”

Internal planning documents from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, a nominally independent thinktank which serves as an extension of the Israeli military, show how the 12 Tribes envisioned itself: “strategically, we want to be a non-hierarchical mothership, working for the people and the state” of Israel.

However, the effort’s masterminds were heavily preoccupied with maintaining a facade of independence from Tel Aviv. “Government money is also a political constraint,” one organizer stated, adding, “in order to act on all target audiences, independence is required.” Another planner agreed that the scheme would be more effective if it posed as autonomous: “In the jungle, we need more guerrillas and less IDF.” A third volunteered, “This will not be a covert project, but the connection to the state and the government needs to be very controlled.”

With funding from the 12 Tribes, Israel would deploy “state-of-the-art cyber technology as a soft weapon” through firms like Black Cube — the notorious Israeli intelligence cut-out best known for stalking the accusers of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Black Cube also acts as an attack dog for the makers of highly invasive Pegasus spyware, Israel’s NSO Group. As President Barack Obama closed in on a nuclear deal with Iran, Black Cube sent agents, again under false cover, to investigate administration officials involved in the negotiations.

Internal Black Cube documents boast that the Israeli company has “developed several unique methods, especially social engineering” to “move freely… in limited access environments,” while harvesting data from the darknet.

The email exchanges also offer a glimpse into the early stage of David Ellison’s emerging role as one of Silicon Valley’s top Israel enforcers. It’s a role he was seemingly born to play, given the zeal displayed by his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, in defending the apartheid state.

Paramount’s pro-Israel pedigree

Further emails from the Handala tranche reveal that Larry Ellison was tasked by Israel with evaluating current Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s allegiance to the apartheid state a decade ago, with Tel Aviv’s then UN Ambassador, Ron Posor, asking Larry in 2015: “How was the conversation with Mario [sic] Rubio? Did he pass your scrutiny? Did you have a chance to talk about Israel?”

Larry Ellison responded in the affirmative, declaring, “Marco will be a great friend for Israel.”

The elder Ellison has maintained an extremely close relationship with Tel Aviv, funneling tens of millions of dollars to Israeli militants via the “Friends of the IDF” group over recent years. In fact, a decade before the International Criminal Court indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza, Ellison attempted to place him on the board of directors of Oracle.

Now, Larry Ellison is at the helm of a consortium of Israel-tied billionaires taking over major US media properties from TikTok to Paramount, which controls CBS News. With their takeover of Paramount complete, the Ellison family are not only poised to dictate Israel policy to US viewers, but are well-positioned to dictate the situation on the ground in Gaza as well. Indeed, Ellison pledged over $350 million to the Tony Blair Institute, whose founder was named by President Donald Trump as the future director of the so-called Gaza International Transitional Authority – a neocolonial occupation entity that will provide an inevitable windfall to Blair’s tech backers.

Meanwhile, as the new owner of Paramount Skydance, Ellison’s son, David, has installed Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief – and Zionist enforcer – of CBS News.



From ‘cancel culture victim’ to ethically conflicted CBS News chief

The 41-year-old Weiss began her career as a pro-Israel activist hounding Palestinian professors on the campus of Columbia University before working for a number of Israeli media outlets. An admitted “Zionist fanatic,” she rose to prominence as a columnist as a neocon diversity hire at the New York Times opinion section before a stormy resignation in which she branded the paper as a woke hive infected with cancel culture – while omitting her long history of attempting to cancel Israel critics.

(Her final attempt to cancel Israel critics at the NY Times apparently resulted in the assassination of one of her targets, the Palestinian scholar and pundit Refaat Alareer, who was murdered by an Israeli drone strike after Weiss falsely accused him of mocking a non-existent dead Jewish baby).

As she struck out on her own, Weiss basked in support from techno-feudalist financial angels like David Sacks and Marc Andreesen, founding an “anti-woke,” ultra-Zionist outlet ironically entitled the Free Press. Today, the Free Press partners with an Israeli propaganda cutout called Center for Peace Communications which attempts to foment divisions within Arab societies, and promotes the militia of ISIS-linked Yasser Abu Shabab, a notorious smuggler in Gaza who operates alongside the Israeli army.

With support from Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Weiss has also launched an “anti-woke” quasi-university, the University of Austin (UATX), where students read passages from Palantir CEO and university trustee Alex Karp’s harshly panned book, The Technological Republic, alongside Plato’s The Republic. Upon entering the university’s gates, visitors are greeted with a bust of Weiss, the founding mother, donated by Lonsdale.


While journalists have traditionally sought to speak truth to power, Weiss has made a career of doing the opposite, and has been hailed as a kind of scrooge whisperer among the conservative establishment. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” Republican pollster Frank Luntz said of Weiss. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”

To complete Ellison’s Paramount takeover, his company is purchasing Weiss’s Free Press at an eye-popping price of $150 million. His appointment of Weiss as CBS editor-in-chief raises serious issues about the network’s editorial independence, especially given her proclivity for using Free Press as a vehicle for promoting the interests of her tech donors.

Who were the Free Press investors who profited from the sale to Paramount? Was David Sacks among them? Now that Sacks is a Trump White House Special Advisor on AI and Crypto, his financial relationship with Weiss creates a clear conflict of interest at CBS.

In her first act as CBS editor-in-chief, Weiss issued an October 6 letter to all employees of the organization pledging to advance a commitment to “journalism that is fair, fearless, and factual.”

Sep 19th 2014

Larry Ellison's Oracle Started As a CIA Project — Paleofuture

Yesterday, Vox somehow managed to write an entire article about the history of Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison without mentioning the CIA even once. Which is pretty astounding, given the fact that Oracle takes its name from a 1977 CIA project codename. And that the CIA was O

paleofuture.com

Larry Ellison's Oracle Started As a CIA Project​

Yesterday, Vox somehow managed to write an entire article about the history of Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison without mentioning the CIA even once. Which is pretty astounding, given the fact that Oracle takes its name from a 1977 CIA project codename. And that the CIA was Oracle's first customer.

Vox simply says that Oracle was founded in "the late 1970s" and "sells a line of software products that help large and medium-sized companies manage their operations." All of which is true! But as the article continues, it somehow ignores the fact that Oracle has always been a significant player in the national security industry. And that its founder would not have made his billions without helping to build the tools of our modern surveillance state.

"Recognizing the potential demand for a commercial database product, [Ellison] founded the company that became Oracle in 1977," Vox writes, conspicuously omitting the whole "because CIA wanted a relational database" part of the history.

Which isn't to say that Oracle's work with the US government should necessarily be frowned upon. The CIA needs databases, just like any large organization. But not mentioning just how reliant Oracle has been on government contracts since its inception is downright strange and seems to feed this narrative that Ellison simply created a product that companies wanted and private enterprise did the rest.

Oracle has pulled in billions of dollars each year working for governments at all levels for all manner of projects, the most high-profile of late being the disaster that was the Oregon health insurance exchange. But it's the company's philosophy behind how national security databases should work which would surprise someone who'd only read about them on Vox.

Ellison has always been a big believer in the federal government maintaining large national databases. And he was able to be much more public about it in the months after the September 11th attacks. In fact, Ellison argued that we needed just one large national security database, one with national ID cards and mandatory iris scans, naturally.

"The single greatest step we Americans could take to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was copied into a single, comprehensive national security database," Larry Ellison wrote in the New York Times in January of 2002.

"Creating such a database is technically simple. All we have to do is copy information from the hundreds of separate law enforcement databases into a single database. A national security database could be built in a few months," Ellison explained. "A national security database combined with biometrics, thumb prints, hand prints, iris scans or whatever is best can be used to detect people with false identities."

And Ellison has worked tirelessly to build that all-seeing database, suggesting that he had even given away for free much of the tech necessary for such infrastructure. He'd only charge the government for additional services and maintenance of the systems, of course.

As Jeffrey Rosen recounts in his 2004 book, The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age, business was particularly booming at Oracle after September 11th. Rosen explains that the federal government accounted for a whopping 23 percent of Oracle's licensing revenue in 2003, roughly $2.5 billion.

Rosen tells of meeting with the folks at Oracle, one of whom was David Carney, formerly the number three person at the CIA. Carney had retired after 32 years there, and been hired at Oracle to head its Information Assurance Center, founded just two months after the September 11th attacks.

From Rosen's book:

"How do you say this without sounding callous?" [Carney] asked. "In some ways, 9/11 made business a bit easier. Previous to 9/11 you pretty much had to hype the threat and the problem." Carney said that the summer before the attacks, leaders in the public and private sectors wouldn't sit still for a briefing. Then his face brightened. "Now they clamor for it!"

Maybe they shouldn't have. Even assuming a best case scenario in which Oracle isn't actively enabling the kinds of domestic spying that Americans have rightly been up in arms about since the Snowden revelations, it would appear the company's leaky products should still be cause for concern.

"Of all of the commercial databases, Oracle is the least secure," British security expert David Litchfield recently told Reuters. Which is a problem, both from a national security perspective or even a consumer confidence perspective. Because today, everybody uses Oracle databases.

As Ellison himself told Rosen proudly for The Naked Crowd, "The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything. The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance, is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database."

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Vox didn't highlight Oracle's CIA origins or its never-ending relationship with governments at all levels. But writing an explainer about Oracle without mentioning the CIA or Ellison's post-9/11 goals or national security infrastructure strikes me as simply bizarre.

Trump's labelling of ANTIFA and undocumented/illegal immigrants as terrorists, plus 'sending in the troops' on US soil plays into this too. Just like the UK 'we are all terrorists now'.
The UK digital ID card to "stop the boat people" is more than likely part of all this. I'd suspect that a lot more surveillance systems will be announced under the mask of "dealing with migrants" soon.

Going back a few months to add some more context to what the near future holds - given all the above context:

Israeli spyware firms are fueling the global surveillance state - The Grayzone

The Pegasus hacking tool was just the beginning. A new survey of spyware firms reveals Israeli companies are being used by agencies in Western nations to build perfect dictatorships under democratic guise. This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic! Last week another batch of...

thegrayzone.com

July 31st 2025

Israeli spyware firms are fueling the global surveillance state
​

The Pegasus hacking tool was just the beginning. A new survey of spyware firms reveals Israeli companies are being used by agencies in Western nations to build perfect dictatorships under democratic guise.
This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!

Last week another batch of peaceful pro-Palestine protestors were arrested by British police on suspicion of terrorism offenses, including a disabled man in a wheelchair, as the UK continues its descent into authoritarianism on behalf of Israel.

If any of these protestors had their phones on them at the time of arrest, the police will most likely have scraped them for data using sophisticated spy tech software. Protestors not arrested will have been caught on mobile cameras that sit atop police vans in the UK, and their faces, perhaps even their voices, will have been captured, analyzed and cross referenced against a police database.

And in a perverse twist, this spyware technology – technology which now underpins the insidious and growing capabilities of the modern surveillance state – will most likely have been made in Israel by Israeli spies.

But it’s not just in the UK.

Spy tech developed by former Israeli spies is being used on an industrial scale by various agencies in western democracies, from police forces to national security agencies to militaries. Some has been declared illegal, some skirts legal boundaries, and much remains hidden.

The scale of usage, and the range of capabilities provided by this Israeli spy tech, is vast. From face and voice recognition software, to interception and wiretap technology, to covert location tracking, to forced data extraction from smartphones and other devices.

The tech, built by software engineers who cut their teeth writing code to enable and enforce Israeli domination over, and apartheid against Palestinians, is being sold to security services, police forces and immigration agencies across the West.

While much of the information in this article isn’t new, it hasn’t been summarized in one place before. The implications for global civil liberties of Israel’s dominance in spy tech have also not been articulated, and past media coverage has sometimes omitted the Israeli link to these companies. This article will outline the primary players, the sellers and the buyers, and also identify recent contracts, previously undocumented, between Israeli spytech and Western buyers.

Scandals involving Israeli spyware companies have been well documented by mainstream media, the most famous of which was the NSO Group affair. NSO, an Israeli firm founded by ex-Unit 8200 officers Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, was found guilty in a California court in 2019 of selling its Pegasus software to governments so they could hack WhatsApp accounts. Pegasus, which was able to execute what is known as a ‘zero-click’ attack to access a smartphone without the user knowing, was used by governments to spy on dissidents, human rights activists and journalists and was likely used by Saudi agents to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was murdered. The company was eventually ordered to pay $167 million in damages to Meta, who bought the case, and in 2021 Biden blacklisted the company, preventing it doing business the US. (The US state department, notably, went out of its way to say the US would take no action against Israel, despite the fact that the Israeli government provide export licenses for all spyware software).

Also blacklisted by Biden as part of the same executive order was another Israeli spyware maker called Candiru, whose hacking software did not attract the same high-profile attention as the NSO Group. Candiru, also founded by ex-Unit 8200 intelligence personnel, sold spyware to governments to spy on human rights activists, journalists, academics, embassy workers, and dissidents.

In 2023, the Biden administration again blacklisted two Israeli spyware companies with little fanfare, and once again without taking action against Israel. The two companies, Cytrox and Intellexa, were founded by Tal Dilian, who spent 24 years in the IDF, rising to become chief commander of Unit 8200. In 2019, Dilian, who lives in Cyprus, was visited by a Forbes journalist, where he demonstrated how his software could remotely hack a phone within seconds.

In Europe, Cyprus and Barcelona have become hubs for ex-Unit 8200 Israelis building spyware companies.

Another Israeli spy firm, Paragon Solutions, was identified earlier this year as silently infiltrating and extract data from WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger and Gmail without needing user interaction. A criminal complaint against Paragon was filed in Rome after an Italian journalist was hacked by the Italian government using Paragon software. No other legal action has been taken, however. The company, founded by Unit 8200 commanders Ehud Schneorson, Idan Nurick, Igor Bogudlov, and advised by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, has not been blacklisted by the EU or the US and remains free to operate.

These companies are just the tip of the iceberg, the names that skirted legal grey areas and either eventually fell on the wrong side of the law (such as it is) and into the scope of the authorities, or whose illicit spying activities were discovered.

Even more insidious are the Israeli spyware companies openly contracting with Western security services and agencies to spy on and crack mobile phones and other devices. Because these companies work with lawful state agencies, they claim to have a different model than the NSO Group, Candiru and others focused on illicit hacking services. Yet in many cases their software is similar if not identical, and the full scope of their activities is unknown.

Lead among these is Cellebrite, founded by ex-IDF soldier Yossi Carmil and staffed with dozens of ex-Unit 8200 Israeli intelligence personnel. Cellebrite’s flagship tool is called the Universal Forensic Extraction Device which extracts data including contacts, locations, deleted messages, and calls from a range of devices including smartphones, pads, SIM cards, and GPS devices. In the US Cellebrite has a $30 million contract with ICE, and a $1.6 million contract with Customs & Border Protection to scrape the data from phones seized at the border.

The surveillance firm also worked with the FBI to unlock the phone of Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Crook. And Cellebrite is looking to embed itself more deeply in the US security and surveillance state. Last year, Cellebrite was revealed to have hired a lobbying firm and established a dedicated arm of its business to win more US government contracts, after raking in more than $18 million from US federal government contracts in 2024. In December 2023 Cellebrite boasted it had signed a one-million dollar contract with “one of the largest police departments in the country” without disclosing which one. Given that they were referenced as “a long-time customer,” the most likely candidate is the NYPD, who have been documented as working with Cellebrite for years.

On top of this, my research has found that Cellebrite has active contracts with a host of US federal agencies, from the Navy, to the DEA, the Coast Guard, to the Fish and Wildlife Service. A number of US embassies also contract with Cellebrite including the US embassies in Lima, Bogota and Asuncion. US Special Operations Command, the agency which oversees the various special operations programs across the US military branches, also pays for Cellebrite tools, as does Global Strike Command, the US Air Force unit responsible for nuclear attacks.

Cellebrite is just as active in the UK. In 2020 the company signed a three-year, two million pound contract with London’s Metropolitan police for Cellebrite’s premium product. The Met said the Cellebrite software is the only one on the market “that meets Met police requirements,” particularly its ability to crack Android phones. It’s not clear if this contract was renewed.

In 2018 Police Scotland signed a £370,000 contract with Cellebrite to provide 41 mobile ‘cyber kiosks’ to be rolled out across Scotland, enabling on-site phone cracking. And in 2022 North Wales Police paid Cellebrite over a quarter of a million pounds for a suite of tools which enabled ‘password bypass’ and ‘brute forcing’ of phones.

Kent Police, the police force whose armed police recently threatened with arrest people for holding Palestine flags, signed a one year contract with Cellebrite last year. And this year, two additional UK police forces have signed contracts with Cellebrite. In February the City of London Police, the police for London’s financial district and distinct from the Met Police, paid one hundred thousand pounds for Cellebrite tools. And in April Leicestershire Police signed a one-year contract with Cellebrite that cost them £328,700. Cellebrite also has a contract with the UK’s Department for Transport.

In the UK, Cellebrite is an approved supplier under what is known as the ‘Digital Forensics Dynamic Purchasing System’ which, according to the body responsible for signing commercial deals for UK police forces “enables the streamlined procurement across UK forces for Cellebrite tools.”

How widespread the use of Cellebrite tools is by UK police forces is unknown. Freedom of Information Requests have previously found twenty six of the UK’s forty seven police forces admitted using the technology, with others planning to trial it. More recent FOI requests to UK police forces this year concerning their use of Cellebrite, from South Wales to West Yorkshire, have been denied on so-called ‘national security’ grounds.

Cellebrite has boasted of its work enabling the Israeli genocide of Gaza, saying it has been ‘instrumental’ in providing phone hacking services to Israeli intelligence since October 7th.

Arguably even more sophisticated tools are offered by Israeli spy tech firm Cobwebs Technologies, founded by former IDF Unit 8200 officers Omri Timianker, Udi Levy, and Shay Attias and which employs a number of ex-Unit 8200 on its staff. Among the services offered by Cobwebs (sold to a company called PenLink in 2023 but retaining the CobWebs team) is an AI-powered service enabling facial and image recognition across social media and the deep web, and a feature called WebLoc that enables the tracking of mobile phone movements in a specific area selected by the user. This capability, known as geofencing, is enabled by in-app advertising which pulls personal data from smartphones, data which is then sold to spy tech companies like Cobwebs for integration into tools like WebLoc. A now-deleted 2019 press release details in corporate tech speak the services offered by the company. Cobwebs previously signed a $2.7 million contract with ICE, has an active $3.2 million contract with the US Department of Homeland Security and last June entered into a huge $5.3 million contract with the Texas Department of Public Safety. A 2024 report also found that the LAPD has been using Cobwebs’ suite of surveillance and tracking tools for a number of years.

In 2020 the company opened an office in London with the intent to provide its spy tech to UK police and security services, but no public information on UK bodies working with Cobwebs is available.



Another Israeli spy tech firm working with western security services, police forces and government agencies is Cognyte. The firm, spun out of another Israeli spy tech company called Verint, is led by Elad Sharon, Gil Cohen and Ronny Lempel, all of whom are IDF and Unit 8200 graduates. CEO Sharon’s LinkedIn banner is a Cognyte-branded image proclaiming the company stands with Israel.

Cognyte makes “network intelligence” tools that hoover up huge quantities of information, including anything running through 4G/5G towers, telecom metadata, messaging platforms, phone calls and network signals, to spot patterns and anomalies in communications. This gets fed into a data platform ‘solution’ that enables users to connect dots and analyse information. This is all supposedly legal, but information on the nature of the work and the agencies contracting with Cognyte is scarce. Cognyte announces the awards but never the end users.

What we do know is that in the last 18 months, western law enforcement agencies, national security agencies and militaries have signed deals with Cognyte worth collectively close to $60 million. These include a $20 million, three-year deal with a national security agency in Europe, a $3 million agreement with a US police department and a $10 million contract with a European military announced just last week. The press release for the military deal explained how “Cognyte continues to deliver field-proven solutions that empower frontline military teams with the actionable intelligence they need to operate.”

Two buyers I have identified, listed on a US government procurement website, are the US Secret Service and the US embassy in El Salvador.

Similar to Cellebrite and Cobwebs, a search on LinkedIn for ex-Unit 8200 who now work at Cognyte brings up dozens of names.

The company that Cognyte was spun out of, Verint, is also Israeli, founded by former intelligence officers and has also worked with Western security agencies. In 2014 Verint built Switzerland’s wiretap and surveillance infrastructure, and in 2017 was paid $35 million by the US Department of Defense to work on a major undisclosed project. In 2018 Verint scored part of a 50 million pound deal to provide UK police with new cyber intelligence capabilities. Verint has since pivoted its business model to focus on customer engagement platforms, with much of the military and security spytech spun out into Cognyte.

Another Israeli company that has partnered with British police forces is Corsight AI which has sold its facial recognition technology to the Essex Police. Corsight’s software, which enables the identification and cross referencing of people’s faces, was perfected first on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. According to the linked article, the technology has been deployed during the genocide of Gaza. The founder and chairman of Corsight’s parent company, Cortica, is Igal Raichelgauz, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Corsight has also sold its facial recognition to Sao Paulo’s military police and to Bogota’s metropolitan police.

Israeli facial recognition company, Briefcam, also has contracts with UK police forces as well as police departments in the US. In the UK, Cumbria police use Briefcam’s analytics system in their county-wide network of CCTV, but claim to have disabled the facial recognition component. In France, Briefcam had its contracts cancelled in 2023 after it was revealed scores of police forces across the country were using them illegally in breach of French privacy laws. Police in Brussels and Warsaw also use Corsight facial recognition, and in the US Chicago, Springfield and Beverly Hills PD have confirmed their usage of Corsight.

NICE, an Israeli company founded by ex-IDF soldiers, has captured the market for identifying financial fraud, serving 85% of the Fortune 500 and a number of European regulators. A multi-billion dollar company, it has also provided surveillance tools for cities including license plate recognition, face capture, as well as hand held GPS-based video terminals and mobile video sensors to track citizens. A 2015 Buzzfeed investigation found NICE was supplying secret surveillance software to a number of countries.

A dishonorable mention must go to Israel’s Black Cube, founded by ex-Unit 8200 intelligence spooks Dan Zorella and Avi Yanus. Black Cube was notoriously hired by Hollywood rapist Harvey Weinstein (a man who said he was “Israeli in his heart and mind”) to spy on and gather information about his accusers. BlackCube has been implicated in a number of spying scandals and in the past has employed western diplomats including Vivian Bercovici, Canada’s former ambassador to Israel.

What this compendium demonstrates is that Israel and its apartheid economy sits at the center of the drive towards a fully surveilled, zero-dissent world. Across the globe, Israeli spyware is ushering in a distinct 21st century fascism that fuses new technologies of control to a tried-and-tested framework that seeks to spy, suppress and dominate. Under the guise of citizen safety and crime fighting, Israeli tech is smoothing the gears of authoritarianism.

Israel’s permanent war and apartheid economy, and the spy tech firms run by Israeli intelligence operatives that emerge from this economy, are the single biggest threat to civil liberties in the world today. And it’s no surprise that Israel has cornered this market. Israel churns out individuals and projects directed for dominance because Israelis are raised in and surrounded by a military culture of impunity. A culture where technology is created only to dominate, test subjects are abundant and rules of engagement non-existent.

In buying and relying on the tools of an apartheid state for security and law enforcement technology, we see how Israel’s apartheid and genocide itself becomes indispensable to Western governments in their drive towards complete security states.