The Fourth Horse of the Apocalypse Is the Digital Revolution

The Fourth Horse of the Apocalypse Is the Digital Revolution

Chuck Baldwin explains the destruction of Western freedom, a word soon to be erased from the dictionary:

Last week another batch of peaceful pro-Palestine protestors were arrested by British police on suspicion of terrorism offences, 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, analysed 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 summarised 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.

The first thing to say is that a few 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 in 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 provides 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 extracting 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.

What this compendium demonstrates is that Israel and its apartheid economy sits at the centre 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.

Our world is becoming more authoritarian and fascist because tools developed by authoritarians and fascists are being employed across the public and private sphere.