The Vast Network of Israeli Spy Tech Behind The Modern Surveillance State

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 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 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.

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. Drop Site News last year revealed that Cellebrite has hired a lobbying firm and has set up 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 programmes 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 is also used extensively by Australian police and government agencies. A 2023 investigation found 128 contracts between Australian government agencies and the company since 2011, from the Australian Federal Police to the Department of Defence to Australia’s tax office.

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. And in 2023, Reuters revealed that Cognyte had sold interception software to Myamar’s state-owned telecoms company just prior to the military coup that installed the junta who committed a genocide against the Rohingya people.

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 span 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 dishonourable 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 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.

This is why, as I argued in my last article, we must de-Zionise the world.

The surveillance and spy tech industry is just another strand of the deep and pernicious web of influence Israel has spun across the west, a web that is choking our politics, throttling our civil liberties and has led to a holocaust.

Our future, and a future for the Palestinians, depends on dismantling this web and rooting out the influence of Israel in our societies.