Why do some of the most evil tech companies, especially ones that use exploits and zero-days as part of their business model, disproportionately originate from the same small (population-wise) country? The company from the article, all the other examples everyone here lists, Candiru, NSO... All Israeli.
One factor is that Israel generally refuses to extradite their citizens who are accused of crimes in foreign countries. So they effectively operate with a certain level of legal immunity.
The perpetrator of the viral "you're stealing my house," "if I don't steal it someone else would steal it," video was purported to be an alleged sex offender who fled to Israel to escape charges.
Yes, in general Israeli intelligence and hacking groups tend to enjoy far fewer consequences when they screw up than their Western counterparts, which then allow them to be far more aggressive.
It isn't all Israel. North Korea, Russia, and Iran have long been known to be where most cyber crime comes from. Israel is there, but they are an also-ran compared to the others. (but Israel does tend to have more sophisticated attacks). The US also has done a large share, but mostly that is government attacks on other governments (that we know of).
Israel has a lot of enemies that going against them. Which is why they have incentive to be good at this - to attack back. Corporate attempts are just ways to make money.
I'm going to stay out of the political issue of what any actor should do.
This is true, but as far as I know, the other countries (except the US, which however is far larger than Israel) keep their cyberwarfare operations mostly internal. There's no public Russian company accessible to any Russian that does what the example companies above do, for instance. It's all government-led. So is the existence of these companies some outcome of the legal or financial system in that country?
No religions are states, that is just your political opinion. I think it's a really toxic opinion because it then leads to the question of the potential allegiance to a foreign nation of anyone based on their religion. This is the same reason why a Catholic president was once controversial, because back then people believed there was a Catholic state secretly controlling them.
In my political opinion Israel is an artificially created state which is why it's so unstable and we should simply walk away and cut our losses on this. I believe my opinion is the prevailing populist opinion too so y'all have to contend with that.
There needs to be some compromise between our points of view or else we'll continue to get more war and violence. I think our country needs to recognize our responsibility for this mess and should offer land in North America of equivalent value for any Zionist refugees and then leave the poor people of that land alone. I ultra extremists would feel right at home in the Catskills lol.
Certainly some is antisemitism. To imply, as you have, that there is 0% legitimacy to any other reasons to hate the behavior of the current Israeli government is just as pro-genocide as you claim antisemitism.
Most people I know who oppose Israel's actions in Gaza have no problem with Jewish people; many themselves are Jewish.
>Gas prices are solely Israel's fault? You couldn't have said "I am a propagandist" any more clearly, even if you had tried.
I agree it's a bit of a stretch, but only a bit. Had Israel not gotten the USA on board with the attacks on Iran, I do not think gas prices would be much above their standard seasonally- and inflation-adjusted level, unlike where they have been since the "war" started.
Was Israel essential for Trump being willing to attack Iran, or would he have been willing to go it alone? Even if Israel was essential, it took two to tango. Israel for sure wasn't going to do this without the US. If Trump had said no (as the previous N US presidents had), then we wouldn't be here. If Trump had listened to analyses saying that Iran would disrupt Hormoz (as there were plenty of analyses that said), then we wouldn't be here.
So I consider the "solely" to be more than just "a bit" of a stretch. There's blame enough to go around, but a massive chunk of the blame rests on the White House.
It's complicated when all election options are beholden to Zionist interests. I think many Americans are in denial about how dire the situation is. If you voted for Trump, you are responsible for what he is doing because it was clear he was compromised but! if you voted Biden you would also be responsible because it was clear he was compromised.
This isn't conjecture, both of these presidents have been openly operating for Israel. Biden even went on live tv and lied about seeing 40 beheaded babies.
You basically have Tomas Massie and Rashida Tlaib as the only mainstream politicians that are actually standing up to the Zionist takeover of our government. It's hard to say what the way out of this mess looks like, but voting for a Zionist in Zionist controlled elections is not it.
So is Jim Jordan, the ultra-MAGA ideologue from Ohio. (He may not even be the most extreme, he's just the one that first came to mind.) If being a representative automatically makes you mainstream, they both are. And at that point, "mainstream" is more like "main river" or "main ocean" - it's so broad that it's meaningless.
Tlaib is one of the four most-extreme-left members of the House. I claim that that makes her not mainstream, for any reasonable definition. She sure is not in the mainstream of the House!
She's mainstream, just because you don't agree with her doesn't mean she's not. Trump is also mainstream, I don't agree with him but he is. We're not talking about podcasters or people xeroxing newsletters, these are elected officials.
...are also widely considered bad actors. Yet, it isn't "islamophobia" when you criticize Iran or "anti-Orthodox" when you call Russia to account.
Curiously, however, when you similarly criticize the actions of this specific Israeli government and its leaders, you are slandered with the term "antisemite" and there are orgs that exist to doxx you and get you fired from your job.
Their military is very good at cyber-warfare. The gap has narrowed in the last decade, but before that there wasn't even a distant second, maybe Russia. People serve in those units, acquire very useful and specific skills, then start companies that offer commercial variants of cyber-warfare, or become subcontractors for other governments.
They're even better at sextortion. Jeffrey Epstein is the posterchild for their efforts, along with his Mossad agent father-in-law Robert Maxwell, and handler Ehud Barak. It's likely that many of Israel's "triumphs" over the last few decades were less a result of hacking and more a result of blackmail, similar to the FSB/KGB.
Mandatory military service, too. You have to imagine that the US would have a similarly disproportionately-scaled cyber-warfare industry if it also had mandatory military service and good sorting of capable people into those units.
Palestinians aside, what reasons do neighboring countries have to hate Israel from it's very first moment?
A lot of the immediate neighbors attacked Israel at its birth, and further away countries just seem to hate Israel due to religion/ethnicity/populism (?), countries like Pakistan, Malaysia, etc.
The whole idea of Greater Israel would make anyone in the region queasy. The logic is pretty hard to dispute when Israelis claim the lang is God given. The "God given" land actually extends much farther beyond Israel's boundaries so I'd say people of those countries are rightful feel as they do.
Like immagine if the rhetoric of Turkey was constantly talking about expanding to Greece and how the land of Greece is historically the Turks. Obviously that would make any Greek uneasy.
Seeing how things have played out this year, maybe this will end up being their undoing. Israel has made it clear that the next domino to fall after Iran is Turkey. I don't even know how that would work. Isn't Turkey a NATO ally? At some point, this has got to stop. After everything that's come out this year, I wonder if an alternative world where a lot of these Middle Eastern countries developing into stable democracies could have occurred had Israel been contained or never been created.
The idea of “greater Israel” is a bogeyman that lives in the heads of people that hates Israel in several factors of greater numbers than there are people in Israel who believe that.
You can literally count with both hands the amount of people in Israel that advocate for “greater Israel”
Well, Syria and Lebanon both hold some pretty serious resentment over the recent landgrabs. With the whole "acquiring buffer zone for the buffer zone" business in former and the population expulsions in the latter.
I answered your question, no need to move the goalposts. Countries usually don't like having their land occupied. As far as I know the Turkish occupation zone in Syria has been dissolved.
That's not really an accurate characterization of the situation as much of the land was uninhabited/unregistered and/or state owned. The Negev desert for example is a large percentage of the total land area and was effectively uninhabited and not privately owned. Land ownership records at the time were also not particularly clear and often there were disputed claims. Also Israel has about 20% Arab/Palestinian citizens so it's not like they ethnically cleansed everyone like Egypt/Jordan did with the Jews in Gaza and the West Bank when Israel gained independence.
Because Israel invaded a land that had been settled by Arab Muslims for centuries, claimed a portion for itself exclusively, proceeded to ethnically cleanse an even bigger portion, all with the support of their extremely powerful western backers. Asking "why did the others hate them" is like asking "why would Europeans hate the Chinese if they had invaded, settled and ethnically cleansed half of France (with the promise of taking even more later)"?
Ethnically cleansing Palestine is reason enough to hate Israel. As an American I’ll add that I hate their influence on my country via bribes and blackmail, and how they strip my rights (anti-BDS laws…) and steal my tax dollars. Spying on everyone via things like the OP don’t help either.
You don't even need to go that far. These anti-BDS laws are clearly against the constitution and get struck down without issue. The real problem is that it's much easier to create these BS laws and put them on the books than it is to repeal them, because repealing them requires court challenges, lawsuits, and then these supporters go and make alterations to the law to meet the criteria of the challenges and ram them through again. Then we go through this whole cycle all over again. To solve this problem, you really need to go after the public officials that are being pushed to pass this garbage by consistently holding their feet to the fire and not tolerating this with punishments of losing their elections. The country is shifting towards that, but there's so much BS going on elsewhere that this takes a back burner in people's minds.
"Whataboutism" or "whataboutery" (as in, "but what about X?") refers to the propaganda strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of offering an explanation or defense against the original accusation. It is an informal fallacy that the accused party uses to avoid accountability [...]
> My friend recommended a documentary to me recently about Hitler. It was about Hitler's atrocities. But my friend, god love her, she couldn't think of the word atrocities. She tried to cover for a second; she went "ahhh—" while she searched for a synonym, but it didn't come out right.
She said, "Gary, I saw this very interesting documentary about Hitler's shenanigans." [audience laughter] Shenanigans! [he chuckles] Not even close!
And, as a Jew, I'm obviously not oversensitive, but when people trivialize Hitler's monkey-business... [audience laughter] When the Nazis' hijinks, tomfoolery, and ballyhoo is understated, I feel it does a disservice to the millions who were, ahhh, inconvenienced by Hitler's mischief! [audience laughter]
Two things can be true at the same time. There’s no denying that there’s an extreme amount of antisemitism in eg Pakistan that would still be there if Israel would behave properly.
> Israel refuses to even define its borders. And current behaviour demonstrates why.
States like Israel formally define their borders via mechanisms like peace deals that include bilateral recognition of agreed upon borders, like Israel has with Egypt and Jordan.
You can't realistically define borders properly otherwise, trying to define borders via unilateral declaration doesn't really work when there are 2 states next to each other, the borders ultimately need to be negotiated bilaterally between those states with both sides recognizing the same borders.
It isn't really unique to Israel, though. There's conflict practically everywhere where major cultures/religions have drawn up borders, or within the backwash of fading empires (Britain, Ottomans, Soviets, French...).
None of those have as much impact on Americans day to day life as Israel does.
Lets zoom out: The whole world is about to enter a massive economic calamity, all because Americans got tricked into to electing the current knucklehead in the White House who took a ~$300 million bribe from an Israeli supporter to start this war.
None of those other conflicts will affect the entire world as what Israel has done.
> all because Americans got tricked into to electing the current knucklehead in the White House who took a ~$300 million bribe from an Israeli supporter to start this war.
From what you've said. It sounds like America is to blame here, tbh. $300mil is chump change in international bribery/development. If your establishment sells itself so cheaply, that's on America.
Besides, what's happening in Iran is minuscule compared to what happened during the 'War on Terror'. Play imperial games, win imperial prizes.
Agreed, the system needs reform so a country the size of Slovenia can't dictate US actions so easily. Reform is hopefully coming but too slowly.
>Besides, what's happening in Iran is minuscule compared to what happened during the 'War on Terror'. Play imperial games, win imperial prizes.
Disagree, Those wars were confined to an adversary that was already a few rungs down on the ladder and couldn't crash the world economy. Iran is larger than Iraq + Afghanistan combined, has very large mountainous terrain which has a lot of easy hiding spots for drones/launchers, has the fourth largest collection of trained staff in the field of nuclear science (more than France) and even became space launch capable in 2009.
Thats is like night and day difference between Iraq/Afghanistan.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think you're discounting the geopolitical impact the War(s) on Terror had.
America needed to push cheap credit to boost confidence after 9/11, oil prices skyrocketed and haven't really come back down, hugely expensive wars were funded on debt. It's arguable that these all directly contributed to the GFC in substantial ways.
Global confidence in American leadership plummetted since these wars, and opened the door for China and 'multi-polarity' to enter the stage which has caused a new wave of proxy wars as powers are trying to get a piece of the new round of global empires. We have Russia making moves (apparently also kickstarted by Gadaffi's death), UAE and Turkey playing games in the Sahel, dicerolled team selections in Libya, China testing the waters in Myanmar and Laos, fuckeries in Venezuela and Cuba, Syria, Azerbaijan....
If anything, Israel have been baited into their current actions just like America were as new and old powers try and undo 'centuries of shame', etc.
Americans didn't get tricked into electing Trump. Don't let Americans off the hook like they're naive schoolchildren. Americans knew what Trump represented, they were warned vociferously and repeatedly about him, his entire life and his public opinions have been well documented, and he isn't exactly subtle or capable of duplicity.
Jan. 6th wasn't enough to disqualify him from a second term. The Epstein files weren't enough to get him removed from power. ICE wasn't enough to get him removed from power. Blatant disregard for the courts, threatening allies, arbitrary and insane tariff policies weren't enough to get him removed from power. No President in the history of the United States has been as secure in his position as Donald Trump is. The Supreme Court even went out of its way to make him immune from prosecution for any crime he might possibly commit while in office.
Israel may have (probably did) talk Trump into the war but Americans are the reason Trump was in that position to begin with, and he is there because Americans want him there.
Russia didn't create Trump. They're not solely responsible for Trump.
The same can be said of Brexit, Victor Orban, AfD, etc. All of these bad things were, nevertheless, boosted by Russian ops with the same general strategic goal in mind.
>Americans didn't get tricked into electing Trump. Don't let Americans off the hook like they're naive schoolchildren.
The fact that they are still trying last minute fuel price manipulation in the hopes of converting some people into Trumps good graces proves that you are wrong. The country is very large. In 300+ million people you will find a large distribution of people in terms of skills and ability to discern fact from fiction. The bottom 10% of the distribution is still ~30 million people. Some % of these people vote. Lets not even consider the bottom 50% percentile.
>Jan. 6th wasn't enough to disqualify him from a second term. The Epstein files weren't enough to get him removed from power. ICE wasn't enough to get him removed from power. Blatant disregard for the courts, threatening allies, arbitrary and insane tariff policies weren't enough to get him removed from power.
You are conflating two different things. This is a failure of the system. This takes time to reform. There are attempts going back years. When you have so many layers of people who benefit from the existing status quo the only way you speed up the fix this without decades of sludging through roadblocks is if a national calamity happens that finally forces change(economic or other challenge). Otherwise too many people are insulated from the downsides of the system until they aren't anymore and then something changes.
>but Americans are the reason Trump was in that position to begin with, and he is there because Americans want him there.
Objectively this is a stated fact (unless you believe the election was rigged). But it glosses over so much nuance and context.
My point is that being at war with your neighbor(s) is not a unique situation, but only Israel has acquired such an extreme abuse-through-tech slant because of it. Why?
My guess (not any more informed than anyone else's) is that it's because they absolutely need US support, and intelligence is one of the few things they could offer them so they invested _a lot_ into it
Because they are the best at spying in the world by far, and are willing to splash the cash. They're what Silicon Valley would have been if it kept doing government contracts instead of just selling ads.
If Mossad is willing to give you a hundred million to make your startup a spyware company, you're obviously going to agree.
I in fact tried to word this as neutrally as possible, but people are already seeing ghosts just because it has a hint of negativity towards the country, which should be expected because most people agree that these technologies are not actually good for the world.
> The same reason why many great tech companies originate from Israel. That's why Nvidia is the largest private employer in Israel. Why Apple's CTO is from Israel.
You never said what the reason for that is. Their society doesn't seem more tech-oriented than comparable countries. Their universities are OK, but not the best in the world. So what in their society caused this?
Careful. The trolls are out. Half of them are trying to prove Israel is a nation full of demonstrably evil people, and half of them will tar you with antisemitism if you don't love Bibi and all his works.
This bullshit polarization of ideology ruins civil discourse. It's possible to condemn Hamas' slaughter of innocents, and condemn Israel's slaughter of innocents. And to still realize there are innocent Palestinians and Israelis who are not working to make things worse.
Culturally, Israel has a strong emphasis on entrepreneurship, coupled with general lack of tolerance for bureaucracy, makes for pretty agile organizations.
In the military side, it creates a country sized funnel that picks the best people and places them together trying to solve problems that would seem impossible. When these people are discharged, they are friends that knows how to work best together. Think of it like a larger and more focused version of an Ivy League school
If that's your first instinct, then by your standards no country can be criticized for much of anything. After all, pointing out the negative outcomes of a purposefully designed system is the exact same as prejudice based on immutable birth characteristics.
No country's people should be blanket stereotyped. That's my first instinct. 'why are people from xyz nation more likely to be associated with(negative thing)....'. nah, fuck that kind of talk.
Where did you see me saying that? I didn't even mention any people or generalize that all of them are this or that. Saying that cyberwarfare companies are more likely to be in Israel, which is what I did, seems like the most objective way of framing my observation. Other replies already gave some good reasons for why that may be, and all of them have to do with the systems built within the country, not some inherent property of their people. They could change these systems if they wanted to, it's not inherent to them.
I went out of my way to write the comment in as neutral of a tone as possible. I didn't even state my opinion on Israel or anything it's involved in to avoid starting a flamewar in what would otherwise be a standard question about adversarial technology and cyberwarfare. The only expressed opinion was about the companies themselves, which I think it more than warranted. Yet, as I said in a sibling comment, people are seeing ghosts anyway and disregard the perfectly normal question because they think I'm not really curious about it and am asking it for nefarious reasons.
again 'I'm not racist, I'm just connecting the dots around crime statistics in an impartial way'. This thread was filled with all kinds of nefarious stuff around the same topic at the time I posted, and of course was disclaimered as 'totally not anti-semitic' even though time and again jewish people have said the discussion around IP often veers into 'the stereotype is deserved' and 'if American jews don't like it they need to distance themselves from Israel more' (a race now has to take affirmative action to show they 'are the good ones'?) and that that does in fact feel anti-semitic to them. But then the 'anti-zionsim' card gets played (with zero explaination of what anti-zionism means exactly, does it mean a nation of 8 million jews, the majority left on the planet, just gets wiped out and jews what? Go where? ) and it can't be anti-semetic to say 'the steretype is justified' and 'you need to prove you are one of the good ones by stating publicaly your opinion on something half way around the world'.
here's a nice response for you 'it's the shiftiness of jews'. There's your totally not racist as fuck/antisemitic dot connecting.
I kinda wish these threads wouldn't get 'cleaned up' so we can see the actual totally 'not antisemitic' HN discourse plain as day. I'm sure the above comment will get removed/cleaned up and you can go back to 'connecting the dots around crime statistics isn't a core part of racist cannon'.
>Right, this discussion totally isn't being used as a bash Israel/isrealis as inherently bad with lots of blanket statements.
I see lots of (maybe un-carefully-worded, maybe?) bashing of the actions of the current Israeli government, and its defense forces and intel apparatus.
That's 100% fair game, anywhere on the planet.
What's I don't see is the rank antisemitism you claim, except for a few outlier recently-created accounts.
The most despicable thing I see at scale in the conversations is the attempt to silence critics of Israel with slanderous accusations of antisemitism. It used to work, as a tactic, but it (like the "racism card") has been vastly overplayed and is rapidly losing its value.
"it's the shiftiness of jews'. Racism doesn't exist anymore, and calling these discussion anti-semitic is me just shielding isreal as a tactic. Fuck off.
> "it's the shiftiness of jews'. Racism doesn't exist anymore, and calling these discussion anti-semitic is me just shielding isreal as a tactic. Fuck off.
Can't find the quoted phrase in the referred comment: did you just make it up or did he edit it out? Other than that, he made some observations about Judaism. Off-topic perhaps but nowhere near racist. Fuck off.
If you think that one person's comment is the distillation of the whole thread, then you're not paying attention to the rest of the thread (or very knowledgeable about statistics). I clearly acknowledged the existence of antisemitism in these discussions, but also that it is an outlier. Good job, you found the outlier! Hooray!
>Racism doesn't exist anymore
Who said that?
>calling these discussion anti-semitic is me just shielding isreal as a tactic.
Yes, when the discussion is about the current government of Israel, the IDF, its intel apparatus, and their actions.
Ah I shouldn't call out what I think is racism because 'it doesn't have impact' anymore. Nah. You think labeling nations /communities and by extension their peoples is fine. I don't. It's simple as that.
I didn't attempt to silence anyone. I simply called out what I see. Silencing is what HN does when they moderate the Ukraine Russian discussions different than their newer standard for Israel Palestine.
I'd rather have nations be held accountable for being bad global participants than hiding behind cries of -isms. Israelis can always elect a better government if they don't like the stereotypes the current one earns them.
You might also look into the tale of the boy who cried wolf. The more you keep shoutin "antisemtism" in an attempt to shut down criticism the more people will learn to just ignore that word or ascribe to it a meaning far different from the one you want.
Oh well, each individual must be judged on their actions and merits, but this doesn't prevent us from observing how groups behave on average. Nobody ever shouted racism when it's said that French are chauvinistic or that Germans follow rules strictly- it won't and shouldn't tell you anything about single individuals but you know there's a grain of truth in the generalisation.
Opposed to noticing what else? Vibes? Sound a lot more racist than factual and provable realities based on real data.
Finding an understanding patterns and acting according to them is the most logical and natural thing a human or any life form can do. You would call someone speciest for not hugging a bear just to feel ideologically pure.
