Let’s just say I’m even more of a fan of EU digital infrastructure moving to strictly EU countries, no outside traffic allowed.
Northern and Western European states tend to use American products, but the difference between "American", "Israeli", "Czech", and "Indian" blurs because of how much overlap the industry has transnationally.
Italy, Czechia, Poland, and Netherlands all have significant domestic capacity in the space as well, but a large portion of it is via American and Israeli tech.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-spyware-probe-slams-gover...
[1] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-national-secur...
The Italian Carabinieri bought Paragon even though they can't legally use it, because mass surveillance is obviously illegal and against our constitution.
And yet, nothing's being done.
The fact that the US can continue to economically do so well relative to others despite currently being run by some of the stupidest and most abhorrent people possible is... sad.
It's not sad, it's strong evidence (I hesitate to call it proof, but...) that a federated model of governance with limited regulation is the most resilient and successful form of government.
All the EU states need to do is learn that regulation is not the solution to every theoretical problem any bureaucrat can imagine, and they too can experience meaningful economic growth.
On the intelligence front, Mossad does a wonderful job performing extra-judicial killings using the dirtiest tricks you could think of. They’re also very good partners: almost every counter-intelligence outfit sings their praises.
Step 1: Get 6 million of you systematically eradicated in Europe and hundreds of thousands more booted from their homes in the Middle East for "reasons".
Step 2: Build yourself a country so no one can throw you out again.
Step 3: Get attacked by the countries who threw you out for "reasons".
Step 4: Get accused of "aggression".
People's continued downplay and revisionism of Jewish and Israeli history is truly something to behold.
I think actually they are in a bit of panic mode because the US might want to get out from the ME and focus on China. They want a guarantee that Iran won't be able to come on its foot again in at least 10 years. That's all my guess, though.
Start here, and then work your way both forwards and backwards if you have any interest in learning.
Certainly the common practice of looting civilian homes and posting about it on social media implies something about their infantry.
And they were punished for it rather than celebrated and their families paid a wage for life...
How's that different from the US? half of the big players started as three letters agency side projects
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-ehud-barak-le...
Then they go about solving problems. Some of those problems are people dont have a good trustworthy pornsite. Some of them are their buddies that stayed in the military have a military related or adjacent problem.
Darknet diaries did a great podcast on unit 8200.
It's just friends buying from friends.
Israel paid 2.3 Billion for their F-35, but the US committed to buy 4 Billion from Israel defense firms, so concluding with a net positive of +1.25 Billion for Israel economy....all at the cost to the US tax payer. :-)
"F-35I Adir: Israel’s Custom F-35 That No Other Nation Has" - https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/04/f-35i-adir-israels-custo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
Sounds like a decent deal to me.
Source that a large proportion of founders/employees are actually American/British? The more believable claim is that such Israeli startups are US/UK backed, but that's not as damning as it sounds, because US/UK is the finance hub, so thats where you expect funding to come from, rather than "colonialism foreign base" or whatever.
Which makes the failure of October 7th even more striking. It's insane Israeli leadership hasn't paid for this.
you would be wise to reconsider what it actually was
They also establish the so called “R&D” offices in Israel which is code-word for free software export.
Then the same country that has access to the source code of the major American tech firms, combobulates the “best” in class spyware doesn’t come as a surprise.
We keep crying wolf to Chinese tech spies when the real wolf are these. That’s a tiny nation living off of 300MM large nation and its allies make that another 400MM.
So the Palestinians and Arabs thought a hundred years ago. It served them badly.
It’s not that US/UK and others don’t get anything out of the relationship, as you note. But the arrows have been mostly pointing the other way for a long time. Trump and his background, as well as Epstein/Mandelson/McSweeney/Labour are just the latest, blatant examples of how this works.
Not to claim that Israel is the land of saintly virtues - but if your news sources are inclined toward tech or polarized left/right politic, they make sure that's what you see. Wouldn't matter if 99.9% of actual Israeli startups were working to build better home bagel-makers, or gene-engineering perfect breeds of salmon for lox.
To be clear, do you deny that there are multiple terrorist groups targeting civilians in Israel such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, and multiple individuals who attacked civilians indiscriminately with bombs, knives and guns?
Do you deny that Israel uses its intelligence services to detect and stop these terrorist attacks?
It makes sense in a way, most Israelis probably acquire a fair bit of skills and contacts as part of being in the military there. And because the military 'needs' to surveil millions of people it rules over without any mandate whatsoever, what better way to get a contract than to enhance the surveillance capabilities of the army once you get back into civilian life?
It has been trained on decades of Palestinians crossing check points, some being Hamas camouflaging with beards, glasses and what not.
Also the data it's fed for third party customers is as flawless as it can be: if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world.
If you're walking in a random mall on the other end of the world, even if you have no phone, you have covered your tracks and you're wearing a hat and glasses, etc, you are going to be recognized by the software if a camera gets even a mediocre shot at you.
Compound this with all the information people put online on their own on socials, you're gonna be tracked and recognized, whether you want it or no.
What does "virtually error free" mean? There's no "error free" in facial recognition, or any other application of machine learning.
More to the point, who says all this, besides yourself in this thread? Why should anyone believe that "virtually error free" is a factual description of real technological capabilities rather than state propaganda?
By the way, UK, South Wales especially claims an 89%+ success rate and 1 in 6'000 false positives, you can read it on UK's official website.
The company between Oosto claims 99%.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...
Claim that China will pay tariffs to the US or claim of full unsupervised autonomy driving by the end of 2016.
Now apply that to something that can drastically alter someone's life
* The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) tested the algorithm South Wales Police and the Metropolitan Police Service have been using for LFR.
* At the settings police use, the NPL found that for LFR there were no statistically significant differences in performance based on age, gender or ethnicity.
* There was an 89% chance of identifying someone on the specific watchlist of people wanted by the police, and at worst a 1 in 6,000 chance of incorrectly identifying someone on a watchlist with 10,000 images (known as a false alert). In practice, the false alert rate has been far better than this.
It looks like this is the report by the NPL:
science.police.uk/site/assets/files/3396/frt-equitability-study_mar2023.pdf
It's a big report and it'd take some time to go through it but it's clear that laboratory testing of a system deployed in the wild is not going to give accurate results, meaning the "89%" claimed is going to be significantly worse in reality. Anyway there's obvious limitations to the testing e.g. (from the report):
Large demographically balanced datasets: The testing of low error rates in a statistically significant manner requires large datasets. To achieve the required scale, the evaluation uses a supplementary reference image dataset of 178,000 face images (Filler dataset). This is an order of magnitude larger than the typical watchlist size of an operational Live Facial Recognition deployment. To avoid introducing a demographic bias due to reference dataset composition, a demographically balanced reference dataset was used, with equal numbers in each demographic category. For assessment of equitability under operational settings, the results from the large dataset are appropriately scaled to the size and composition of watchlist or reference image database of the operational deployment.
I'd say "uh-oh" to that. Unbalanced classes is a perenial source of error in evaluations. "Equal numbers in each demographic category" is an obvious source of unrealistic bias.
Anyway, I don't have the time to go through that with a fine toothed comb, but just the fact that they report a 100 False Positive Rate for "operator initiated facial recognition" is another big, hot, red flag.
Also, from the UK gov link above:
* The 10 LFR vans rolled out in August 2025 are using the same algorithm that was tested by the NPL.
There's a bit of ambiguity there. The police are using "the same algorithm" tested by the NPL, but are they using the same settings? The report uses specific settings to come up with its conclusions (e.g. a "face match" setting of 0.6 for LFR), but there's nothing to say the police stick to the same. Lots of room for manoeuvering left there, I'd say.
>> The company between Oosto claims 99%.
We can easily dismiss this just by looking at the two digits preceding the "%".
edit : i think their tech is overhyped. Remember the signal-chats debacle last year where the National Security Advisor was photographed using a modified client of Signal by Israeli company TeleMessage. And immediately after, TeleMessage was hacked, and it was revealed that all the chats were transmitted and stored in plain-text. They still managed to get their backup-spyware installed at the highest levels of the US government and military. It looks like they have great sales teams.
Also I mean you and I can recognize people we know. A surveillance camera has millions of sensors sampling every ~50 ms. It’s plausible.
Approximately what year did this start?
Pretty extreme bar your setting. I would think most people would agree it could still have extremely (and surprisingly) potent accuracy and still fail in this case. I wouldn't expect facial recognition to work in a case when there is little to no face to work with... if that guy came dressed like that to any airport or mall he would've been detained immediately.
It's why you no longer need to speak with a person when reentering your home country in a lot of different places (israel being one of them, but also the EU, trusted travelers in the US through global entry, ect).
idk about their accuracy but "error free"?
Also do you understand the amount of compute and network bandwidth necessary to index and track billions of people by processing exabytes of streaming footage constantly with heavy computer vision models. who's integrating all these different camera systems to start with?
These claims sound like they come from someone who hasn't done these things in real life.
Tangentially, it seems like Israel tech scene has so many players involved in spyware/malware and surveillance.
Similarly this would make things like evading law enforcement pretty much impossible, while in reality there are countless people, at least thousands, who have been photographed in relation to e.g. a crime, but never found, and never identified.
So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? Knowing about Mossad operations? With Bibi on the record saying
> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank
With most of the world's spyware, including Pegasus and NSO group, having hailed from Israel?
It's not "going down a very dark rabbit hole", it's the by far most likely option and therefore your whole comment makes no sense, presuming the much less likely option.
If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god..
That is a naive statement given that 75% of the world's population identifies with an established religion, and each of those have evidence free beliefs such as virgin birth, reincarnation, the existence of hell, etc.
That may be a little exaggerated [1].
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ap-review-on-what-the-ep...
This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated. I know its too convenient and useful for government/big companies so it'll never happen...but it should
The other thing is that people willingly buy phones full of spyware. E.g. quite many Samsung models have the Israeli AppCloud installed (supposedly to recommend applications):
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/budget-samsun...
Even though AppCloud itself may be for recommendations it apparently mines a lot of data and each such background application, it is another potential attack vector, and I suppose that the Isreali government can compel the company to use their software for different purposes (not sure).
In contrast to what some news articles state, some Samsung models sold in Europe also have it and nobody seems to really care about it (nor the persistent Meta services, etc.).
The other parts layered defense, reducing the number of privileged/non-sandboxed applications/processes, not shipping spyware/adware, etc.
Only Apple/GrapheneOS and to a slightly lesser extend Google Pixel are good at this. Many phone manufacturers still use the TrustZone TEE on the main CPU (rather than a separate security processor), isolated radios, hardware memory tagging, and dozens of other defense-in-depth features.
If you mean the hardware supply chain, has that ever actually happened? I've only ever seen it mentioned as a theoretical possibility so far.
There's always a comment for "regulation" by an ignorant HN normie under anything related to surveillance. I feel like it's mostly bots at this point.
Woah there cowboy, sure you want such a broad and strong claim? Maybe you've eaten too much asbestos, breathed too much lead-gasoline fumes or otherwise inhaled something strange, because I'm sure there are countless of examples of regulation working just fine. Not to say it isn't without problems, but come on, "never"?
My take is that this is probably a test account.
Like, I have Threema installed, even though none of my contacts use it. But if one does happen to use it in the future, I'm reachable if necessary.
I'm fine with not criticizing China or Chi, as long as EU and US governments don't have access to my messages.
In China, it can be illegal to even talk about changing the status quo.
When I see people on the internet saying things like: "Yeah screw the US, we just made a deal with China!" I wonder how oblivious they are to the domestic conditions in China.
But I think this is more about China wasting resources on trivial things while the US wisely focuses on more important things /s.
Did your sarcasm include that sentence?
If not, I suggest you stop doom scrolling. You don't really believe this? That would be wild.
Spy agencies and spyware companies don't have some magickal tech nobody else knows anything about. They take advantage of peoples' careless style of interacting online.
those companies have very little technical know how. they are just money movers. they buy zero days and package them in a (likely insecure) dashboard.
now with PE and growth demand, they have to advertise something that is hard to advertise. hence these "slip ups" and articles.
But yeah I don't think its anything too surprising about buying exploits and packaging them.
I think the article is more of a commentary on how these companies can exist in the open, where as a teenage hacker goes to jail for stuff like this.
If paranoid, use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763674
"Cohen (former head of Mossad) insisted that the publicly recognized success against Hezbollah was merely one element of a far wider, systematic deployment of sophisticated devices worldwide, although notably abscent in the Gaza Strip."
And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)
Also, lets be clear and admit that if your notion of "target" is "anyone close to a device I sold years ago", you're not the type of person that cares if the balled up paper made it to the trash can: so long as it left your hand you would be satisfied.
Except we don't know. "virtually every potential theater" is intentionally very vague language that could mean anything.
So you may be safe today, what happens when they don't like your opinion ?
While true in general, super apps that do too many things and used by billions (WhatsApp, Chrome, TikTok, Instagram, CleanMaster etc) are big enough of an attack surface already.
Defenses (compile-time / runtime memory safety & control flow integrity, media coders/decoders, sandboxes, for example) are getting better & so exploits are getting expensive.
> use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it
While using different devices is good enough, it requires the end user to maintain strict isolation (and sometimes may require appropriate features from the OS). Using burners is an extreme version of this practice.
One of these are not like the others...
You can't trust software not to be buggy and both, hardware, and software not to be purposely compromised because "think of the children" (that the EFs proved to be BS).
I only know pegasus broke iOS.
I find it interesting that Apple has spun Lockdown mode from a 'we are terrible at security' into a feature for marketing.
Now when someone gets hacked Apple can say: "Well they weren't in lockdown mode, its their own fault."
Gosh I wish I was as good at marketing as Apple. They really need to sell their marketing team as a service. If they did that, I'd buy their stock outright.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-ju...
iOS generally seems harder than non-GrapheneOS Android, taking a few months for Cellebrite to catch up with. All the other Android phones/variants should make people cry because device security is so bad.
Interestingly enough, turns out Ehud Barak was close to Epstein as well, frequently mentioned in the "newly" released files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehud_Barak#Relationship_with_J...
Why hasnt this been used for stealing Crypto?
Is there evidence Android OS has been compromised? (I know Samsung phones had an issue)
Is there any evidence a Fedora, Debian-family, or linux has been compromised?
Because the information obtained is much more valuable than imaginary tokens.
> Is there evidence Android OS has been compromised? (I know Samsung phones had an issue)
I assume every OS can be compromised by a determined adversary.
> Is there any evidence a Fedora, Debian-family, or linux has been compromised?
I'm not sure what evidence you would need, but see above.
But also, imaginary tokens are really really valuable. I'm sure there are normal-ish people with ~100-1000 bitcoin, let alone a few of the outspoken people who are bitcoin billionaires.
At the same time Israel has world renowned success of thwarting terrorist plots, and best in class intelligence shared with other countries (like the many, many, terrorist attacks stopped in European capitals thanks to Israeli intelligence).
You can choose either surveillance, or terrorism.
When you end apartheid, you end 'terrorism' (legal and ethical resistance against having your life, land, and water stolen). History shows this to be possible, preferable, and moral.
Your theory has really not been borne out by reality.
Somehow Hamas committed October 7th and has fired tens of thousands of rockets indiscriminately into Israel since Gaza was given in its entirety to the arabs.
Somehow Iran has been financing and arming multiple terrorist groups even though it obviously is its own country far away from Israel.
Somehow Hezbollah has fired tens of thousands of rockets at civilians as well.
Somehow the Houthis have been committing terrorism sa well and their flag is literally "God is great, Death to America, Death to Israel".
Yeah, I'm sure if Israel just stopped all the security measures on the West Bank, all terrorism would stop!
If you could execute every Yemeni, Iranian, Lebanese and Syrian tomorrow, gifting you a 'clean', and 'pure' world for Greater Israel to flourish for 1000 years, would you do it?
If your answer is yes. Then anything I say about the right of the invaded and occupied to resist occupation under international law will land on deaf ears.
Terrorism is "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." - are you saying exploding bombs, knife attacks, and firing rockets indiscriminately against civilians is not terrorism?
Now take a long look in the mirror.
So a two state solution makes much more sense.
"History has also shown that whenever Mizrahi Jews are a minority relative to Ashkenazi Jews something bad tends to a happen to them"
What now mupuff? Is it because they tainted by their Arab blood?
I could do this all day with random minorities, but it's not a refutation of my argument.
'Single supreme race' states are evil. The Antebellum South was one of the most evil places ever to exist and functioned on the exact same terms. There was a civil war, and we settled on a one state solution. The only mistake was not fully purging the slavers from positions of power and stopping reconstruction.
Racial/Ethnic/Religious caste systems are a race to the bottom. They are a suicidal purity cult.
I should note that you are factually wrong. Jews have very rarely been an ethnic majority, yet many cultures have managed to not genocide them throughout history. This includes middle eastern countries prior to the Nakba. Don't project out the utterly imperial eurocentric 'pograms are inevitiable' and 'arabs are all that same, and are savages' viewpoint out onto every civilizations.
European empires created or exacerbated divisions in peaceful populations as a means of colonial control. This is well documented and intentional. Zionism as a project is very very British, they wrote their plans down! Same as they did in South Africa. Same as they did in Ireland.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/140/604-605/777/8140798
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/histor...
