Tag: israel

Leaked Texts From Israeli Consulate Employee Show More Details In Gaetz-Levinson Funding Scheme

Three screenshots of texts between Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, and Jake Novak, media director of the Israeli consulate in New York City were shared with TAC. The messages were authenticated by one of the parties to them.

In the first screenshot, Novak messaged Adams last Saturday to tell him about the investigation into Gaetz. The New York Times story on the Gaetz investigation was not published until Tuesday.

In the second, Novak appears to represent himself as deeply involved in the efforts to free Bob Levinson from Iran, telling Adams “this is screwing up my efforts to free Bob Levinson.”

“Gaetz’s dad was secretly finding [sic] us,” he continues. “So I’m very much wanting this to be untrue. I’ve got a commando team leader friend of mine nervously waiting for the wire transfers to clear.”

In the third screenshot, Novak casts doubt on Gaetz’s claims that he is being extorted. “The real documents do not extort,” he writes, “And we only asked for $25 million as an estimate at first. We came way down.”

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BIDEN SPOKESPERSON JEN PSAKI WORKED FOR ISRAELI SPY FIRM

President Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki worked for an Israeli firm accused of involvement in surveillance of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation.

Psaki’s public financial disclosures show that she earned at least $5,000 as a “crisis communications consultant” for AnyVision.

The disclosure forms for executive branch officials can be requested from the White House. Psaki’s disclosure obtained by The Electronic Intifada is included below this article.

The exact date of the work is not specified, but it occurred between the time Psaki left the Obama administration in 2017 and her new role in the Biden White House.

Psaki has operated a communications firm called Evergreen Consulting since a month after President Barack Obama left office.

This covers the period when AnyVision faced a public relations crisis over its alleged complicity in Israel’s abuses of Palestinian rights.

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Israel adopts law allowing names of unvaccinated to be shared

Israel’s parliament passed a law Wednesday allowing the government to share the identities of people not vaccinated against the coronavirus with other authorities, raising privacy concerns for those opting out of inoculation.

The measure, which passed with 30 votes for and 13 against, gives local governments, the director general of the education ministry and some in the welfare ministry the right to receive the names, addresses and phone numbers of unvaccinated citizens.

The objective of the measure — valid for three months or until the Covid-19 pandemic is declared over — is “to enable these bodies to encourage people to vaccinate by personally addressing them”, a parliament statement said.

Israel, a country of nine million people, has administered the two recommended jabs of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus to roughly a third of its population.

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Saturday Night Live Controversy Hides Greater Issues Around Israeli Apartheid

Saturday Night Live (SNL) has come in for a storm of criticism after airing a joke critical of Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout policy. The show’s anchor Michael Che quipped that “Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population. And I’m going to guess it is the Jewish half.” Despite addressing the topic for fewer than seven seconds before moving on, Che’s words sparked a chorus of denunciations from conservative Jewish groups and supporters of the Middle Eastern nation.

“We find the use of age-old anti-Semitic tropes on last night’s episode of Saturday Night Live to be deeply troubling,” wrote the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who accused the show of “propagating Jew hatred under the guise of comedy.” The American Jewish Committee claimed that Che’s words were “a modern twist on a classic antisemitic trope that has inspired the mass murder of Jews.” Meanwhile New York radio host and pro-Israel activist Dov Hikind claimed that SNL has a “long record of anti-Semitism” and that Israel was vaccinating its Arab citizens at the same rate as its Jewish ones.

Even progressive figures expressed their unease with the joke. “I watched that and cringed. Enough that the Israeli govt does is worthy of legitimate criticism; lying about what they do is just as bad,” reacted Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.

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Leftist Guardian Writer Who Said ‘There Is No Cancel Culture’ Gets Canceled For Criticizing Israel

Robinson wrote about his canceling in an article titled, “How the Media Cracks Down on Critics of Israel“:
Personally, I had never thought about the question of whether I could suffer consequences for criticizing the government of Israel (and U.S. support for it). I have just about as much “free speech” as you can get in this world. Perhaps I should have thought about it more, though, because as soon as I crossed an invisible line, it was very quickly made clear to me. The moment I irritated defenders of Israel on social media, I was summarily fired from my job as a newspaper columnist.

I have been writing for the Guardian US since 2017, first as a contributor and then as a full columnist. I write almost exclusively about U.S. politics. I have never written about Israel. My editor has always been satisfied with my work, which is why I kept getting commissioned. I am good at putting out sharp, well-sourced, political commentary quickly, and needed little editing. (I only had a column spiked for content reasons once, as far as I can remember, which occurred when I criticized Joe Biden over Hunter Biden’s corrupt business ties.)

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Cellebrite: Israel’s Good Cyber Cop is Big Tech’s Backdoor to Breaching Your Privacy

Privacy and security have long-been one of the top selling points for iOS devices in the interminable marketing fracas between Apple and its competitors, with fancy additions to their suite of protection features like fingerprint scanning and facial recognition. Android devices, by contrast, always seemed to lag behind in the personal encryption space, but have caught up fairly recently in the consumer’s mind, at least.

The cat, as they say, is out of the bag thanks to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, who decided to test the mobile security systems of two of the biggest mobile device makers, Apple and Google. Their findings reveal that the layers of security protecting our data are only skin deep and that much of the encryption structures built into these devices remain unused. “I’ve come out of the project thinking almost nothing is protected,” Matthew Green, the professor who oversaw the study told Wired.

Using the companies’ own data and records spanning over a decade, the team of cryptographers found a plethora of security loopholes that can and are being exploited “by hackers and law enforcement alike.” The latter’s access to our mobile devices is of particular concern, given “the privacy risks involved in unchecked seizure and search.” Significantly, it is not your local police precinct that necessarily has the right tools to extract any readable data from your cell phone or laptop (though that is changing), but rather, these unique abilities are reserved for private cybersecurity companies who offer their services to police and other government entities.

One such firm, Israeli cyber forensics firm Cellebrite, boasts about their ability to “unlock and extract data from all iOS and high-end Android devices,” a service they have been selling to governments around the world and which they have more recently integrated into a product called Universal Forensic Extraction Device or UFED, which has been purchased by multiple law enforcement agencies across the globe, including the Hong Kong Police, which used Cellebrite’s hacking technology to “crack protestors’ smartphones” during the anti-extradition riots of 2019 and the NYPD, which enrolled in Cellebrite’s “UFED Premium program” that same year and gives ‘New York’s finest’ the capability to extract ostensibly private citizens’ data from the department’s own computers and laptops.

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Aliens Convinced Trump To Keep Them Secret, Claims Ex-Israeli Space Head

The former head of the Israeli space program says not only do extraterrestrial beings live among us, but they convinced President Donald Trump not to reveal their identity because “humanity was not ready yet,” according to the Jerusalem Post.

87-year-old Haim Eshed, the former head of the Defense Ministry’s Space Divison for over three decades, told Yediot Aharonot that aliens have been secretly interacting with the US and Israeli government “for years.” He went on to claim that Trump, at one point, wanted to expose their existence to the world.

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Iran Accuses Israel Of Seeking To Provoke “Full-Blown War” With Brazen Assassination

Since news broke hours ago of the assassination of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, on the streets in a city just east of Tehran, Iranian leaders have blamed an Israeli assassination plot.

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said there were “Serious indications of Israeli role” in killing of Fakhrizadeh, who subsequently died of his wounds in a hospital. What Iran has dubbed a terrorist attack reportedly involved a hail of machine gun fire and a suicide bomber explosion.

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Yes, There Is a World Zionist Congress – and It’s Meeting Now

I’m sometimes astounded at the fact that a major political movement over a century old is so little known among Americans – especially since it has had a momentous impact on the world in general and on the U.S. in particular, causing multiple wars, vast population displacement, and global instability.

In my travels around the US, I’ve found that most Americans know extremely little about Zionism. I would guess that the vast majority of Americans could not define the term (that was certainly my situation for most of my life), and that a great many may not have even heard of it.

And among those who have heard the term, many may think it refers to some antisemitic conspiracy theory.

The fact is, however, that Zionism – according to the dictionary, “a worldwide Jewish movement that resulted in the establishment and development of the state of Israel and that now supports the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland” – is both very real and extremely significant.

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Unit 8200: Israel’s cyber spy agency

In a searingly hot afternoon at a campuslike new science park in Beer Sheva, southern Israel, I watched as a group of bright, geeky teenagers presented their graduation projects. Parents and uniformed army personnel milled around a windowless room packed with tables holding laptops, phones or other gadgets. There was excited chatter and a pungent smell of adolescent sweat. This was a recent graduation ceremony for Magshimim (which roughly translates as “fulfilment”), the three-year after-school programme for 16 to 18-year-old students with exceptional computer coding and hacking skills. Magshimim serves as a feeder system for potential recruits to Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy agency, considered by intelligence analysts to be one of the most formidable of its kind in the world. Unit 8200, or shmone matayim as it’s called in Hebrew, is the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency and the largest single military unit in the Israel Defence Forces. It is also an elite institution whose graduates, after leaving service, can parlay their cutting-edge snooping and hacking skills into jobs in Israel, Silicon Valley or Boston’s high-tech corridor. The authors of Start-up Nation, the seminal 2009 book about Israel’s start-up culture, described 8200 and the Israeli military’s other elite units as “the nation’s equivalent of Harvard, Princeton and Yale”.

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