Tag: israel

Hacker group releases info on Mossad’s alleged involvement in Kazakhstan

The hacker group known as ‘Open Hands’ has once again released sensitive information about the Israeli Mossad and its activities.

Their recent data leak from 7 April was a mini-documentary film showing alleged Mossad activity in Kazakhstan. The film featured anonymous members of the hacker group whose faces were blacked out by shadows. They spoke English, Russian, and Arabic.

The film showcased how the Mossad secretly engages in business activity related to the mining of lithium and other rare earth ores through various front companies.

The film can be found on their Telegram channel.

While it is also found on YouTube, it is unclear for how long it will last until it is subject to YouTube’s censorship policies. Various Silicon Valley social media giants have been accused of bias towards the US, Israel, and their allies.

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Is that Darth Invader? Israeli TV channel unwittingly runs ‘live footage’ from Ukraine… showing a crash-landed TIE fighter from Star Wars

An Israeli TV news channel has run ‘live footage’ of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine featuring a crash-landed TIE fighter from Star Wars.

The clip even shows stormtroopers standing beside the Imperial aircraft on a snowy road. 

An investigation at Channel 13 has been launched and the editor has been suspended after the video was aired during a montage of destruction in Ukraine.

The clip was originally an advert produced by Disney and Lucasfilm in 2014 to promote a new Star Wars channel on Sky Deutschland.

It shows the stormtroopers surveying the crashed starfighter on a German autobahn while cars zoom past.

The original caption said: ‘Warning: Unsecured crash on the A3. Please turn right and not overtake!’

It is believed the video started circulating on the messaging app Telegram after the Russian invasion, duping people into believing it showed footage from the war. 

Ukraine has warned about disinformation being shared online, saying Russia is preparing an online campaign to suggest senior military and political figures have surrendered.

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Booster Shots Causing More Injuries Than Previously Thought, Israeli Survey Shows

More Israelis are experiencing injuries and reactions following COVID-19 booster shots than the country’s passive reporting system indicates, according to a survey conducted by the Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH).

The MOH conducted an active survey of booster shot recipients to collect data on adverse events associated with booster doses, then compared the survey data to the data available from the country’s passive reporting system. 

The survey concluded Israel’s passive reporting system was grossly underreporting adverse events.

The data from the Israeli survey could provide some insight into the extent of the underreporting occurring in the U.S.

It also could corroborate safety signals the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is ignoring.

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Israel insists it only ‘legally’ spies on citizens

An Israeli minister has denied reports that police illegally used Pegasus surveillance software to spy on the country’s own citizens, calling the “central claim” – that the practice was illegal – “not true.”

Several government investigations were launched this past week after the Israeli newspaper Calcalist reported that law enforcement had been using NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus spyware to illegally intercept the calls of citizens.

The newspaper claimed that police had been using the spyware since 2013 to carry out surveillance on citizens “who were not criminals or suspects.”

Omer Bar-Lev, Israel’s Minister of Public Security, told Channel 12 on Saturday that the allegations were not true, “except for the fact that the Israel Police used advanced technology.”

“The central claim that the police are illegally spying is not true,” he declared, citing the assurances of Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai, before claiming to be “very happy that the Israel Police has advanced technological tools to help deal with serious crime organizations that are using advanced technology.”

Commissioner Shabtai vowed on Friday that the police’s “legal use of technological tools” would “continue,” and said the force would carry on “developing and improving these tools.”

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Israel is using counter-terrorism phone surveillance to track Omicron carriers

Rights groups in Israel have called on the country’s top court to repeal the recently announced measures to use the counter-terrorism phone tracking system to track carriers of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. The groups raised privacy concerns.

On Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced emergency measures including phone tracking to locate those infected by the Omicron variant, which is thought to be more contagious.

The Shin Bet counter-terrorism agency’s phone-tracking technology was to be used to enable to surveillance.

Rights groups have said that the emergency measure is a violation of the Supreme Court’s rulings on such surveillance, which has been used by the country’s domestic intelligence agency since the beginning of the pandemic last year.

“Operation of the Secret Service to trace citizens violates the basic trust between the citizen and the government,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), one of four groups who petitioned the court, said in a statement to Reuters.

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So much for vaccine-generated herd immunity

A reader tipped me to this fascinating paper in a peer-reviewed journal about a Covid outbreak in Israel that began in mid-July, just as vaccine failure was accelerating there.

A vaccinated dialysis patient was admitted to Meir Medical Center – a large Israeli hospital near Tel Aviv – with fever and cough. He remained on the dialysis unit for days, as his condition worsened. (One of many problems with overselling the vaccines is that it led to mistakes like this.)

By the time he was diagnosed with Covid-19, he had infected three fellow patients. He also had a PCR threshold of 13.6 – almost impossibly low, showing viral loads roughly 1 million times those in a lightly infected person. He was moved to a Covid-19 ward, where he eventually died (I say he, though the patient’s gender is not revealed; the paper refers to “they).

The paper, published in Eurosurveillance, a journal published by the European Centers for Disease Control, explains that the outbreak rapidly spread among both patients and staff of the hospital’s dialysis unit, the Covid-19 ward, and other wards. At the time, 238 out of 248 of exposed patients and staff had been fully vaccinated with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine.

Again, the fact that 96 percent of the people in this population had been vaccinated – a level far above early estimates of the percentages required for herd immunity – apparently made no difference.

Further, all patients and staff were required to wear surgical masks when they were in the same room, and staff on the Covid-19 unit wore N95 masks and face shields.

Ultimately, 39 out of the 238 exposed vaccinated people (16 percent) were infected, along with 3 out of 10 unvaccinated people – a difference that doesn’t reach statistical significance because the unvaccinated group is too small.

Of the infected, 23 were patients and 19 staff. The staff all recovered quickly. But five patients died and another nine had severe or critical cases. All were vaccinated. The two unvaccinated infected patients both had mild cases.

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Israel To Conduct COVID “Genetic Scanning” For All Inbound Air Passengers

The world’s most “ultra-vaxxed nation” Israel is continuing to struggle to keep its coronavirus infections down, despite enacting some of the most stringent rules and requirements on its population, including rolling out one of the earliest versions of a vaccine passport to visit public venues, which has to be “updated” each six months or so based on a booster shot timeline. 

Now Israel will go so far as to conduct “genetic scanning” for travelers arriving in the country. It’s considered a huge and experimental high tech step in screening inbound passengers for coronavirus infections at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett made the announcement at a meeting of his cabinet on Sunday, confirming plans to eventually deploy it at Ben Gurion. “We are working on a scanning system for everyone who comes into Israel,” Bennett said. The statements were reportedly not intended to be made public, but were leaked to local Israeli media.

“Israel will thus become the radar for the virus,” he added. However, no further details on how the ‘genetic scanning’ will work were given, nor whether there might be an opt-out mechanism. Thus a Covid passport, which Israel calls its “green pass” – may be linked to an eventual regimen of forced genetic testing at international travel points.

The technology, which will no doubt be hugely controversial given privacy concerns, is being discussed as part of Israeli efforts to keep further Covid variants from entering the country, as The Times of Israel describes:

Bennett expressed support for Social Equality Minister Meirav Cohen, who had warned that “the next variant will come to Israel through Ben Gurion,” saying the proposed genetic testing would help prevent that from happening.

Conventionally since the start of the pandemic airports have often monitored passengers’ temperatures with a quick and simple thermometer scan of their foreheads, but Israeli health officials are now seeking a method which might given greater certitude over whether someone has the virus or not, and especially whether they are carrying a variant.

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Israel Unveils New Armed Robot Amid Outcry Over “Death Machines”

Israel unveiled a new remote-controlled killer robot Monday at a major weapons fair in the U.K. that human rights advocates are criticizing as an event to sell “death machines” and tools of abuse.

Developed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the Rex MK II is a four-wheeled vehicle mounted with two machine guns to carry out remote attacks. According to a press statement from the state-owned company announcing the release, the robot has already been sold to global customers.

The weapon was unveiled Monday at Defence & Security Equipment International (DSEI) in London, an event that occurs every two years and is one of the world’s biggest arms fairs. The weapons expo has faced sustained condemnation from anti-war campaigners who say it’s a venue “where those who profit from war, repression, and injustice do business.”

IAI describes the robot as an unmanned land vehicle that can carry a load of 1.3 tons and execute operations including intelligence gathering using “electro-optical sensors and radar.” It can also be used to launch attacks with “remotely controlled weapons systems including a 7.62mm machine gun” and “a cal 0.50 heavy machine gun,” the company says, and serve “as a multi-mission multi-purpose platform to support additional missions based on troops needs.”

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Hot Mic Catches Israeli Health Minister Admitting Vaccine Passports Are About Coercion

Unaware that he was on a hot mic and being broadcast live on a TV station, Israeli health minister Nitzan Horowitz admitted that vaccine passports were primarily about coercing skeptical people to get the vaccine.

“Imposing “green pass” rules on certain venues is needed only to pressure members of the public to get vaccinated, and not for medical reasons, Israeli Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said on Sunday, ahead of the weekly Cabinet meeting,” reports Jewish News Syndicate.

Unaware that his words were being broadcast live to the nation on Channel 12, Horowitz told Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked that not only should the green pass be removed as a requirement to dine at outdoor restaurants, but also, “For swimming pools, too, not just in restaurants.”

“Epidemiologically, it’s true,” said Horowitz, adding, “The thing is, I’m telling you, our problem is people who don’t get vaccinated. We need [to influence] them a bit; otherwise, we won’t get out of this [pandemic situation].”

The health minister went on to acknowledge that the system wasn’t even being enforced in most venues.

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