Category Archives: Surveillance

Information Warfare: Israeli Algorithmic Counterinsurgency

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Unit 8200 collected all the spoken Arabic text they had and created a database of about a hundred billion words from groups that were hostile to Israel. Israelis also trained the model to understand specific terms used by anti-Israel groups. This massive collection of training data included large volumes of communications between Palestinians, which was just what the model needed to succeed.

Earlier machine learning models used by Unit 8200 made wide-scale surveillance of Palestinians effective as a form of control, particularly in the West Bank where they said it has contributed to a greater number of arrests. The model enabled Israeli intelligence specialists to automatically analyze intercepted phone conversations and identify Palestinians planning to attack soldiers or Israelis living in illegal settlements. When Israeli soldiers entered West Bank communities, the AI system detected people using words indicating hostile activity like throwing rocks or using firearms against soldiers.

When used to select targets for airstrikes, the AI sometimes makes mistakes when pilots are sent to attack innocent civilians instead of militants.

~ Full article

How Corporate Partnerships Powered University Surveillance of Palestine Protests

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What the students didn’t know at the time was that the University of Houston had contracted with Dataminr, an artificial intelligence company with a troubling record on constitutional rights, to gather open-source intelligence on the student-led movement for Palestine. Using an AI tool known as “First Alert,” Dataminr was scraping students’ social media activity and chat logs and sending what it learned to university administration.

This is the first detailed reporting on how a U.S. university used the AI technology to surveil its own students. It’s just one example of how public universities worked with private partners to surveil student protests, revealing how corporate involvement in higher education can be leveraged against students’ free expression.

~Full article

PROMISes, Sex Slaves, and Spying: A Brief History of the Blackmail-Surveillance Nexus

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P.R.O.M.I.S.

The story of the PROMIS software in the 1970s weaves a complex narrative of foreign double-agents, human trafficking, and murder.
[…]
DEADLY GAME

A series of murders were allegedly committed in order to try to contain the scope of the spying.

Freelance journalist Danny Casolaro supposedly slashed his wrists in a hotel room after a source contacted him about the so-called Octopus: an international network of intelligence operatives.vi Also assassinated was Robert Maxwell, a UK-based publishing magnate, born in Czechoslovakia as Ján Hoch. The young Hoch escaped Nazi occupation and was decorated by the British military for his service to the Allies. MI6 used Maxwell (Hoch) as a front for its publishing arm, Springer-Verlag.vii

Using his contacts with Czech communists, he allegedly facilitated the export of aircraft parts to Israel, which helped the country win the Arab-Israeli War 1948. Maxwell became a Member of Parliament for the British Labour Party and was supposedly suspected by UK intelligence of being a Soviet-funded double-agent, though this appears to have been part of an MI5 smear campaign against the Labour Party.viii Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, supposedly inserted its own bugs into PROMIS and contracted Maxwell to distribute the rigged software.ix Maxwell died in 1991 after falling off his yacht.

The yacht, Lady Ghislaine, was named after his youngest child. In the same year as her father’s death, Ghislaine Maxwell met Jeffrey Epstein, a financier, fixer, and human-trafficker who was working for the CIA to blackmail businesspeople, intellectuals, politicians, and royalty.x Many suspect that Epstein was also working for Mossad.xi Epstein also died when details of his dark empire began to emerge: officially by suicide in 2019. Some people suspect that US, British, and/or Israeli intelligence helped Epstein and Maxwell, respectively, to fake their deaths, but there is little evidence to prove these theories. Elements of the Maxwell family continued their father’s interest in software.

https://www.pipr.co.uk/promises-sex-slaves-and-spying-a-brief-history-of-the-blackmail-surveillance-nexus/

The Surveillance Empire That Tracked World Leaders, a Vatican Enemy, and Maybe You

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“…Inside the hidden world of First Wap, whose untraceable tech has targeted politicians, journalists, celebrities, and activists around the globe.
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Operating from their base in Jakarta, where permissive export laws have allowed their surveillance business to flourish, First Wap’s European founders and executives have quietly built a phone-tracking empire, with a footprint extending from the Vatican to the Middle East to Silicon Valley.

It calls its proprietary system Altamides, which it describes in promotional materials as “a unified platform to covertly locate the whereabouts of single or multiple suspects in real-time, to detect movement patterns, and to detect whether suspects are in close vicinity with each other.”

Altamides leaves no trace on the phones it targets, unlike spyware such as Pegasus. Nor does it require a target to click on a malicious link or show any of the telltale signs (such as overheating or a short battery life) of remote monitoring.
[…]
Last year the investigative newsroom Lighthouse Reports obtained a secret archive, containing more than a million instances where Altamides was used to trace cell phones all over the world. This data trove, the majority of which spans 2007 to 2014, is one of the largest disclosures to date of the inner workings of the vast surveillance industry. It does not just list the phone numbers of people who were monitored; it offers, in many cases, precise maps of their movements, showing where they went and when. Over months of research, Lighthouse, Germany’s Paper Trail Media, Mother Jones, Reveal, and an international consortium of partners dug into these logs to understand who was being spied on and why. We identified surveillance targets in 100 countries and spoke to dozens of them. We obtained confidential documents and communications outlining how Altamides—an acronym for “Advanced Location Tracking and Mobile Information and Deception System”—was marketed and deployed. We also interviewed industry insiders and former employees of the company about its operations and clientele.

What we found changes what we know about the history of surveillance technology, demonstrating the proliferation of dangerous tools well before Edward Snowden brought the issue to global attention. Despite its considerable size, the archive represents only a fraction of the surveillance activities carried out with Altamides. But it nevertheless shows how it was used, and abused, across the world.

The First Wap archive reveals extensive cell phone tracking in the US, which usually is considered out of bounds for spyware and surveillance vendors. Even the most notorious, like Israel’s NSO Group, have made a point of avoiding it. Foreign companies that have surveilled people in the US have in multiple cases been sanctioned. Yet Altamides was deployed in thousands of tracking operations on US soil…”

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/firstwap-altamides-phone-tracking-surveillance-secrets-assad-erik-prince-jared-leto-anne-wojcicki/