What stands out to me here is the pipeline. Israel has built an unusually tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups, and global markets. When that ecosystem scales internationally, it’s fair to ask whether partners are buying technology or importing unilateral leverage that only benefits Israel here.
EU law enforcement agencies regularly buy this kind of software, even if illegal!
The Italian Carabinieri bought Paragon even though they can't legally use it, because mass surveillance is obviously illegal and against our constitution.
Don't get me wrong, I get why they want to and it is probably a justified security concern, but it's also things like that which will probably cause Europe's economy to continue to stagnate while the US's will probably continue to soar even with Trump (and perhaps, later, Vance) completely destroying our international reputation and credibility and our most important political and scientific institutions.
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 is probably in their blood because as someone surrounded by enemies you gotta be pragmatic and on your toe all the time. No wonder they are pretty good at intelligence collection. One of my previous bosses told me that people with highest scores join the intelligence staffs. Not sure if it is true, though.
Surrounded by enemies of their own creation. It’s a beautiful cycle of aggression and self-victimization; a true ouroboros.
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.
Paragon co-founded by former Unit-8200 commander Ehud Schneorson and former Israeli Prime-minister and defence-chief, Ehud Barak who tapped his long-time friend Jeffrey Epstein (a wealthy American financier and eccentric) to find him clients for his ventures in the US and across the world. That certainly is some tight-integration!
They're just too busy repackaging the same spying tech on different channels and then selling that for billions in the US stock market. Also knowing that US regulators won't say a single word, because how could they ever say something bad about these companies... It must be a very good business.
The thing is everyone goes into the IDF. The smart ones get put into unit 8200 where they hone their persistent, iterative, troubleshooting skills. Then their service is over they leave and they've basically been trained in innovation and leadership.
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.
You should look at Israel deal for the F-35. They got the only F-35 unlocked and non dependent on the US software lock. They were never part of the development program like Norway, Denmark, Italy or the Netherlands so did not have to bear those costs. Norway, Denmark, Italy or the Netherlands, still had to pay for their F-35...
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. :-)
90% of startups coming out of Israel seem to be some dodgy 'security' or spyware startups.
This in addition to them boasting of having 'field tested' their stuff on Palestinians, which is also why U.S. cops go there for training. I suppose to learn from the 'real experts' how to suppress the masses.
This is not true. It's just "dodgy security/spyware" startups are more open coming from Israel that they exist than the myriad of hidden companies that you never heard about because they focus on tailored exploits.
Israel is the British colonialism foreign base where the Brits and the US can dodge their own laws while developing their own "defence" hardware, software, tactics, and ideology.
>where the Brits and the US can dodge their own laws while developing their own [...]
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.
Meh, imho it's much simpler: Israel has had insane security needs since it's birth, thus naturally security firms concentrated where there was an immediate market and testing possibility.
Which makes the failure of October 7th even more striking. It's insane Israeli leadership hasn't paid for this.
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.
Israel being founded with the help of terrorist groups like Irgun and Lehi and their current prime minister as well as former defense minister being wanted for war crimes, excuse me if I don't take their word as to whom they're fighting for granted. Especially not after what they did in Gaza.
That is some nasty garbage right there. The Israeli tech startup scene is very large and dynamic with including basic software development tools, wireless infrastructure, and so on. If anything it is more like 90% either consumer infrastructure or non-LLM developer tools. Whether it is politically advantageous to talk about or not, a very large fraction of all economic activity is still down the chain near the child needs bowl of rice level. Grandiose claims without support only obfuscate the situation instead of focusing on what needs to be done to protect people.
> 90% of startups coming out of Israel seem to be ...
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.
Except the English articles are not generally fearmongering, more praising of the 'bursting' Israeli tech scene. It's only when you look at what the startups do you realize what's up.
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?
I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free.
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.
>> I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free.
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?
I doubt whatever facial recognition trained over 6 million odd Palestinians (plus 2 million Israeli Palestinians) would trump similar offerings from competitors like Hikvision trained on data of 1.4 billion Chinese.
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.
A facial recognition model trained on one genotype will behave poorly on another genotype. For detecting e.g. white and middle eastern faces, this Israeli model should perform better than the one trained on Chinese people
I believe that most of what you said is true, but I don't think the tracking of people around the world is as efficient as your post suggests. If a single face scan were enough to track people anywhere like that, American government agencies (I'm thinking ICE, the FBI, etc.) wouldn’t have as much trouble as they do arresting people. That’s just my impression of course, maybe for some reason they choose not to use these technologies.
i have doubts on accuracy of face recognition. There is already nancy guthrie case going on and if it is so accurate why are suspects still not recognized?
You mean the the case where he came to her door dressed like death with his face almost completely covered?
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.
I used to think that the scenes of the TV series “Person of Interest” were exaggerated for storytelling purposes. Maybe not and it was accurate prescience.
I'm sorry this sounds like hyperbole to say the least.
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.
> This capability has been demonstrated multiple times, specially when it was politically convenient, like for example the intercepted Hamas calls that showed that some of the rockets fall inside Gaza by mistake.
Can it be something generated? One can display something that is politically convenient and not true at once.
Even if you don't believe in the capabilities of Israeli intelligence, it's well documented that Israel supported Hamas as a hard-line alternative to the PLO to avoid a two-state solution. The Israeli right has for decades intensified the conflict to justify total war against Palestinians. Allowing a domestic attack to gin up support for aggression is in line with their behaviour for the past 3 decades.
I'm old enough to remember when Arafat was well-respected in the west and a two-state solution was the mainstream view amongst Americans. Once Netanyahu came to power in 1996 (30 years ago!) he worked to delegitimize the PLO and pursue an aggressive genocide against the Palestinians.
"Walls of Jericho" plan was known to Israel since 2017. Everything was known but as usually with IDF, too much arrogance and this was mostly ignored. Not to mention the 4am meeting the top brass decided not to raise alarms for fear of miscalculation.
Maddening arrogance and many heads should have rolled but still some are in their seats.
I think these sort of claims of excessive competence are challenged by the October 7th attacks. Think about the massive amount of planning and organization that went into that attack over a period of years. There were thousands of forces engaging in some specialized and unusual strategies. Hamas even released a propaganda video more or less showing their plan with paragliders and everything. And they carried it out the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. And somehow this all caught Israel completely by surprise. So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole, or accept that these claims of excessive competence are, at the minimum, exaggerated.
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 either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole
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..
Top notch work. I assume the person picture is a test account, but it still shows how deep these companies can get.
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
This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated.
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):
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.).
Or maybe, you know, we should stop writing security-critical software in memory-unsafe languages. Mobile devices not treating their owner as an adversary would also be nice.
That's only part of it. That all security issues would be gone after writing code in a memory-safe language is a fairytale (though it does help a lot).
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.
"Regulated" in reality basically means your messages are not only read by private companies that collect them, intelligence agencies that access them, but also by people sitting in the regulation panels. When officials say regulation they basically mean "I want a piece of action, too, dumbass, otherwise I'm gonna shut you down!".
Yes, that's exactly how regulation works and is why everyone with a drivers licence are always complaining when the gu the government sent to hold the steering wheel that morning is late. /s
Regulated by whom exactly? Since you can't even read, the spyware is being exclusively used by all govts of the world. Regulation never works, if you need a secure phone use GrapheneOS.
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"?
I don't see WeChat, which is weird, considering it has been out for decades and not particularly famous for being secure. Maybe it is rarely used by people in Western countries, I guess. But anyway the Chinese government can conveniently read your WeChat messages. Congratulations to all tech brothers and sisters who bring upon the love of governments to us.
Maybe it's just me being old, but it generally seems unlikely that 5 or 6 messaging apps. I can understand having both TikTok and Snapchat (plus a number of other social media apps).
Yeah my thought, too. I'm also wondering whether they hire in-house engineers or mostly just buy it from some other places. Maybe they also hire people straight out from intelligence?
If the Chinese government can read WeChat but not the actual government, which has unlimited access to our body parts, I guess we should all be switching to WeChat.
I'm fine with not criticizing China or Chi, as long as EU and US governments don't have access to my messages.
I think you need to be invited by a Chinese citizen to use WeChat, and they're penalised (in the real world!) for inviting people who don't comply with Chinese law.
Stuff like that is wild to me. At least in the US, we have internal laws democratically elected that can force things to happen (Epstein transparency act for example).
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.
It's funny you use the Epstein transparency act as an example of a law forcing things to happen, when the government is not complyibg with the Epstein transparency act.
I don't really think there is a lot of differences between the two. China does have a heavy hand in regulating the chats, e.g. you could have your account auto-banned for whatever the reason, if the AI finds something. Sometimes it could as trivial as mentioning e.g. 8964 in a completely different context.
But I think this is more about China wasting resources on trivial things while the US wisely focuses on more important things /s.
It's really unbelievable how much data most people put online about themselves. "Valentina" has probably shared all the information about here the alleged system dashboard showed. Any interested party would only have to search the open internet (and some walled gardens like Facebook) and aggregate the information found in there.
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.
I've known people who were manually stalked through just information they posted to the internet. It really doesn't take anything more than a name and a few usernames.
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.
"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."
His claim there did not necessarily imply rigged explosives, but supply chain attacks either for surveillance or assassination purposes.
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.)
> limit the number of apps ... lower attack surface ... If paranoid
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.
Burners seem extreme, but old used hardware still seems the best and only way you can sort of prove isolation on your own.
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).
> Paragon’s founding team not includes the former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, it also includes former Unit 8200 commander Ehud Schneorson, exposing how Israeli intelligence expertise metastisizes into private markets.
I would be careful with such allegations. The emails show Ehud Barak first visited the island in 2014, while Virginia claimed the rape happened on the island in 2002.
Android and Linux's source code is available. So its easy to find flaws and report them. Linux has live a long time and hasn't had major security issues. (Sometimes you get a compromised vendor down the chain in a single distro)
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.
My main concern is that these companies will sell to almost anyone willing to buy. The technology itself is not inherently evil (I do want spyware on, say, Ghislaine Maxwell's phone, were she to be released), but the fact that almost any despot can purchase it and use it to brutally suppress dissent is horrible.
As for Israel itself, same kind of thing. Spyware on Sinwar's phone: completely justified. Spyware on journalists' phones because they're accurately recording and reporting genocidal actions: dystopian. And they're likely to do both.
> Palestinians have long lived under one of the most extensively documented surveillance regimes in the world. The deployment of facial recognition systems, predictive analytics, and device monitoring technologies in the occupied Palestinian territories are widely documented by human-rights organizations and digital researchers.
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).
When you choose build an apartheid, you choose surveillance, because how else would you enforce a top to bottom racial order on the populace?
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!
Also love the refusal to even agree that words have meaning. You put scare quotes around 'terrorism'. Are you saying that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a series of small terrorist groups, and a series of individuals did not commit terrorists attacks in Israel?
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?
This "apartheid" claim never made sense to me. Are people completely ignorant to South African history? Israeli Palestinians are equal citizens. Black people in South Africa couldn't own property, couldn't vote, and often couldn't even live in the same building as white people.
There has been recent academic research (+ book) about how it's the opposite - Israel relied on foreign intelligence (Club de Berne) for it's most famous operations.
let me add that fucker in the picture who invest in this serviallance was raping babies with epstien make sense to me what side to stand with am aginst raping babies and eat them
What stands out to me here is the pipeline. Israel has built an unusually tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups, and global markets. When that ecosystem scales internationally, it’s fair to ask whether partners are buying technology or importing unilateral leverage that only benefits Israel here.
Recently for obvious reasons I’ve started questioning everything. I imagine I’m not alone.
Let’s just say I’m even more of a fan of EU digital infrastructure moving to strictly EU countries, no outside traffic allowed.
I'd be super surprised if EU doesn't have similar "dashboards".
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EU law enforcement agencies regularly buy this kind of software, even if illegal!
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.
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Balkanization of the internet. It was foretold.
Don't get me wrong, I get why they want to and it is probably a justified security concern, but it's also things like that which will probably cause Europe's economy to continue to stagnate while the US's will probably continue to soar even with Trump (and perhaps, later, Vance) completely destroying our international reputation and credibility and our most important political and scientific institutions.
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.
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It is probably in their blood because as someone surrounded by enemies you gotta be pragmatic and on your toe all the time. No wonder they are pretty good at intelligence collection. One of my previous bosses told me that people with highest scores join the intelligence staffs. Not sure if it is true, though.
Surrounded by enemies of their own creation. It’s a beautiful cycle of aggression and self-victimization; a true ouroboros.
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.
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> One of my previous bosses told me that people with highest scores join the intelligence staffs.
Certainly the common practice of looting civilian homes and posting about it on social media implies something about their infantry.
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As always, experience breeds competence. Much like Ukraine are good at drone warfare, Israel are good at missile defence etc etc...
> Israel has built an unusually tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups, and global markets.
How's that different from the US? half of the big players started as three letters agency side projects
Paragon co-founded by former Unit-8200 commander Ehud Schneorson and former Israeli Prime-minister and defence-chief, Ehud Barak who tapped his long-time friend Jeffrey Epstein (a wealthy American financier and eccentric) to find him clients for his ventures in the US and across the world. That certainly is some tight-integration!
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-ehud-barak-le...
Why is everyone surprised that a country of less than 10 million has a tech sector where everyone effectively knows each other?
I would put the upper bound on the population relevant to _the_ tech sector at 28000.
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They're just too busy repackaging the same spying tech on different channels and then selling that for billions in the US stock market. Also knowing that US regulators won't say a single word, because how could they ever say something bad about these companies... It must be a very good business.
The thing is everyone goes into the IDF. The smart ones get put into unit 8200 where they hone their persistent, iterative, troubleshooting skills. Then their service is over they leave and they've basically been trained in innovation and leadership.
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.
> tight feedback loop between military intelligence, private startups
It's just friends buying from friends.
You should look at Israel deal for the F-35. They got the only F-35 unlocked and non dependent on the US software lock. They were never part of the development program like Norway, Denmark, Italy or the Netherlands so did not have to bear those costs. Norway, Denmark, Italy or the Netherlands, still had to pay for their F-35...
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...
This net positive argument is asinine.
You aren't burning money, you're getting services and technologies.
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So the US basically got billions and billions worth of F-35 R&D for the price of 2B?
Sounds like a decent deal to me.
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90% of startups coming out of Israel seem to be some dodgy 'security' or spyware startups. This in addition to them boasting of having 'field tested' their stuff on Palestinians, which is also why U.S. cops go there for training. I suppose to learn from the 'real experts' how to suppress the masses.
This is not true. It's just "dodgy security/spyware" startups are more open coming from Israel that they exist than the myriad of hidden companies that you never heard about because they focus on tailored exploits.
Israel is the British colonialism foreign base where the Brits and the US can dodge their own laws while developing their own "defence" hardware, software, tactics, and ideology.
>where the Brits and the US can dodge their own laws while developing their own [...]
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.
Meh, imho it's much simpler: Israel has had insane security needs since it's birth, thus naturally security firms concentrated where there was an immediate market and testing possibility.
Which makes the failure of October 7th even more striking. It's insane Israeli leadership hasn't paid for this.
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> British colonialism
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.
To be clear, do you think it's bad to use technology to detect and stop terrorism?
Israel being founded with the help of terrorist groups like Irgun and Lehi and their current prime minister as well as former defense minister being wanted for war crimes, excuse me if I don't take their word as to whom they're fighting for granted. Especially not after what they did in Gaza.
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That is some nasty garbage right there. The Israeli tech startup scene is very large and dynamic with including basic software development tools, wireless infrastructure, and so on. If anything it is more like 90% either consumer infrastructure or non-LLM developer tools. Whether it is politically advantageous to talk about or not, a very large fraction of all economic activity is still down the chain near the child needs bowl of rice level. Grandiose claims without support only obfuscate the situation instead of focusing on what needs to be done to protect people.
> 90% of startups coming out of Israel seem to be ...
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.
Or maybe that's the ones you know about because it's what gets fearmongering articles written about in English and the rest is in Hebrew?
Except the English articles are not generally fearmongering, more praising of the 'bursting' Israeli tech scene. It's only when you look at what the startups do you realize what's up.
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?
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I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free.
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.
>> I've learned from a former college colleague that got into cyber security that Israeli intelligence facial recognition is virtually error free.
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?
Those are private companies, so it's not 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...
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I doubt whatever facial recognition trained over 6 million odd Palestinians (plus 2 million Israeli Palestinians) would trump similar offerings from competitors like Hikvision trained on data of 1.4 billion Chinese.
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.
https://archive.is/0qjVI
A facial recognition model trained on one genotype will behave poorly on another genotype. For detecting e.g. white and middle eastern faces, this Israeli model should perform better than the one trained on Chinese people
I believe that most of what you said is true, but I don't think the tracking of people around the world is as efficient as your post suggests. If a single face scan were enough to track people anywhere like that, American government agencies (I'm thinking ICE, the FBI, etc.) wouldn’t have as much trouble as they do arresting people. That’s just my impression of course, maybe for some reason they choose not to use these technologies.
They need recall, not precision. It’s conceivably fine if you tag 100 people as long as one of them is your guy.
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.
> if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world
Approximately what year did this start?
I have no clue because my first extra EU flight has been in 2022 and I definitely got a full face scan.
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Is the Israeli intelligence facial recognition system in the room with us now?
Oosto, Corsight AI.
i have doubts on accuracy of face recognition. There is already nancy guthrie case going on and if it is so accurate why are suspects still not recognized?
You mean the the case where he came to her door dressed like death with his face almost completely covered?
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.
I used to think that the scenes of the TV series “Person of Interest” were exaggerated for storytelling purposes. Maybe not and it was accurate prescience.
I'm sorry this sounds like hyperbole to say the least.
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.
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Can it be something generated? One can display something that is politically convenient and not true at once.
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Of course they knew.
Even if you don't believe in the capabilities of Israeli intelligence, it's well documented that Israel supported Hamas as a hard-line alternative to the PLO to avoid a two-state solution. The Israeli right has for decades intensified the conflict to justify total war against Palestinians. Allowing a domestic attack to gin up support for aggression is in line with their behaviour for the past 3 decades.
I'm old enough to remember when Arafat was well-respected in the west and a two-state solution was the mainstream view amongst Americans. Once Netanyahu came to power in 1996 (30 years ago!) he worked to delegitimize the PLO and pursue an aggressive genocide against the Palestinians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas
"Walls of Jericho" plan was known to Israel since 2017. Everything was known but as usually with IDF, too much arrogance and this was mostly ignored. Not to mention the 4am meeting the top brass decided not to raise alarms for fear of miscalculation. Maddening arrogance and many heads should have rolled but still some are in their seats.
I think these sort of claims of excessive competence are challenged by the October 7th attacks. Think about the massive amount of planning and organization that went into that attack over a period of years. There were thousands of forces engaging in some specialized and unusual strategies. Hamas even released a propaganda video more or less showing their plan with paragliders and everything. And they carried it out the day after the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. And somehow this all caught Israel completely by surprise. So either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole, or accept that these claims of excessive competence are, at the minimum, exaggerated.
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 either you have to go down a very dark rabbit hole
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..
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Top notch work. I assume the person picture is a test account, but it still shows how deep these companies can get.
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
This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated.
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.).
Or maybe, you know, we should stop writing security-critical software in memory-unsafe languages. Mobile devices not treating their owner as an adversary would also be nice.
That's only part of it. That all security issues would be gone after writing code in a memory-safe language is a fairytale (though it does help a lot).
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.
How do you defend against supply chain attacks??? The problem is that Israelis and their firms have access to the full chain due to their influence.
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Could you elaborate more on this?
"Regulated" in reality basically means your messages are not only read by private companies that collect them, intelligence agencies that access them, but also by people sitting in the regulation panels. When officials say regulation they basically mean "I want a piece of action, too, dumbass, otherwise I'm gonna shut you down!".
Yes, that's exactly how regulation works and is why everyone with a drivers licence are always complaining when the gu the government sent to hold the steering wheel that morning is late. /s
Regulated by whom exactly? Since you can't even read, the spyware is being exclusively used by all govts of the world. Regulation never works, if you need a secure phone use GrapheneOS.
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.
> Regulation never works
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"?
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I don't see WeChat, which is weird, considering it has been out for decades and not particularly famous for being secure. Maybe it is rarely used by people in Western countries, I guess. But anyway the Chinese government can conveniently read your WeChat messages. Congratulations to all tech brothers and sisters who bring upon the love of governments to us.
The example is from a Czech citizen, unlikely that they use WeChat (Line neither though).
Maybe it's just me being old, but it generally seems unlikely that 5 or 6 messaging apps. I can understand having both TikTok and Snapchat (plus a number of other social media apps).
My take is that this is probably a test account.
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Yeah my thought, too. I'm also wondering whether they hire in-house engineers or mostly just buy it from some other places. Maybe they also hire people straight out from intelligence?
If the Chinese government can read WeChat but not the actual government, which has unlimited access to our body parts, I guess we should all be switching to WeChat.
I'm fine with not criticizing China or Chi, as long as EU and US governments don't have access to my messages.
I think you need to be invited by a Chinese citizen to use WeChat, and they're penalised (in the real world!) for inviting people who don't comply with Chinese law.
Stuff like that is wild to me. At least in the US, we have internal laws democratically elected that can force things to happen (Epstein transparency act for example).
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.
It's funny you use the Epstein transparency act as an example of a law forcing things to happen, when the government is not complyibg with the Epstein transparency act.
I don't really think there is a lot of differences between the two. China does have a heavy hand in regulating the chats, e.g. you could have your account auto-banned for whatever the reason, if the AI finds something. Sometimes it could as trivial as mentioning e.g. 8964 in a completely different context.
But I think this is more about China wasting resources on trivial things while the US wisely focuses on more important things /s.
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It's really unbelievable how much data most people put online about themselves. "Valentina" has probably shared all the information about here the alleged system dashboard showed. Any interested party would only have to search the open internet (and some walled gardens like Facebook) and aggregate the information found in there.
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.
I've known people who were manually stalked through just information they posted to the internet. It really doesn't take anything more than a name and a few usernames.
Keep your devices always up to date and limit the number of apps you use (lower attack surface).
If paranoid, use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it.
And if you use iPhones and have reason to be really paranoid, consider using lockdown mode.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120
Has android been hacked?
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.
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two last attacks from paragon for pixel devices uses the modem firmware. these things doesn't help much.
iPhone 17's and later offer the highest level of security in a smartphone: https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement...
How do we know it is not rigged with an explosive like the Pagers?
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."
His claim there did not necessarily imply rigged explosives, but supply chain attacks either for surveillance or assassination purposes.
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.)
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Take it with you on an international trip or three. Surely those airport scanners will pick it up.
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We know because we're not shooting rockets at them.
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> limit the number of apps ... lower attack surface ... If paranoid
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.
>super apps that do too many things and used by billions (WhatsApp, Chrome, TikTok, Instagram, CleanMaster etc)
One of these are not like the others...
Burners seem extreme, but old used hardware still seems the best and only way you can sort of prove isolation on your own.
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).
> Paragon’s founding team not includes the former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, it also includes former Unit 8200 commander Ehud Schneorson, exposing how Israeli intelligence expertise metastisizes into private markets.
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...
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I would be careful with such allegations. The emails show Ehud Barak first visited the island in 2014, while Virginia claimed the rape happened on the island in 2002.
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Meanwhile "Pending Criminal Charges" is still at zero [1].
[1]: https://www.pedoarrestcounter.fun/
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You mean Giuffre and not Guthrie right?
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Is this company a candidate for being "Jia Tan"?
Jia Tan wouldn't be interested in secret spyware firms. They hide their code in plain sight.
No need, they have plenty of 0-day exploits that don't leave discoverable traces.
this is an Advertisement.
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.
Interesting marketing idea.
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.
Wow. your threshold for a literal crime and imoral behavior is extremely low. I do hope you realizes that is weird and not normal.
How are they intercepting Signal?
They are attacking the end-point app on your device.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46979819
Questions:
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?
> Why hasnt this been used for stealing Crypto?
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.
Android and Linux's source code is available. So its easy to find flaws and report them. Linux has live a long time and hasn't had major security issues. (Sometimes you get a compromised vendor down the chain in a single distro)
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.
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Please don't make this a left vs. right issue. It's a good vs. evil issue.
GP didn't say left or right
My main concern is that these companies will sell to almost anyone willing to buy. The technology itself is not inherently evil (I do want spyware on, say, Ghislaine Maxwell's phone, were she to be released), but the fact that almost any despot can purchase it and use it to brutally suppress dissent is horrible.
As for Israel itself, same kind of thing. Spyware on Sinwar's phone: completely justified. Spyware on journalists' phones because they're accurately recording and reporting genocidal actions: dystopian. And they're likely to do both.
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Your account is a politics-only throwaway on a tech journalism website. Be careful throwing "bias" stones from a glass house.
Pretending like this some gotcha is pretty funny. The effectiveness of the software hasn't changed. In fact the targets don't even know it's there.
> Palestinians have long lived under one of the most extensively documented surveillance regimes in the world. The deployment of facial recognition systems, predictive analytics, and device monitoring technologies in the occupied Palestinian territories are widely documented by human-rights organizations and digital researchers.
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 choose build an apartheid, you choose surveillance, because how else would you enforce a top to bottom racial order on the populace?
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.
> When you end apartheid, you end 'terrorism'
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!
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Also love the refusal to even agree that words have meaning. You put scare quotes around 'terrorism'. Are you saying that Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and a series of small terrorist groups, and a series of individuals did not commit terrorists attacks in Israel?
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?
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This "apartheid" claim never made sense to me. Are people completely ignorant to South African history? Israeli Palestinians are equal citizens. Black people in South Africa couldn't own property, couldn't vote, and often couldn't even live in the same building as white people.
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History has also shown that whenever Jews are in a minority of the population something bad tends to a happen to them.
So a two state solution makes much more sense.
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There has been recent academic research (+ book) about how it's the opposite - Israel relied on foreign intelligence (Club de Berne) for it's most famous operations.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article/140/604-605/777/8140798
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/histor...
You didn't even try with this one
You can choose a secular government with equal rights and opportunities for all or found a theocracy.
That government, and its country, will be destroyed in three days.
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let me add that fucker in the picture who invest in this serviallance was raping babies with epstien make sense to me what side to stand with am aginst raping babies and eat them
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