It has been trained on decades of Palestinians crossing check points, some being Hamas camouflaging with beards, glasses and what not.
Also the data it's fed for third party customers is as flawless as it can be: if you ever took an international flight your biometrics are fully recorded and available to virtually every agency in the world.
If you're walking in a random mall on the other end of the world, even if you have no phone, you have covered your tracks and you're wearing a hat and glasses, etc, you are going to be recognized by the software if a camera gets even a mediocre shot at you.
Compound this with all the information people put online on their own on socials, you're gonna be tracked and recognized, whether you want it or no.
What does "virtually error free" mean? There's no "error free" in facial recognition, or any other application of machine learning.
More to the point, who says all this, besides yourself in this thread? Why should anyone believe that "virtually error free" is a factual description of real technological capabilities rather than state propaganda?
edit : i think their tech is overhyped. Remember the signal-chats debacle last year where the National Security Advisor was photographed using a modified client of Signal by Israeli company TeleMessage. And immediately after, TeleMessage was hacked, and it was revealed that all the chats were transmitted and stored in plain-text. They still managed to get their backup-spyware installed at the highest levels of the US government and military. It looks like they have great sales teams.
Also I mean you and I can recognize people we know. A surveillance camera has millions of sensors sampling every ~50 ms. It’s plausible.
Similarly this would make things like evading law enforcement pretty much impossible, while in reality there are countless people, at least thousands, who have been photographed in relation to e.g. a crime, but never found, and never identified.
So even after "there's a child sex trafficking island where all the elites have gone to party for decades" you're still skeptical of that claim? Knowing about Mossad operations? With Bibi on the record saying
> Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank
With most of the world's spyware, including Pegasus and NSO group, having hailed from Israel?
It's not "going down a very dark rabbit hole", it's the by far most likely option and therefore your whole comment makes no sense, presuming the much less likely option.
If we're still not at the point where we stop being this naive, my god..
That is a naive statement given that 75% of the world's population identifies with an established religion, and each of those have evidence free beliefs such as virgin birth, reincarnation, the existence of hell, etc.
Approximately what year did this start?
Pretty extreme bar your setting. I would think most people would agree it could still have extremely (and surprisingly) potent accuracy and still fail in this case. I wouldn't expect facial recognition to work in a case when there is little to no face to work with... if that guy came dressed like that to any airport or mall he would've been detained immediately.
> 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.
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.
Let’s just say I’m even more of a fan of EU digital infrastructure moving to strictly EU countries, no outside traffic allowed.
Well until press found out that they had tapped into Obamas encrypted phone calls while flying in the AF1 for a long time.
After all you have to admit that getting killed is more serious than getting starved...
Northern and Western European states tend to use American products, but the difference between "American", "Israeli", "Czech", and "Indian" blurs because of how much overlap the industry has transnationally.
Italy, Czechia, Poland, and Netherlands all have significant domestic capacity in the space as well, but a large portion of it is via American and Israeli tech.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-spyware-probe-slams-gover...
[1] - https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-national-secur...
The Italian Carabinieri bought Paragon even though they can't legally use it, because mass surveillance is obviously illegal and against our constitution.
And yet, nothing's being done.
The fact that the US can continue to economically do so well relative to others despite currently being run by some of the stupidest and most abhorrent people possible is... sad.
It's not sad, it's strong evidence (I hesitate to call it proof, but...) that a federated model of governance with limited regulation is the most resilient and successful form of government.
All the EU states need to do is learn that regulation is not the solution to every theoretical problem any bureaucrat can imagine, and they too can experience meaningful economic growth.
On the intelligence front, Mossad does a wonderful job performing extra-judicial killings using the dirtiest tricks you could think of. They’re also very good partners: almost every counter-intelligence outfit sings their praises.
Step 1: Get 6 million of you systematically eradicated in Europe and hundreds of thousands more booted from their homes in the Middle East for "reasons".
Step 2: Build yourself a country so no one can throw you out again.
Step 3: Get attacked by the countries who threw you out for "reasons".
Step 4: Get accused of "aggression".
People's continued downplay and revisionism of Jewish and Israeli history is truly something to behold.
Step 2: Build a country out of Lego- I mean, gradually settle an existing, populated area of the Levant - Palestine - and then have daddy Britain and later big daddy USA forcibly carve out a chunk of the land without input from the natives. And no, it was not a UN partition plan because most of the world was still colonized at the time.
Step 3: Take advantage of the obvious discontent with this move by the natives and activate Plan Dalet to take even more of the land. After all, the land granted by the partition plan is not enough.
Step 4: War starts with neighboring countries, partly to disrupt the ethnic cleansing campaign against a mostly defenseless population, but also to satisfy their own expansionist aims (esp. Transjordan).
The people who fled Europe or forced out of the Middle East purchased empty lands, dried marshes, planted forests, installed infrastructure, sown fields, built cities and created a democracy to govern themselves. Incidentally, some purchased lands had squatters from Syria, Jordan, Arabia, etc., who lived on lands they did not own. Bye bye and boo hoo.
Seven different armies invaded Israel on its day of foundation. Seven armies got wrecked. Entire countries with billions of people keep crying about it, going so far as making the destruction of Israel an official goal, in some countries even actual laws! No conspiracy theories, no "Plan Dalet" and other bullshit your Hamas friends told you about, their real, actual goals stated right in your face.
This rhetoric circles back to the self-victimization complex btw.
This women is in a trench just for fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_War#...
But they sure love to claim that they were at the cusp of elimination at various points - again, the self-victimization complex in action :)
I think actually they are in a bit of panic mode because the US might want to get out from the ME and focus on China. They want a guarantee that Iran won't be able to come on its foot again in at least 10 years. That's all my guess, though.
Maybe by starting to behave as if the Palestinian population that live on the territory they control have equal rights? Like stopping West Bank colonization projects?
Israel claims to be threatened by its neighbors. Israel claims to want peace with countries in the region. Neighboring countries have repeatedly stated that a precondition to normalization is a just solution for Palestinians. But Israel does not want a just solution.
In other words, the problem is entirely self-inflicted. Israel wants peace, but without making any concessions on the issue of Palestine. So instead it pursues a system of “peace through violence” - just like it does in the West Bank and Gaza.
Besides, Israel has since made peace with Egypt and Jordan.
Start here, and then work your way both forwards and backwards if you have any interest in learning.
Certainly the common practice of looting civilian homes and posting about it on social media implies something about their infantry.
And they were punished for it rather than celebrated and their families paid a wage for life...
How's that different from the US? half of the big players started as three letters agency side projects
Are Japanese people “from” China? Is Japanese cuisine therefore part of Chinese or Korean cuisine?
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-ehud-barak-le...
Israel paid 2.3 Billion for their F-35, but the US committed to buy 4 Billion from Israel defense firms, so concluding with a net positive of +1.25 Billion for Israel economy....all at the cost to the US tax payer. :-)
"F-35I Adir: Israel’s Custom F-35 That No Other Nation Has" - https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/04/f-35i-adir-israels-custo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...
Sounds like a decent deal to me.
You aren't burning money, you're getting services and technologies.
It's just friends buying from friends.
Source that a large proportion of founders/employees are actually American/British? The more believable claim is that such Israeli startups are US/UK backed, but that's not as damning as it sounds, because US/UK is the finance hub, so thats where you expect funding to come from, rather than "colonialism foreign base" or whatever.
Which makes the failure of October 7th even more striking. It's insane Israeli leadership hasn't paid for this.
So the Palestinians and Arabs thought a hundred years ago. It served them badly.
It’s not that US/UK and others don’t get anything out of the relationship, as you note. But the arrows have been mostly pointing the other way for a long time. Trump and his background, as well as Epstein/Mandelson/McSweeney/Labour are just the latest, blatant examples of how this works.
Not to claim that Israel is the land of saintly virtues - but if your news sources are inclined toward tech or polarized left/right politic, they make sure that's what you see. Wouldn't matter if 99.9% of actual Israeli startups were working to build better home bagel-makers, or gene-engineering perfect breeds of salmon for lox.
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?
My take is that this is probably a test account.
Like, I have Threema installed, even though none of my contacts use it. But if one does happen to use it in the future, I'm reachable if necessary.
In China, it can be illegal to even talk about changing the status quo.
When I see people on the internet saying things like: "Yeah screw the US, we just made a deal with China!" I wonder how oblivious they are to the domestic conditions in China.
But I think this is more about China wasting resources on trivial things while the US wisely focuses on more important things /s.
Did your sarcasm include that sentence?
If not, I suggest you stop doom scrolling. You don't really believe this? That would be wild.
This surveillance tech is a real problem--it's making everyone unsafe and should be regulated. I know its too convenient and useful for government/big companies so it'll never happen...but it should
The other thing is that people willingly buy phones full of spyware. E.g. quite many Samsung models have the Israeli AppCloud installed (supposedly to recommend applications):
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/budget-samsun...
Even though AppCloud itself may be for recommendations it apparently mines a lot of data and each such background application, it is another potential attack vector, and I suppose that the Isreali government can compel the company to use their software for different purposes (not sure).
In contrast to what some news articles state, some Samsung models sold in Europe also have it and nobody seems to really care about it (nor the persistent Meta services, etc.).
The other parts layered defense, reducing the number of privileged/non-sandboxed applications/processes, not shipping spyware/adware, etc.
Only Apple/GrapheneOS and to a slightly lesser extend Google Pixel are good at this. Many phone manufacturers still use the TrustZone TEE on the main CPU (rather than a separate security processor), isolated radios, hardware memory tagging, and dozens of other defense-in-depth features.
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"?
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.
If paranoid, use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45763674
"Cohen (former head of Mossad) insisted that the publicly recognized success against Hezbollah was merely one element of a far wider, systematic deployment of sophisticated devices worldwide, although notably abscent in the Gaza Strip."
And his limiting it to "virtually every potential theater" would suggest that it's mostly present in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, most likely Iraq as well.
But let's be honest here, this isn't civilian equipment that's been compromised. It's supply chain attacks where the buyer is manipulated into buying goods that they've tampered with, or re-engineered. They weren't pagers anyone could pick up at Radio Shack. (Everyone who got hit was a target, or a direct relative of a target.)
Also, lets be clear and admit that if your notion of "target" is "anyone close to a device I sold years ago", you're not the type of person that cares if the balled up paper made it to the trash can: so long as it left your hand you would be satisfied.
Except we don't know. "virtually every potential theater" is intentionally very vague language that could mean anything.
Besides, if I was in a terrorist cell, had a pager for communicating, and was taking a vacation flight, I think I might leave that pager behind for a week.
They weren't flagged because they went into Lebanon which has very little import security, and because it was a supply chain attack.
The batteries were swapped for a combination battery / explosive charge. The follow-up attack where Hezbollah moved to using walkie-talkies that were also rigged to explode was the real shocker, though.
No
So you may be safe today, what happens when they don't like your opinion ?
I only know pegasus broke iOS.
I find it interesting that Apple has spun Lockdown mode from a 'we are terrible at security' into a feature for marketing.
Now when someone gets hacked Apple can say: "Well they weren't in lockdown mode, its their own fault."
Gosh I wish I was as good at marketing as Apple. They really need to sell their marketing team as a service. If they did that, I'd buy their stock outright.
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/14344-cellebrite-premium-ju...
iOS generally seems harder than non-GrapheneOS Android, taking a few months for Cellebrite to catch up with. All the other Android phones/variants should make people cry because device security is so bad.
While true in general, super apps that do too many things and used by billions (WhatsApp, Chrome, TikTok, Instagram, CleanMaster etc) are big enough of an attack surface already.
Defenses (compile-time / runtime memory safety & control flow integrity, media coders/decoders, sandboxes, for example) are getting better & so exploits are getting expensive.
> use a different device to access suspicios apps/sites with nothing on it
While using different devices is good enough, it requires the end user to maintain strict isolation (and sometimes may require appropriate features from the OS). Using burners is an extreme version of this practice.
One of these are not like the others...
You can't trust software not to be buggy and both, hardware, and software not to be purposely compromised because "think of the children" (that the EFs proved to be BS).
At the same time Israel has world renowned success of thwarting terrorist plots, and best in class intelligence shared with other countries (like the many, many, terrorist attacks stopped in European capitals thanks to Israeli intelligence).
You can choose either surveillance, or terrorism.
When you end apartheid, you end 'terrorism' (legal and ethical resistance against having your life, land, and water stolen). History shows this to be possible, preferable, and moral.
So a two state solution makes much more sense.
"History has also shown that whenever Mizrahi Jews are a minority relative to Ashkenazi Jews something bad tends to a happen to them"
What now mupuff? Is it because they tainted by their Arab blood?
I could do this all day with random minorities, but it's not a refutation of my argument.
'Single supreme race' states are evil. The Antebellum South was one of the most evil places ever to exist and functioned on the exact same terms. There was a civil war, and we settled on a one state solution. The only mistake was not fully purging the slavers from positions of power and stopping reconstruction.
Racial/Ethnic/Religious caste systems are a race to the bottom. They are a suicidal purity cult.
I should note that you are factually wrong. Jews have very rarely been an ethnic majority, yet many cultures have managed to not genocide them throughout history. This includes middle eastern countries prior to the Nakba. Don't project out the utterly imperial eurocentric 'pograms are inevitiable' and 'arabs are all that same, and are savages' viewpoint out onto every civilizations.
European empires created or exacerbated divisions in peaceful populations as a means of colonial control. This is well documented and intentional. Zionism as a project is very very British, they wrote their plans down! Same as they did in South Africa. Same as they did in Ireland.
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...
The current DOJ dump seems to not even be half of all the documents they have available, so don't think we can know for sure yet when the first contact was.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01775... mentions in 2011 for example a meeting with Barak, so who knows when the "first visit to the island" really was.
You might be right, I just don't think we know for sure yet.
those companies have very little technical know how. they are just money movers. they buy zero days and package them in a (likely insecure) dashboard.
now with PE and growth demand, they have to advertise something that is hard to advertise. hence these "slip ups" and articles.
But yeah I don't think its anything too surprising about buying exploits and packaging them.
I think the article is more of a commentary on how these companies can exist in the open, where as a teenage hacker goes to jail for stuff like this.
Why hasnt this been used for stealing Crypto?
Is there evidence Android OS has been compromised? (I know Samsung phones had an issue)
Is there any evidence a Fedora, Debian-family, or linux has been compromised?
Because the information obtained is much more valuable than imaginary tokens.
> Is there evidence Android OS has been compromised? (I know Samsung phones had an issue)
I assume every OS can be compromised by a determined adversary.
> Is there any evidence a Fedora, Debian-family, or linux has been compromised?
I'm not sure what evidence you would need, but see above.
But also, imaginary tokens are really really valuable. I'm sure there are normal-ish people with ~100-1000 bitcoin, let alone a few of the outspoken people who are bitcoin billionaires.
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.
