by Sean Jobst
8 April 2020
In the previous post, I discussed a tracking app being rolled out by a corporation with links to Israeli military intelligence's Unit 8200 called NSO Group, ostensibly to "track" and "fight" the Coronavirus. Their long track record (pun intended) of providing spyware and malware to various governments to track dissidents reveals a Surveillance State agenda tied into a myriad of Globalist technocratic groups and networks. From a geopolitical standpoint it especially ties into China's Belt and Road Initiative in alliance with Israel, although revealing multiple Globalist power centers as a "multipolar world" becomes the latest face of Globalism. I uncovered many elitist figures within these networks with extensive surveillance and intelligence pasts, which on the surface do not directly connect to our current situation but such is the nature of interconnected networks.
We left off by looking at the Frontier Services Group (FSG), a Hong Kong-based logistics and security company founded by Erik Prince of Blackwater/Xe infamy, and its UAE-based subsidiary Frontier Resource Group (FRG), whose Executive Director Lital Leshem was co-founder of Carbyne and was associated with Israeli hi-tech companies with Chinese investors. The FSG is owned by Chang Zhenming, a Chinese investor and Communist Party secretary who served as chairman of the state-owned "trillion dollar behemoth" Citic Group....that is until he stepped down three weeks ago, and was replaced by Zhu Hexin, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China. No reason was given for this move amidst the current crisis, while Zhu Hexin had been appointed to his bank position in 2018 in what was a vast restructuring for China's state bank to avoid potential financial risks. What are we to make of the timing for both? Simultaneously a Chinese Communist Party secretary, Zhu Hexin had previously been deputy governor of Sichuan Province, and oversaw intensified efforts by the regime to reassert control throughout the vast country.
These include surveillance efforts involving the FSG's activites in Xinjiang. Zhu Hexin's own Sichuan Province has seen intensified draconian controls by the regime exploiting the current crisis. "In the three days I spent cycling through the Sichuan countryside in the early days of the epidemic," writes an American traveler. "I had the opportunity to probe the reaches of the famously all-penetrating Chinese surveillance state, which had been fully activated to stanch spread of the virus. At times it was as Orwellian as I had always imagined....In the past several years, President Xi's campaign to reassert ideological control in the countryside has spurred local officials all over China to reconnect loudspeakers that have lain dormant since the death of Mao." Aside from laying the foundations for these increased surveillance controls, Zhu Hexin presided over establishment of the Sichuan Free Trade Zone which included extensive cooperation with Israeli hi-tech companies - many no doubt founded and staffed by Unit 8200 alumni.
Mercenaries for Hire on the Globalist "Smart Cities" Market
Activities that used to be the preserve of nation-states are outsourced by governments to private entities, including a myriad of corporations operating private armies. They see borders not as natural barriers but as abstractions that can be exploited. If words are spells laden with meanings, the FRG/FSG "frontier" is about providing "natural resource opportunities in frontier markets" in the words of Leshem. Even "natural resources" the elites apply to the population, so that we become the "human resources" to be "mined", which is why this corporation (and others like them) operates private militaries that provide expansive surveillance services on behalf of China and other governments, as much as they provide "security" in mining regions. Its my contention given their links to the NSO Group and other groups that these are the armed wings whose invasive surveillance technology will increasingly be used by the Globalist elites to "manage" the population through various crises and resources. Patterns help us see the current trajectory, how the elites intend to exploit this crisis.
Only months after protests started back in his company's home city of Hong Kong, Erik Prince visited Israel in July 2019 to "meet with start-ups and companies in fields including defense technology, intelligence and foodtech" according to the Jerusalem Post. "Particularly of interest to Prince are the young alumni of elite IDF intelligence unit 8200, who have established a reputation for developing innovative hi-tech start-ups after their release from the army." Among the companies he met with was BlueBird Aero Systems, which just announced this February that it was selling over 150 unmanned drones to European countries. The company sold similar drones to the Chilean Army in 2013. Another company he met with was Axon Vision, "a leader in AI solutions for the defense industry". The company seems connected to the UN Habitat's "Smart Cities" project which enables complete control over a cosmopolitan mercantile city engineered at every level through AI and surveillance technologies.
8 April 2020
In the previous post, I discussed a tracking app being rolled out by a corporation with links to Israeli military intelligence's Unit 8200 called NSO Group, ostensibly to "track" and "fight" the Coronavirus. Their long track record (pun intended) of providing spyware and malware to various governments to track dissidents reveals a Surveillance State agenda tied into a myriad of Globalist technocratic groups and networks. From a geopolitical standpoint it especially ties into China's Belt and Road Initiative in alliance with Israel, although revealing multiple Globalist power centers as a "multipolar world" becomes the latest face of Globalism. I uncovered many elitist figures within these networks with extensive surveillance and intelligence pasts, which on the surface do not directly connect to our current situation but such is the nature of interconnected networks.
We left off by looking at the Frontier Services Group (FSG), a Hong Kong-based logistics and security company founded by Erik Prince of Blackwater/Xe infamy, and its UAE-based subsidiary Frontier Resource Group (FRG), whose Executive Director Lital Leshem was co-founder of Carbyne and was associated with Israeli hi-tech companies with Chinese investors. The FSG is owned by Chang Zhenming, a Chinese investor and Communist Party secretary who served as chairman of the state-owned "trillion dollar behemoth" Citic Group....that is until he stepped down three weeks ago, and was replaced by Zhu Hexin, deputy governor of the People's Bank of China. No reason was given for this move amidst the current crisis, while Zhu Hexin had been appointed to his bank position in 2018 in what was a vast restructuring for China's state bank to avoid potential financial risks. What are we to make of the timing for both? Simultaneously a Chinese Communist Party secretary, Zhu Hexin had previously been deputy governor of Sichuan Province, and oversaw intensified efforts by the regime to reassert control throughout the vast country.
These include surveillance efforts involving the FSG's activites in Xinjiang. Zhu Hexin's own Sichuan Province has seen intensified draconian controls by the regime exploiting the current crisis. "In the three days I spent cycling through the Sichuan countryside in the early days of the epidemic," writes an American traveler. "I had the opportunity to probe the reaches of the famously all-penetrating Chinese surveillance state, which had been fully activated to stanch spread of the virus. At times it was as Orwellian as I had always imagined....In the past several years, President Xi's campaign to reassert ideological control in the countryside has spurred local officials all over China to reconnect loudspeakers that have lain dormant since the death of Mao." Aside from laying the foundations for these increased surveillance controls, Zhu Hexin presided over establishment of the Sichuan Free Trade Zone which included extensive cooperation with Israeli hi-tech companies - many no doubt founded and staffed by Unit 8200 alumni.
 |
| Erik Prince taking on the world, in alliance with his Israeli Unit 8200 partners and Chinese bosses |
Mercenaries for Hire on the Globalist "Smart Cities" Market
Activities that used to be the preserve of nation-states are outsourced by governments to private entities, including a myriad of corporations operating private armies. They see borders not as natural barriers but as abstractions that can be exploited. If words are spells laden with meanings, the FRG/FSG "frontier" is about providing "natural resource opportunities in frontier markets" in the words of Leshem. Even "natural resources" the elites apply to the population, so that we become the "human resources" to be "mined", which is why this corporation (and others like them) operates private militaries that provide expansive surveillance services on behalf of China and other governments, as much as they provide "security" in mining regions. Its my contention given their links to the NSO Group and other groups that these are the armed wings whose invasive surveillance technology will increasingly be used by the Globalist elites to "manage" the population through various crises and resources. Patterns help us see the current trajectory, how the elites intend to exploit this crisis.
Only months after protests started back in his company's home city of Hong Kong, Erik Prince visited Israel in July 2019 to "meet with start-ups and companies in fields including defense technology, intelligence and foodtech" according to the Jerusalem Post. "Particularly of interest to Prince are the young alumni of elite IDF intelligence unit 8200, who have established a reputation for developing innovative hi-tech start-ups after their release from the army." Among the companies he met with was BlueBird Aero Systems, which just announced this February that it was selling over 150 unmanned drones to European countries. The company sold similar drones to the Chilean Army in 2013. Another company he met with was Axon Vision, "a leader in AI solutions for the defense industry". The company seems connected to the UN Habitat's "Smart Cities" project which enables complete control over a cosmopolitan mercantile city engineered at every level through AI and surveillance technologies.
 |
| Social engineering the Globalist cities of the future. "Smart" = Complete centralized control at all levels by a Technocrat elite who have "transcended" humanity, over a dumbed-down population |
One of the leading countries that seem to be on board the UN Habitat's "Smart Cities" program is the United Arab Emirates, which keeps coming up so often in these connections that we have to wonder if indeed these private militaries with their extensive activities in surveillance, cybersecurity, and A.I. are intended to facilitate these hi-tech cities. "Prince has helped provide foreign troops for the army of the United Arab Emirates (whose military is today committing some of the worst abuses in Yemen)," as noted by one source. The main private "security" contractor at the UAE's service in the Yemeni Civil War is the U.S.-based Spear Operations Group of Abraham Golan, a Hungarian-Israeli veteran of the French Foreign Legion who is close to former Mossad chief Danny Yatom, himself founder of a "strategic consultation company" that had been awarded contracts in Iraqi Kurdistan by the same Neocon occupation authorities who hired Blackwater. Abu Dhabi hired Golan through the ruling family's security adviser Mohammed Dahlan, the former Palestinian Fatah leader of Gaza who fled to the UAE after his falling-out with Mahmoud Abbas. Dahlan holds dual Serbian/Montenegrin citizenship (both countries among the manpower sources for these private militaries), attended the Seychelles meeting I mentioned in Part 1 as the Crown Prince's adviser, and had been suspected of being an Israeli agent by other Palestinians.
A company with the ominous name "DarkMatter" was founded by Faisal Al-Bannai, son of a UAE army general and head of the Gulf mobile phones company Axiom Telecom, in Abu Dhabi in 2015. Billing itself as solely a "cyber defense" company, DarkMatter is actually a mass surveillance and hacking front that employed ex-NSA employees on behalf of the UAE according to a Reuters expose. Bannai has been to Israel on business, where he recruited from the usual suspects. "Two recent investigative reports in Hebrew-language media claimed that the United Arab Emirates-based DarkMatter was actively headhunting Unit 8200 graduates," according to the Times of Israel. Those graduates who took the offer of salaries of up to $1 million annually worked in DarkMatter's offices in Cyprus and Singapore, while others worked front jobs at hotels and resorts in Thailand, which could possibly tie in with my own research about Mossad and Chabad activities there.
DarkMatter is a perfect case example of the direct tie-in between global cybersecurity, Unit 8200, Chinese state corporations, and the Communitarian "Smart Cities" agenda. Bannai officially launched the company in a keynote speech at the Arab Future Cities Conference in November 2015. "It presented a vision of smarter, tech-driven cities, which caught the eye of Chinese officials," as Adam Bensaid notes for TRT World. "Smarter cities meant Big Brother-esque widespread surveillance installed throughout the UAE." Their operations were couched in innocent terms such as "cyber network defense" and "secure communication", revealing the same innoculous abuse of language as Communitarian "sustainable development". On 25 April 2017, DarkMatter signed a Global Strategic Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese company Huawei for "Big Data systems" and "Smart City solutions". The Chinese firm's "Smart City" technology "is being trialed in more than 160 cities across 40 countries."
Accused of undermining infrastructure around the world through cyber attacks, Huawei is at the forefront of implementing the Belt and Road Initiative's global tech objectives that hide under the innoculous fronts of "constructing transnational fiber optics" and "synchronizing technological standards" as claimed by a 2015 Chinese government directive. The truth is that these optic fiber cables are built in poorer countries that "makes them highly vulnerable to one-directional information barrage emerging from China as well as to real-time surveillance" as noted by Indian scientist Dr. Chaitanya Giri. The real-time surveillance is completely in keeping with Huawei's past projects, including Ecuador's ECU 911 system which the Chinese company billed as a "national emergency system" but according to sources familiar with the project, actually entailed "4,500 surveillance cameras - some equipped with facial recognition technology, routers, wireless access points, network switches and wireless access controllers." Former Chinese leader Hu Jintao drew up a 2050 long-term strategic plan based on dominance in global communications through inserting Chinese-made components in communications intersections. This gives China control over these infrastructures, perhaps a "backdoor" through software similar to what I earlier documented about chip technology.
Huawei's surveillance is at the heart of the "Smart Cities" project, such as their placing more than 10,000 cameras in Kazakhstan's capital of Astana which, like the projects in the UAE are touted as a model for future "Smart Cities". Such projects are a defining feature of the Belt and Road Initiative, as cited by the Indian journalist Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury in an informative piece for The Economic Times: "BRI involves China's version of smart city. In 2015 China's State Information Centre published a research paper detailing how construction of smart cities could help BRI. The paper lauded Huawei and ZTE for undertaking an important role in building 'smart cities' in other countries. In May 2017, at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, President Xi Jinping reiterated the importance of building smart cities under OBOR [One Belt, One Road, another name for the BRI]." Huawei's website describes a "complex mesh of systems across sectors" which, comparing them to the human nervous system, can provide "real-time situation reporting and analysis that combines cloud computing, IoT [Internet of things], Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)."
The "complex mesh of systems" integrated as one fits the same model as the UN Agenda 2030 whose vision is remarkably similar to China's model. The brainchild of Israeli sociologist (and Haganah member) Amitai Etzioni, the Smart Cities' ideology of Communitarianism is truly a Hegelian synthesis neatly fitting the Chinese regime's model of a Communist bureaucracy married to Capitalist endeavors. Little surprise that the UN-Habitat has partnered with China's Smart Cities project. Huawei's mechanistic comparison of these electronic systems to the human nervous system fits in with the Transhumanism that seems like an obsession to many Globalist elites. The "reporting and analysis" will clearly be overseen by some entity, so no matter how much they try to sell it as "safe" or "smart", its nothing but a mass surveillance agenda as with China's own domestic "Great Fire Wall" and Frontier Service-built detention camps. China's extensive network of informants also fits in with Agenda 2030's division of people into "assets" or "problems". The "asset" model may be like those who inform upon their neighbors and other people to the authorities during this era of "quarantines" and "lockdowns", so perhaps another way Coronavirus is being exploited: Not so much a forced top-down control, but more a way of changes in the culture and how people relate to and interact with each other, restructuring communities to create the social conditions.
Although some in Israel have raised the same concerns about Huawei's 5G networks as other countries, it hasn't stopped Huawei from opening a R&D (Research & Development) Center in Israel in 2009. This local subsidiary is called Toga Networks and is one of the many companies suspected of US technology transfers to China via Israel, as noted by the Wall Street Journal. "Toga‘s hiring practices raise even more concerns, as many of the company‘s engineers previously served in elite Israeli army units focused on interception and encryption technology," according to an analysis by RWR Advisory Group. Among Toga Networks' Unit 8200 alumni are Computer Vision Developer Shahar Ben Ezra among others as a perusal of their LinkedIn pages reveal as a matter of public record. There is growing awareness in many countries about Huawei's role in building 5G towers, but these links to Unit 8200 and "Smart Cities" should likewise concern people. The firm's own website touts its endorsement of Agenda 2030 and incorporating its "Sustainable Development" into its own operations.
DarkMatter actively recruited workers from major tech giants, such as QualComm, a cellphone technology company which invested in Israeli cybersecurity firm Team8, founded by three Unit 8200 alumni. QualComm's founder and chairman emeritus, Irwin M. Jacobs, is a Zionist who was an early investor in many Israeli hi-tech startups. His transfer of American innovation and technology to Israel includes establishing many R&D centers, and donating $133 million towards the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute, which includes many Unit 8200-founded companies. "I am very proud to see so many companies and organizations that joined our initiative and worked together to secure the next generation of innovation in Israeli high tech," Jacobs boasted to the Times of Israel. When DarkMatter unsuccessfully sought to recruit Italian security researcher Simone Margaritelli, creator of the anti-hacking security tool Bettercap, he was interviewed in Dubai by "a former employee of another controversial surveillance company, Verint."
Verint was founded by former Israeli intelligence officer Jacob "Kobi" Alexander as a subsidiary of New York-based Comverse Technology in 1984. Charged with stock trading irregularities in 2006, he fled the U.S. to Namibia where he was helped by Lev Leviev, the oligarch whose activities I documented in Part 1. Verint/Comverse provides extensive monitoring and intercept capabilities to governments and service providers worldwide. Former Unit 8200 commander Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen told Forbes in 2007 that Comverse's "Logger" technology program was based on Unit 8200 technology. "Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government," according to an informative expose by writer Christopher Ketcham. "50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade." Investigative reporter James Bamford documented how Verizon's eavesdropping program was run by Verint, as well as the Israeli firm's role in running warrantless wiretapping of Americans on behalf of the NSA. "Many of the [eavesdropping] technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by [Unit 8200] veterans," Gefen revealed to Haaretz in 2000. Former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi has exposed possibilities of a "trojan" backdoor within these technologies that would give these Unit 8200-founded Israeli companies access to the secure systems.
The main point to make is such technologies selling themselves for one purpose often hold a darker agenda - and this is no more true than some of the technologies and tracking apps that will increasingly be pushed using claims of "tracking" or "fighting" Coronavirus. For that matter, why were hedge fund traders suddenly selling more Verint stocks within the months leading up to the current crisis? This came on the heels of Verint's sudden announcement in December 2019 that it would split into two companies, even while buying up two smaller cyber surveillance companies around the same time. I don't fully know what to make of these suspicious moves, but suspect that with such Unit 8200 companies shifting and morphing in other forms, there is something to watch for. On 31st December 2019, Calcalist’s Forecasts 2020 Conference was held in Tel Aviv, bringing together "some of Israel's most notable figures in politics, business, and the defense sector" to discuss "how will Israel face the financial, social, political, and environmental challenges in its path, both locally and globally." One of the sponsors of the Conference was Psagot Investment House, whose CEO Barak Soreni "did his compulsory military service in Unit 8200, the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence unit that has produced some of the country’s top high-tech entrepreneurs and chief executives." One of the participants was Mati Kochavi, founder/owner of the Zurich-based IoT company AGT International, whose activities in "Smart Cities" surveillance deserves attention.
Having done his own military service in "intelligence" (which could possibly mean Unit 8200), Kochavi's various cybersecurity and surveillance companies are staffed with Mossad, Shin Bet and Unit 8200 personnel, including his consultant Major General Amos Malka, who headed Israeli Military Intelligence from 1998 to 2001. Among Kochavi's companies are AGT, Vocativ, Logic Industries, Sentry Technology Group, and Moonscape Ventures. The billionaire's activities parallel many ventures I've discussed in this series, making a fortune in real estate he then invested in "the homeland security field" after 9/11. His other activities includes arms-dealing, and a Manhattan-based online media site called Vocativ which seems more akin to Cambridge Analytica than a simple news outlet. "Amazed that two key global events - the 2008 economic crisis and the Arab Spring - erupted without anyone predicting them," Haaretz said in an expose about Vocativ, "Kochavi says he decided to look into ways of predicting such events. His solution was to find a way of discovering what hundreds of millions of people were thinking by mining social media networks and smartphones using 'Big Data' technology." A recurring theme we have seen throughout is an appeal to "predicting crises" covering an impulse to manage and manipulate these crises.
AGT's worldwide operations include installing "security systems" for electrical grids, urban monitoring systems in Singapore, and "flood management" in China and the Netherlands. Kochavi based AGT in Switzerland so he could do more public business in the Arab world, especially the UAE where its $800 million contract involved surveillance cameras, electronic fences and sensors to "monitor strategic infrastructure and oil fields", and providing both cyber defense shields and drones. The overarching surveillance system is linked by "thousands of cameras spread across the city, as well as thousands of other cameras installed at facilities and buildings in the emirate," according to the Abu Dhabi Monitoring and Control Centre. Built from 2007 to 2016, the resulting "Falcon Eye" system "comprises a network of cameras, sensors, and artificial intelligence platforms that provide everything from traffic control to intimate surveillance data", according to an analysis by the AIPAC-linked Washington Institute. Under the name 4D Security Solutions, Kochavi is involved in the UAE's "Smart Cities" just as other Israeli firms have invested in Saudi Arabia's futuristic tech city NEOM. These expansive surveillance systems are their defining feature and raise serious questions, as we will see in Part 3 in relation to how the Coronavirus is being exploited to slowly promote "tracking apps" and other surveillance technologies, as well as other objectives. .....
DarkMatter is a perfect case example of the direct tie-in between global cybersecurity, Unit 8200, Chinese state corporations, and the Communitarian "Smart Cities" agenda. Bannai officially launched the company in a keynote speech at the Arab Future Cities Conference in November 2015. "It presented a vision of smarter, tech-driven cities, which caught the eye of Chinese officials," as Adam Bensaid notes for TRT World. "Smarter cities meant Big Brother-esque widespread surveillance installed throughout the UAE." Their operations were couched in innocent terms such as "cyber network defense" and "secure communication", revealing the same innoculous abuse of language as Communitarian "sustainable development". On 25 April 2017, DarkMatter signed a Global Strategic Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese company Huawei for "Big Data systems" and "Smart City solutions". The Chinese firm's "Smart City" technology "is being trialed in more than 160 cities across 40 countries."
 |
| Belt and Road Initiative: The marriage of Israeli technology with Chinese markets over the world |
Huawei's surveillance is at the heart of the "Smart Cities" project, such as their placing more than 10,000 cameras in Kazakhstan's capital of Astana which, like the projects in the UAE are touted as a model for future "Smart Cities". Such projects are a defining feature of the Belt and Road Initiative, as cited by the Indian journalist Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury in an informative piece for The Economic Times: "BRI involves China's version of smart city. In 2015 China's State Information Centre published a research paper detailing how construction of smart cities could help BRI. The paper lauded Huawei and ZTE for undertaking an important role in building 'smart cities' in other countries. In May 2017, at the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, President Xi Jinping reiterated the importance of building smart cities under OBOR [One Belt, One Road, another name for the BRI]." Huawei's website describes a "complex mesh of systems across sectors" which, comparing them to the human nervous system, can provide "real-time situation reporting and analysis that combines cloud computing, IoT [Internet of things], Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)."
The "complex mesh of systems" integrated as one fits the same model as the UN Agenda 2030 whose vision is remarkably similar to China's model. The brainchild of Israeli sociologist (and Haganah member) Amitai Etzioni, the Smart Cities' ideology of Communitarianism is truly a Hegelian synthesis neatly fitting the Chinese regime's model of a Communist bureaucracy married to Capitalist endeavors. Little surprise that the UN-Habitat has partnered with China's Smart Cities project. Huawei's mechanistic comparison of these electronic systems to the human nervous system fits in with the Transhumanism that seems like an obsession to many Globalist elites. The "reporting and analysis" will clearly be overseen by some entity, so no matter how much they try to sell it as "safe" or "smart", its nothing but a mass surveillance agenda as with China's own domestic "Great Fire Wall" and Frontier Service-built detention camps. China's extensive network of informants also fits in with Agenda 2030's division of people into "assets" or "problems". The "asset" model may be like those who inform upon their neighbors and other people to the authorities during this era of "quarantines" and "lockdowns", so perhaps another way Coronavirus is being exploited: Not so much a forced top-down control, but more a way of changes in the culture and how people relate to and interact with each other, restructuring communities to create the social conditions.
 |
| The UN's own graphic illustrates how far-reaching are the areas of control through"Sustainable Development" |
Although some in Israel have raised the same concerns about Huawei's 5G networks as other countries, it hasn't stopped Huawei from opening a R&D (Research & Development) Center in Israel in 2009. This local subsidiary is called Toga Networks and is one of the many companies suspected of US technology transfers to China via Israel, as noted by the Wall Street Journal. "Toga‘s hiring practices raise even more concerns, as many of the company‘s engineers previously served in elite Israeli army units focused on interception and encryption technology," according to an analysis by RWR Advisory Group. Among Toga Networks' Unit 8200 alumni are Computer Vision Developer Shahar Ben Ezra among others as a perusal of their LinkedIn pages reveal as a matter of public record. There is growing awareness in many countries about Huawei's role in building 5G towers, but these links to Unit 8200 and "Smart Cities" should likewise concern people. The firm's own website touts its endorsement of Agenda 2030 and incorporating its "Sustainable Development" into its own operations.
DarkMatter actively recruited workers from major tech giants, such as QualComm, a cellphone technology company which invested in Israeli cybersecurity firm Team8, founded by three Unit 8200 alumni. QualComm's founder and chairman emeritus, Irwin M. Jacobs, is a Zionist who was an early investor in many Israeli hi-tech startups. His transfer of American innovation and technology to Israel includes establishing many R&D centers, and donating $133 million towards the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute, which includes many Unit 8200-founded companies. "I am very proud to see so many companies and organizations that joined our initiative and worked together to secure the next generation of innovation in Israeli high tech," Jacobs boasted to the Times of Israel. When DarkMatter unsuccessfully sought to recruit Italian security researcher Simone Margaritelli, creator of the anti-hacking security tool Bettercap, he was interviewed in Dubai by "a former employee of another controversial surveillance company, Verint."
Verint was founded by former Israeli intelligence officer Jacob "Kobi" Alexander as a subsidiary of New York-based Comverse Technology in 1984. Charged with stock trading irregularities in 2006, he fled the U.S. to Namibia where he was helped by Lev Leviev, the oligarch whose activities I documented in Part 1. Verint/Comverse provides extensive monitoring and intercept capabilities to governments and service providers worldwide. Former Unit 8200 commander Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen told Forbes in 2007 that Comverse's "Logger" technology program was based on Unit 8200 technology. "Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government," according to an informative expose by writer Christopher Ketcham. "50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade." Investigative reporter James Bamford documented how Verizon's eavesdropping program was run by Verint, as well as the Israeli firm's role in running warrantless wiretapping of Americans on behalf of the NSA. "Many of the [eavesdropping] technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by [Unit 8200] veterans," Gefen revealed to Haaretz in 2000. Former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi has exposed possibilities of a "trojan" backdoor within these technologies that would give these Unit 8200-founded Israeli companies access to the secure systems.
 |
| Mati Kochavi and Bill Clinton discussing hi-tech future in a "Borderless World". |
The main point to make is such technologies selling themselves for one purpose often hold a darker agenda - and this is no more true than some of the technologies and tracking apps that will increasingly be pushed using claims of "tracking" or "fighting" Coronavirus. For that matter, why were hedge fund traders suddenly selling more Verint stocks within the months leading up to the current crisis? This came on the heels of Verint's sudden announcement in December 2019 that it would split into two companies, even while buying up two smaller cyber surveillance companies around the same time. I don't fully know what to make of these suspicious moves, but suspect that with such Unit 8200 companies shifting and morphing in other forms, there is something to watch for. On 31st December 2019, Calcalist’s Forecasts 2020 Conference was held in Tel Aviv, bringing together "some of Israel's most notable figures in politics, business, and the defense sector" to discuss "how will Israel face the financial, social, political, and environmental challenges in its path, both locally and globally." One of the sponsors of the Conference was Psagot Investment House, whose CEO Barak Soreni "did his compulsory military service in Unit 8200, the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence unit that has produced some of the country’s top high-tech entrepreneurs and chief executives." One of the participants was Mati Kochavi, founder/owner of the Zurich-based IoT company AGT International, whose activities in "Smart Cities" surveillance deserves attention.
Having done his own military service in "intelligence" (which could possibly mean Unit 8200), Kochavi's various cybersecurity and surveillance companies are staffed with Mossad, Shin Bet and Unit 8200 personnel, including his consultant Major General Amos Malka, who headed Israeli Military Intelligence from 1998 to 2001. Among Kochavi's companies are AGT, Vocativ, Logic Industries, Sentry Technology Group, and Moonscape Ventures. The billionaire's activities parallel many ventures I've discussed in this series, making a fortune in real estate he then invested in "the homeland security field" after 9/11. His other activities includes arms-dealing, and a Manhattan-based online media site called Vocativ which seems more akin to Cambridge Analytica than a simple news outlet. "Amazed that two key global events - the 2008 economic crisis and the Arab Spring - erupted without anyone predicting them," Haaretz said in an expose about Vocativ, "Kochavi says he decided to look into ways of predicting such events. His solution was to find a way of discovering what hundreds of millions of people were thinking by mining social media networks and smartphones using 'Big Data' technology." A recurring theme we have seen throughout is an appeal to "predicting crises" covering an impulse to manage and manipulate these crises.
AGT's worldwide operations include installing "security systems" for electrical grids, urban monitoring systems in Singapore, and "flood management" in China and the Netherlands. Kochavi based AGT in Switzerland so he could do more public business in the Arab world, especially the UAE where its $800 million contract involved surveillance cameras, electronic fences and sensors to "monitor strategic infrastructure and oil fields", and providing both cyber defense shields and drones. The overarching surveillance system is linked by "thousands of cameras spread across the city, as well as thousands of other cameras installed at facilities and buildings in the emirate," according to the Abu Dhabi Monitoring and Control Centre. Built from 2007 to 2016, the resulting "Falcon Eye" system "comprises a network of cameras, sensors, and artificial intelligence platforms that provide everything from traffic control to intimate surveillance data", according to an analysis by the AIPAC-linked Washington Institute. Under the name 4D Security Solutions, Kochavi is involved in the UAE's "Smart Cities" just as other Israeli firms have invested in Saudi Arabia's futuristic tech city NEOM. These expansive surveillance systems are their defining feature and raise serious questions, as we will see in Part 3 in relation to how the Coronavirus is being exploited to slowly promote "tracking apps" and other surveillance technologies, as well as other objectives. .....
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