<story><title>Israel’s lucrative and secretive cybersurveillance industry</title><url>https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-israels-lucrative-and-secretive-cybersurveillance-talent-pipeline/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>andrepd</author><text>&amp;gt; Within the Israeli cyberweapons industry, the totemic name is NSO Group. Its Pegasus technology can purportedly hack a phone without the target even clicking a link. It’s been used to track dissidents, activists, and journalists from Mexico to Morocco. Most infamously, according to a 2018 lawsuit, the Saudi government is alleged to have used Pegasus to hack the phone of a friend of Jamal Khashoggi’s in order to monitor the journalist before his murder.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Behind NSO Group, there are many more. Cellebrite offers services to reconstruct data deleted from devices. NSO’s sister company Circles sells the ability to locate a person’s physical location using only their phone number.&lt;p&gt;Terrifying stuff. All this makes me wonder: nowadays, how are citizens living under oppressive governments ever to conceivably organise any kind of resistance? Such pervasive and all-encompassing surveillance makes it impossible that any kind of opposition can ever be mounted, if citizens can be monitored everywhere at all times. Absolutely depressing stuff.</text></comment>
<story><title>Israel’s lucrative and secretive cybersurveillance industry</title><url>https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-israels-lucrative-and-secretive-cybersurveillance-talent-pipeline/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>helge9210</author><text>&amp;gt; In Israel, tech education can begin as early as middle school&lt;p&gt;Actual selection starts in kindergarden. Various games and activities that select for ability to follow and understand the rules and so on. Results from kindergarden define class distribution in elementary. At the second grade kids do kind of IQ test (0-100). Those who scored 92-95 get selected for one-day-a-week development program. Those with 95-100 get selected to special schools. Every half a year each teacher fills a summary on each kid. The summary is added to general evaluation.&lt;p&gt;By the time, they get to army, it&amp;#x27;s known precisely which unit is the best fit mentally and physically.&lt;p&gt;Drawback of this system: if immigrant kid gets directly into high school without document trail, he is labeled as not smart. Goes directly to the Border Police. There is a special unit within the Border Policy for kids, who are smart and got there by mistake. In general border police are mentally challenged grunts unable to follow complex written instructions (anecdote: my collegue was treating in the field a border police soldier who lost an eye by shooting through the hole with label &amp;quot;Do not shoot through this hole, you&amp;#x27;ll lose an eye&amp;quot;).</text></comment>