NOVANEWS
Former members of Israeli intelligence work to help crush free speech
Keith Johnson for American Free Press Newspaper
A multinational security firm with ties to Israeli intelligence is providing U.S. law enforcement with intrusive surveillance tools to spy on American citizens and track the movements of political activists.
According to the above-mentioned Rolling Stone article, for-hire intelligence group 3i-MIND has been found peddling their highly advanced data-mining system at various security trade shows and police conferences throughout the nation.
The product, marketed to law enforcement as “OpenMIND,” scours the so-called “deep web”—that 80% of the Internet inaccessible to other search engines—for insights about upcoming demonstrations, identifies and collects information on political activists and monitors their activities in real-time.
“Your insight is distributed to the local police force warning them that the political rally may turn violent and potentially thwarting the violence before it occurs,” says promotional material for the product on the 3i-MIND website.
Very little is revealed about 3i-MIND in the Rolling Stone article. They don’t mention that its founder and CEO is Israeli-born billionaire Mati Kochavi, who made his fortune in real estate after serving as an intelligence operative for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
“Several years ago he became involved in the homeland security field, and this involvement increased after the September 11 attacks in 2001,” reads a 2008 article from Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “He forged contacts within Israel’s military establishment and began hiring high-ranking former officials in the field.”
Kochavi’s companies reportedly employ dozens of former IDF, Mossad and Shin Bet security service officials, including Major General Amos Malka, who headed Israel’s Military Intelligence from 1998-2001.
This isn’t the first time an Israeli-linked company has been implicated in spying on American activists exercising their First Amendment rights. In 2010, public outcry forced the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to end a contract with the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response after it was discovered that the Jerusalem-based intelligence group used the Internet to spy on peaceful protestors and then generated misleading “terror bulletins” on their activities, which were in turn distributed to Pennsylvania law enforcement agencies.
If American citizens are upset that the federal government is eavesdropping on their communications, they should be more than outraged that proxies of an oppressive and untrustworthy foreign nation like Israel are helping their local police departments do the exact same thing.
