Hundreds of former Israeli surveillance agents hold top roles at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon

Veterans of Israel's Intelligence Unit 8200 take their 'surveillance experiment in Palestine' to the broader world.

According to professional profiles on LinkedIn, the outlet reported that Google currently employs, at a minimum, 99 former Unit 8200 agents and Microsoft retains the services of 166 such veterans.

And as journalist Alan MacLeod explained, these numbers certainly underestimate the collaboration between these big tech corporations and this Israeli intelligence unit as these numbers do not include former employees or those without LinkedIn accounts, or those who maintain such profiles but have obeyed Israeli military law that requires them to conceal their affiliation with this special unit.

Such a significant association is relevant because Unit 8200 has been described as “Israel’s NSA,” and has been linked to the development of repressive surveillance methods, first against the indigenous Palestinian people and then for cutting-edge technologies that have been used to spy on tens of thousands of notable individuals across the globe.

Though often overlooked in the West, there exists an overwhelming world consensus of international law that favors the Palestinian cause for a free and sovereign state “within internationally agreed borders” (source). The Catholic Bishops of the Holy Land, along with the Holy See, have unanimously and consistently joined their voices to this cause demanding the Israeli government “put an end to the [illegal military] occupation” of Palestinian territory, including their ongoing confiscation of land, the demolition of homes, the building of illegal settlements, and the detention of political prisoners.

With regard to specific acts of oppression being committed by Unit 8200, a group of 43 reservists from the Israeli unit issued an open letter in 2014 to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu notifying him and other military superiors that they would no longer serve in this regiment due to its “political persecution” of the Palestinian people.

“We refuse to take part in actions against Palestinians and refuse to continue serving as tools in deepening the military control over the Occupied Territories,” the reservists wrote. “Our military service has taught us that intelligence is an integral part of Israel’s military occupation over the territories.”

Like Jeffrey Epstein, who was allegedly also an Israeli spy who collected incriminating information on powerful men for the purpose of extortion, MacLeod explains that Unit 8200 used “big data to compile dossiers on huge numbers of the indigenous domestic population, including their medical history, sex lives, and search histories, in order that it could be used for extortion later.”