Israhell's internet spying and manipulation technology

[yankeedoodle]

Police Spying on Israelis Online via Secret Backdoor
Documents obtained by Haaretz reveal that police have for years required internet providers to allow them to track users or websites through a special system ■ Police do not deny report, say they work in accordance with the law
https://archive.is/z2Ixv#selection-1089.0-1275.272

The police require internet and cellphone providers to give them access to the online data of anyone in Israel or any website, documents obtained by Haaretz and confirmed by sources with knowledge of the technology and its inner workings revealed Sunday.

The police did not respond to Haaretz's questions or request for comment, but also did not deny the existence of such an agreement, published for the first time here and together with the Israeli podcast CyberCyber.

To follow users' online activities, the police demanded in recent years that providers integrate another system into their networks to divert the data of specific users to the police-controlled system. In such a way, specific individuals' activities – be it on their computers or cellphones – passed, unbeknownst to them, to the police's oversight system. The police could thus effectively track the online activity of any Israeli citizen on their radar.

According to the information obtained by Haaretz, the police system goes into effect in two scenarios: First, if police view someone as a suspect, the system will route the suspects' information through the police system. Second, when the police want to know who is visiting a specific website or IP address, they divert all the traffic to that site through the police system.

"The ability to track traffic to different websites is fundamentally different from the ability to track a specific person," one of the sources with knowledge of the technology told Haaretz. "This is a much broader and more severe assault" on individual privacy rights, the source said.

This is the same type of system used by virtual personal networks, or VPNs, which promise to protect users' identity but actually collect the data and sell it off to data brokers. This exploit is called the "man in the middle" by hackers and cybersecurity experts.

"The police are not supposed to operate in the shadows in such a way, and the fact that the Israeli public has no idea that the police have such capabilities is very concerning," said the source.

"This system allows authorities to follow everything someone does online, and even permits them to manipulate the website these users visit," said ethical hacker Noam Rotem, from the CyberCyber podcast. "This system allows tracking of each and every citizen or resident of Israel. But it's not just that; the system is built in such a way that it can also follow intentions or motivations, and not just specific people. For example, it can track everyone who visited the website of the protest movement against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and can even block the real website and change what people are seeing," Rotem said.

"People always talk about China as a technological dystopia, but here we see that we live in one too and we just don't know it," he said.

"A member of Hamas may be presented with the wrong instructions for making a bomb, but a protest activist may be given the wrong location for the carpool to get to a protest," explains Ran Locker, a cybersecurity research and data scientist. "That is the nature of such systems; from the moment they are operational, they tend to be used for every purpose imaginable."