(1) https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-toka-the-most-dangerous-i...
From what Ive been seeing over the past couple weeks, the article is probably correct in that pegasus is just the beginning of what we’re going to find out regarding how deep the rabbit hole goes with israeli malware firms, however mint press has a very long history of what may be questionable funding and there have been quite a lot of organizations who have done some pretty well researched investigating that implicates mint press in some pretty nasty propaganda.
Again, I understand how complicated and messy this kind of thing can be, but if you at all value accuracy in your analysis, it would absolutely be worth looking at some of their history regarding incredibly questionable funding and very strange propaganda for certain regimes.
Israel is a tiny country the size of New Jersey, the fact that there will be overlap of people and connections between them is always the case- there's nothing nefarious about it.
Anyway, looking at the author's twitter gives one a good look into what this looks like if taken outside the context of Israel:
https://twitter.com/_whitneywebb?lang=en
She's an anti-vaxxer talking about how the "ruling class" of using COVID to gain control over the population, about hidden FBI assets, and a ton about how the anti-Defmation League, a group that collects data on antisemitism is really a massive spy network.
If it weren't so scary that people believe in it, it might be funny.
There's no reason to put any more credence in her
I keep being contacted several times a year by established Israeli companies to add spyware into my projects. A couple of weeks ago I was offered $5000 as a sign up bonus by Bright Data (formerly Luminati), before that a growth specialist from Similarweb contacted me to gather intelligence about how to aquire Firefox for Android extensions, it was so slimy I've reported the latter to Mozilla employees.
I can't come up with a single country with such a disproportionate amount of shady companies specialized in online tracking and surveillance compared to the small population size.
No one is saying you should be pro-Israel in this instance. But an anti-anything stance should be reasonable and based on facts.
The fact that a country with a very large high tech sector is home to some questionable companies doesn't say much about the country as a whole.
>I can't come up with a single country with such a disproportionate amount of shady companies specialized in online tracking and surveillance compared to the small population size.
That's probably because you're unaware of the size of the Israeli high tech sector, which is completely disproportional to the country's size. From Wikipedia [0]:
> It [Israel] has the second-largest number of startup companies in the world after the United States, and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies after the U.S. and China. American companies such as Intel, Microsoft, and Apple built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel, and other high-tech multi-national corporations, such as IBM, Google, HP, Cisco Systems, Facebook and Motorola have opened R&D centres in the country
Also relevant - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Wadi, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venture_capital_in_Israel
Unfortunately, the more important it is to hold your government to account, the harder it is. I, personally, don't have the strength to do that, for all I talk of it.
Also, please provide actual counterarguments.
"The Israeli Defense Ministry must approve any license to a government that wants to buy it, according to previous NSO statements."
Boomer journalists are pro-Israel and millennial journalists seem to be pro-Palestinian.
In the recent conflict NYT and WaPost were pro-Palestinian unlike the conflict in 2014 when they were neutral. In 2008/2009 they were openly pro-Israel.