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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

In The Shadow Factory (written after the Klein leaks but before Snowden), Bamford notes that a lot of surveillance equipment comes from Israel. I don't know much about Israeli culture but it may be significantly different from the US.

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I am at the openstack conference right now. My colleague was talking in hebrew to a lot of folks the past few days. I said to him jokingly "Where did all these Israeli's come from that are here"

His reply: "Dude, all this shit comes out of Israel! its the whole tech/NSA bullshit used against the palestinians!"

It was a casual comment - but very interesting in that its a foregone conclusion that the surveillance state is just a function of the culture of Israeli tech development.

Highly self-aggrandizing. I think the most that can be said is that it's a highly symbiotic relationship between .us/.il.

As an (ex-) Israeli with no inside information I'd say the NSA is probably way ahead of Israel on this and wouldn't need or use any Israeli knowledge or equipment. I'd also say traditionally Israel relies on human intelligence while the US on signal intelligence. In terms of commercial surveillance equipment I'm sure there's a lot on the market from lots of countries.

I'm not implying anything, but there are some large Israeli companies which have access to lots of data or provide surveillance or spy tech; Narus, Trusteer, Amdocs, Comverse, Verint, to name a few.

Some equipment might come from Israel (it's just guessing though), but I do not like your implicit hinting that Israeli developers are somehow less moral than U.S developers (because of "cultural" differences?) - especially since you don't know much about it. You seem to be forgetting which government and agency is at the center of this debacle, don't try to share the blame on other nations or cultures for developing those spying system

He isn't saying Israel is less moral at all. The book mentioned above specifically points out there are a good handful of companies that sell hardware/tech to the US government that have originated in Israel.

I think the point being that Israel happens to excel at this type of thing due to the simple fact that they have been surrounded by countries who have wanted to wipe them off the map for a long time. This has happened to breed the talent that is very useful to the NSA / surveillance industry.

In the context of the comment he was replying to, and the allusion to "cultural differences" it doesn't seem to be just about technical proficiency. Otherwise, the second the part of his reply is meaningless, and the entire comment seems out of context.

Living in a country where wars with immediate neighbors and rocket attacks are frequent over 10 year time spans, especially in one much smaller and more culturally diverse than the US (at least among relatively antagonistic cultures), sounds like enough of a "cultural difference" to give some engineers a more "us or them" lens on morality and drive them to passionately work on defense driven technologies. Combine that with a culture that prizes education and a government with access to NATO equipment and know-how (also makes trade in military tech the other way easier too) and it's not a surprise some SIGINT and defense equipment comes from Israeli companies.

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