Unit 8200: Israel’s cyber spy agency
John Reed JULY 10 2015 (less than fiddy)

Former insiders and whistle-blowers provide a view of the formidable military intelligence outfit

The new 'advanced technologies' cyber park being built in the Negev desert city of Beer Sheva.

In a searingly hot afternoon at a campuslike new science park in
Beer Sheva, southern Israel, I watched as a group of bright, geeky teenagers
presented their graduation projects.
Parents and uniformed army personnel milled around a
windowless room packed with tables holding laptops, phones
or other gadgets.
There was excited chatter and a pungent smell of adolescent sweat.

This was a recent graduation ceremony for Magshimim (which roughly translates as “fulfilment”),
the three-year after-school program for 16 to 18-year-old students
with exceptional computer coding and hacking skills.

Magshimim serves as a feeder system for potential recruits to Unit 8200,
the Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy agency,
considered by intelligence analysts to be one of the
most formidable of its kind in the world.
Unit 8200, or shmone matayim as it’s called in Hebrew,
is the equivalent of America’s National Security Agency
and the largest single military unit in the Israel Defence Forces. ...

NYC Taxpayers Spending Millions on Cyber Center with
Controversial Ties to Israeli Intelligence
by Whitney Webb @_whitneywebb | February 14th, 2020

New York City taxpayers are on the hook for a multi-million dollar cyber center
in the heart of Manhattan with deep ties to Israel’s high-tech intelligence apparatus.

Early last week, the city of New York launched — with little media scrutiny —
one of two new massive cybersecurity centers that will be run by
private Israeli firms with close ties to Israel’s government,
the so-called “Mega Group” tied to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and
prominent pro-Israel lobby organizations operating in the United States.
The centers were first announced in 2018 as was the identity of
the firms who would run them: Israel-based Jerusalem Venture Partners and SOSA.

As MintPress has reported on several occasions, all three of these entities
have a history of aggressively spying on the U.S. federal government
and/or blackmailing top American politicians, raising concerns
regarding why these companies were chosen to run the new centers in the heart of Manhattan.

The news also comes as Israeli cybersecurity companies
tied to Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200 were
revealed to have access to the U.S. government’s most
classified systems and simulating
the cancellation of the upcoming 2020 presidential election. ...