Presumably it's a reference to the fact several of the founders are Unit 8200 alumni, which is part of Israeli intelligence. It's not the same as Mossad, though.
As I understand it, Unit 8200 is the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, and Mossad is their CIA.
If you have a problem with Unit 8200 alumni, you’re going to have a difficult time buying commercially available security products. Palo Alto Networks, Armis, Checkpoint, and many others were either founded by or otherwise have former 8200 folks on staff. Then there’s crowdstrike, founded by a Russian. Or Fortinet, which was founded by Ken Xie (born in Beijing.)
I guess you could base your entire security stack on F Secure. Everyone loves the Finns.
Where do you see Wiz in the above list of products in the post I'm responding to?
In any case, as for wiz..., if companies want to stuff their secrets into a proprietary product that is controlled by intelligence officers of a hostile (as in a lack of respect for international law) foreign country, I don't care. I know I would not.
This thread is talking about Wiz. The comment you responded to was about the fact that security company founders often have intelligence community backgrounds and/or come from adversary states (from a US/European perspective.) It had nothing to do with VPN.
I can chose to what part of a comment I'll respond to. I responded to list of companies providing "VPN" software. Fortinet, paloalto/globalprotect, checkpoint,...
It's the only product I'm sometimes required to come in contact with from these companies. And also the only product of theirs that I inspected in any detail in Ghidra. And the only product of theirs that I have to defend my network against.
So I'm only interested in that aspect of their products. For everything else, all these security companies and their customers can devour each other, for all I care.
> The founders of CrowdStrike—George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch, and Gregg Marston—do not have publicly documented personal connections to Israel. That's the first claim of yours I faield to verify so I won't bother with the rest.
I realize reading is a very difficult skill to master, but maybe -- just maybe -- you couldn't verify that "claim" because I never made it.
I think parent was saying that if someone has a problem with Wiz being ex 8200, they would have problems buying cybersecurity solutions in general because the more established companies founders with foreign non-allies background.
That is clearly a false equivalence though. Being born in a country is qualitatively different to working in a military unit requiring security clearance.
So what? Technologies with military and intelligence origins become available to civilians all the time. That includes the Internet itself, which was originally sponsored by DARPA.
Would you rather they have kept the technology to themselves?
"Now Avishai has left 8200 and went off to co-found Wix, the website building tool.
It’s crazy to think that the co-founder of Wix is an expert hacker, someone who’s broken
into multiple countries and conducted massive amounts of espionage."
"Once you get out of 8200 you’re then a reserve and have to spend up
to three weeks a year going back to 8200, refreshing your skills
all the way until you’re forty"
"There’s also a yearly reunion where you leave your family and
spend a week with your fellow soldiers you served with.
Every year they do that. Keep in mind, all this is happening
in a place not even as big as New Jersey with roughly the same population.
Look at how dedicated they are to keeping these connections with one another.
This has powerful results. Everyone knows everyone."
"Imagine if one 8200 member goes off to work at Google to help
"develop the Chrome browser and then goes back to 8200 as part
of their yearly duty and while there, they see a soldier building
exploits for the Chrome browser. What do they do?
Do they take the exploits from 8200 and patch it in Chrome
or do they help their fellow soldier by sharing the source code?"
The Mossad is a security service of the nation of Israel, which, for all intents and purposes, is a nation designed to house and protect Jews. And Judaism is a religion. So yes, a connection exists.
Did you try applying for Israeli citizenship? AFAIK being a follower of Judaism is a requirement. Source: a Christian Jew being denied a citizenship due to this reason.
No... it isn't (as there are 100s of thousands of Muslim, Christian, etc. citizens in Israel). I am assuming you are a foreign national and you are referring to the Law of Return.
Currently, there is a prohibition on using that right and "professing" another religion. Blame the haredi, according to my granfather they're as*holes.
You could get a visa and naturalize like anyone else that is eligible.
I am eligible because my great grandmother was there before statehood in the Irgun.
Me too, but a lot of (admittedly not all) opposition to Israel's existence, extent, and its security apparatus is rooted in anti-semitism. I'm not going to undertake a long discussion about it, but in short, you can hear the dog whistles and they're inappropriate.
Of course... one side of my family goes way way back in the area. Great grandma was Irgun. Rest of the fam was Austro-Hungarian/Ottoman/Polish/Ukrainian/Russian depending on what decade you looked at. Empires borders kept moving. I think at one point we might even had been Italian (Trieste).
Judaism is not only religion in a sense that you go to synagogue to pray. Being a jew is not only about religion but also about traditions, e.g., celebrating jewish holidays, teaching your kids about history of your people, etc.
If you do nothing jewish, then I would argue that you are not jewish in a cultural sense. You still would be a jew from a religious point of view (if your mom is jewish), but if you do nothing jewish, then you are not jewish.
I guess what I am trying to say is being jewish is not ethnicity only, or religion only, it's both. For example, converts are considered jews despite their non-jewish ethnicity.
Had a Jewish wedding and secular divorce, a few rabbis in the family on fathers side, went to Synagogue for a decade or so, haven't gone in a few decades. Don't really keep to most of the traditions. I'm ethnically Jewish and a big chunk of the family is also culturally Jewish with a smaller bit also religiously Jewish. Oddly the Israeli part of the family isn't religious at all (atheist) but follows more of the traditions because they live in a Jewish nation.
Conflating the state of Israel with all Jewish people & implying all of have (a secret) allegiance to Israel, regardless of their citizenship is actual anti-Semitism. Correctly identifying folk who fought for Israel is not anti-Semitic in any way the allegiance at the time they served in an elite unit is clear to all.
You’re responding to an argument that I’m not making. I said there is a connection, which is true. Obviously not everyone living in Israel is Jewish, nor is everyone there a practicing Jew. But the founders’ purpose remains and is woven throughout society and its constitution.
And people aren’t just “identifying folk.” This thread has devolved into a debate about Israel itself, which invariably happens when Israel is even tangentially involved in a story.
I am highlighting that the "connection" you mention is frequently used in bad faith by actual anti-semites, as well as the pro-Likud propagandists who suggest that any criticism of the government of Israel or its policies is antisemitism, as if the current government and Jewish people are interchangeable.
I agree. The comment that equated an intelligence service with a religion was crude, inappropriate and unnecessarily political. It is downright shameful to invoke the very real phenomenon of religious persecution as a way to discourage mere mention of a specific, relatively small intelligence organization.
Modern antisemitism tends to be rooted in racist prejudice against a Jewish ethnicity more then plain religious discrimination. And tends to be related to a lot of conspiracy theories.
I think its possible to fairly critize a nation state and and intelligence agency but some criticismtends towards mossad shark type conspiracies
The constitution of a nation and its practices are separate axes. Many US states practiced the functional equivalent of apartheid until the 1960s, but the USA was still a democracy nevertheless.
(This is not intended to reflect any opinion I may have about Israel's specific practices.)
I'm well aware of what the commenter was trying to suggest, and was not going to dignify it.
Every time a story involves Israel somehow--even if it's about the success of a business based there--it turns into a debate about Israel itself. It's exhausting and stupid.
I'm confused what you mean by "brigade". I see two comments that are replying to you with clarifying questions. No one has denied your statement, only offered opportunities to clarify your meaning.
From the outset the term "anti-Semitism" bore special racial connotations and meant specifically prejudice against Jews. The term has been described as confusing, for in modern usage 'Semitic' designates a language group, not a race. In this sense, the term is a misnomer, since there are many speakers of Semitic languages (e.g., Arabs, Ethiopians, and Assyrians) who are not the objects of antisemitic prejudices, while there are many Jews who do not speak Hebrew, a Semitic language. Though 'antisemitism' could be construed as prejudice against people who speak other Semitic languages, this is not how the term is commonly used.
The term may be spelled with or without a hyphen (antisemitism or anti-Semitism). Many scholars and institutions favor the unhyphenated form. Shmuel Almog argued, "If you use the hyphenated form, you consider the words 'Semitism', 'Semite', 'Semitic' as meaningful ... [I]n antisemitic parlance, 'Semites' really stands for Jews, just that." Emil Fackenheim supported the unhyphenated spelling, in order to "[dispel] the notion that there is an entity 'Semitism' which 'anti-Semitism' opposes."
Others endorsing an unhyphenated term for the same reason include the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance," historian Deborah Lipstadt, Padraic O'Hare, professor of Religious and Theological Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations at Merrimack College; and historians Yehuda Bauer and James Carroll. According to Carroll, who first cites O'Hare and Bauer on "the existence of something called 'Semitism'", "the hyphenated word thus reflects the bipolarity that is at the heart of the problem of antisemitism".
The Associated Press and its accompanying AP Stylebook adopted the unhyphenated spelling in 2021. Style guides for other news organizations such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal later adopted this spelling as well. It has also been adopted by many Holocaust museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem.
