6 thoughts on “Israel’s Cellebrite Violates Sanctions, Selling Hacking Tools to World’s Repressive Regimes – Tikun Olam תיקון עולם إصلاح العالم
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  1. [comment deleted: comments must be directly related to the post. They may not range over every possible marginally-related subject you want to address. Stay on-topic and read the comment rules carefully.

  2. I am surprised that Venezuela has been described as being amongst ‘some of the world’s most repressive regimes.’ and as proof of that the fact that it has been under US sanctions for the past decade and more.

    US sanctions aren’t neutrally applied to the world’s most repressive regimes or else Saudi Arabia and Israel would top the list.

    I have never heard this figure of 8000 executions by Venezuela’s spy agency. This seems Trump like propaganda

    1. @ Tony: I should make clear that some of the material in this post is based on the linked Haaretz article, including the figure of 8,000 dead at the hands of the intelligence services.

      This is the relevant quote:

      “According to Venezuela’s former chief prosecutor, some 8,292 people have been executed without trial by security forces acting on behalf of the government between 2015 and Junt 2017. According to the Venzuallian human rights group COFAVIC, the CICPC unit is responsible for up to a third of those executions.”

      The NY Times adds further details of this campaign of targeted killing.

      I think most people would say Venezuela was a repressive regime. I’m not claiming that the opposition represents any improvement. Nor am I claiming that U.S. Sanctions are uniformly equitable and fairly applied.

      But Hugo Chavez and Maduro are certainly authoritarian figures running a repressive regime. And they would not need Cellebrite products if they weren’t a repressive regime.

      Let’s not forget the other regimes Cellebrite does business with: all among the most repressive regimes in the world.

  3. Much more interesting than to which “dictators” Cellebrite is selling its tools, is which western democracies organisations are buying these instruments to be used to spy their own democratic citizens. Only a fragment of Cellebrite’s turnover comes from selling to alleged dictators, the majority of the money comes from democratic countries.

    The reality is that western privacy laws and moral guidelines make the usage of these hacking gadgets in these countries in most cases illegal. It is hilarious how several years ago, when Snowden etc showed us how western powers spied massively their own citizens in illegal ways, was “popular” in media, it was made vanish from discussion by first claiming Russia (=Putin) spying and remote controlling all possible countries’ decisions and elections and now blaming China (communists) for every problem.

    The most serious problem is not how Israeli “moral, tactics and tools” are used by dictators. It is how these methods have been creeping in our democracies own structures.

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