Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones

https://cybernews.com/privacy/us-police-israeli-spy-vans-falconet-cognyte/

by isaacfrond • 1 day ago

133 45 1 day ago

cybernews.com

mikestew• 1 day ago

It’s those $4.5MM Chevy Tahoes discussed earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969582

ProllyInfamous5• 1 day ago

I have worked at this agency (in the article), as support staff (electrician), over a decade ago.

It was incredibly eye-opening for my then-late-twenties just how much waste... Reflecting now, it's still mostly unbelievable how much money is spent on database infrastructure.

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A brother is now a politician in that same stupid state.

My good advice for remaining fellow Texians: LEAVE.

Nothing forces anybody (let alone the bottom 95% of Americans) to stay in the shithole they grew up in [–5th gen Texan, 2nd-gen Austinite; left a decade ago, following my smarter brother, exeunt].

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"They" don't give a single fuck about you, as long as you stay out of their way. None. Not a single fuck.

¢¢

cyanydeez• 1 day ago

they're there for culture; it's the neo-afghanistan lifestyle they want.

1970-01-01• 1 day ago

Cognyte sells a lot of snake oil – for instance, the company claims to have created software that predicts where crime is likely to occur in the future.

So they claim to implement machine learning which is snake oil?

logicchains• 1 day ago

It's very easy to predict where crime is more likely to occur in future just by postcode, but doing something useful with that prediction is a challenge.

NitpickLawyer• 1 day ago

snake oil – [...] predicts where crime is likely to occur in the future.

Speaking strictly in the abstract here: I'm not sure this is as impossible or snake-oily as the quoted bit implies. From a technical perspective, as long as you're willing to put a lot of data in (unknown how much data about this is collected), and have a good pipeline, I'm sure a model can find enough correlations to get some accuracy better than random chance. Tracking movement patterns, events where lots of people gather, events where lots of tourists are present, temperature, employment stats, housing stats, etc. could all lead to some freaky "predictions" that might be way more accurate than a lot of people would guess. You could get a lot of these signals from GSM tracking, tbh.

The problem with this is that even if the implementation is solid (and all the care in the world is taken when curating datasets, ensuring no biases and so on), and even if deployment is solid (say schedule more LE presence in those areas), there will inevitably be situations where things escalate and LE start trusting the system way more than they should, and start harassing bystanders for no reason other than "the AI said so, you must be a criminal". Minority report vibes and so on.

The other problem is that it seems inevitable that some places will develop and deploy these things, and you can be sure that at least some of them will not care about solid implementations, biases and so on (UK is trialing facial recognition in stores, fully private but w/ cooperation from local LE).

giantg2• 1 day ago

It's not the technology that is snake oil, it's the way it's marketed. Machine learning that predicts where crime might occur is fine. But knowing that isnt going to help any more than just knowing certain neighborhoods are at higher risk.

Then you get into the predictive policing issues if you make this more granular down to individuals. Stuff like a lack of reasonable suspicion or probable cause because police belive the BS sales pitches and take it as truth.

user2722• 1 day ago

But why?

rkozik1989• 1 day ago

To prove they are our greatest ally.

amelius• 1 day ago

Because they can. U.S. law and governance structures turn out to be completely broken. Hackable by the first administration that tries.

danans• 1 day ago

Paraphrasing Garry Kasparov from 2016: "The US is about to find out that it's democracy has been running on the honor system"

roenxi2• 1 day ago

As I follow the stats, somewhere between 20-40% of the US public seems to be open to the idea that Israel is a genocidal ethnostate. I have a low opinion of the US State on the best of days but it actually seems quite remarkable that they would be buying from them given where public opinion seems to be at. The US public is tolerant of a lot of things but the political cost-benefits surely can't make sense for that.

notnaut• 1 day ago

The outcry has RAPIDLY changed in the last few years and the corpses being propped up in our government buildings by deep-seated corrupted interests have long gone deaf.

dumberquestions• 1 day ago

Do you really think popular opinion always gets reflected on policy?

wk_end• 1 day ago

Are you saying that you expect the Trump regime, which has been otherwise clearly and resolutely pro-Israel, to be implementing BDS policies and refusing to buy anything from Israeli companies? To try to appease 20%-40% of Americans mostly on the opposite side of the aisle of them? The Trump regime?

(OK - this is a state-level thing. The article is vague on details, it mentions Texas and "27 states". But the Texas government at least is blood red Republican and strongly aligned with the Trump Feds, as are about half the states, so depending on which 27 states we're talking hardly a surprise. And you were the one who said "the US State" in the first place.)

stevenwoo• 1 day ago

Approximately 60 percent of Americans have unfavorable view on Israel. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/07/negative-... However there are national executive pressures and state mandates against speaking out or boycotting Israeli companies, notably in Texas where they bought these. https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/anti-israel-policies-are-ant...

applicative2• 1 day ago

The US is a genocidal ethnostate. The few remaining Jews of the planet are mostly 'oriental' and are ethnicized by the Islamic world they have been exprelled from.

roenxi2• 15 hours ago

I think it would be hard to make the label "ethnostate" stick to the US. It is too diverse.

128byte• 1 day ago

Incase the article gets disappeared: https://nonogra.ph/us-police-now-armed-with-israeli-spy-vans...

nohell• 1 day ago

You really never know with these people

ProllyInfamous5• 1 day ago

I did my IBEW apprenticeship (mostly) at datacenters, during Snowden's revelations. It was a wild ride, all the "not real" but seen every day at work technological capabilities that didn't technically exist. I was just an electrician.

That was well-over a decade ago. Cannot even imagine how much more control/eavesdropping/automation the current leadership maintains, quasi-"legally" (by statute; we started re-defining wordmeanings centuries ago). I'll "stay in your lane," and thank you Dear Leaders, for freedumb.

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All to say: you're not wrong, but it's Whoever's quest for insatiability that makes them so unpredictable. Our technochomocracy thrives within, colorless.

"Because they can."

close04• 1 day ago

Getting to “the second page” is as good as gone. All it takes is platforms’ algorithms to not promote this link and it doesn’t matter how many people find it worth the discussion.

Case in point, pushing 100 upvotes but off the front page, when some random Wired blogspam stay on the front page for half a day with a quarter of votes and comments.

paytonjjones• 1 day ago

Title is misleading. The vans are manufactured by an Israeli company and bought by US government entities, not vans affiliated with the nation state of Israel.

Georgelemental2• 1 day ago

You think Israeli companies (or those of any other country, for that matter) can sell spy tech abroad without their government's signoff?

rwz2• 1 day ago

That's not the point. The point is that the title makes it seem like the Israeli's government is spying on you, while what the article really says is that US is buying Israel's tech to spy on its own citizens.

The title misrepresents the article claims.

ChrisArchitect2• 1 day ago

Title is: US police now armed with Israeli spy vans simulating mobile phone towers

add in Israeli-made for a bit more clarity

culi• 16 hours ago

it's been flagged to death

zzzeek• 1 day ago

wow that is a really misleading headline. I thought this was the Israeli government spying on US soil.

applicative2• 1 day ago

These articles are for the sake of the misleading headline. The postmonotheistic planet is in a fever that is far far far more profound, delusional and apocalyptic than anything thing in the 30s.

jst1fthsdys2• 1 day ago

They are, even if this particular instance isn't exactly that.

ChrisArchitect2• 1 day ago

Related tech discussion last October:

ICE is using fake cell towers to spy on people's phones

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45184368

Georgelemental2• 1 day ago

You can partially protect yourself from these attacks by disabling 2G on your device. This won't prevent location tracking, but will stop the attacker from intercepting calls or texts.

- Android: https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/cellular-s...

- iOS: you must turn on Lockdown Mode https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120

Israeli spyware vans infiltrate American streets and your phones

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