Mossad starts funding sociopathic startups aiming to deprive people of liberty

Mossad has started funding the worst of the worst of IT startups. Normally, a headline such as this would only be seen on very questionable websites, but the source for this story is the Israeli Jerusalem Post itself — and further: the Israeli Mossad are far from the only ones.

The Jerusalem Post portrays this event as if it were any random story: “Mossad enters the world of Venture Capitalism”, with the addition that the funding entity, named Libertad Ventures, is “expected to put out another call for applications to develop cutting-edge technology for Mossad’s spying purposes”.

This raises so many uncomfortable questions.

And before somebody gets the idea that this is an Israeli thing, the United States CIA already has a similar funding program, called Facebook. Oops, that was a typo, scratch that: it’s called In-Q-Tel. Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ is also already running a similar program, which is even brazen enough to call it the GCHQ Cyber Accelerator, founded just last year — so this seems to be a somewhat recent thing, even though the CIA boasts “investments” back to 2015.

Rather, the question are along these lines:

When all of the technical community has been trying for the past fifty years to make our data networks, communication lines, and data storage resilient, secure, and safe, why are governments spending tax money — money collected by force from this very technical community! — spending tax money funding what the technical community would probably describe as sociopaths, people who are trying their best to be bad actors not just for the technical community, but for humanity at large?

These are people who are developing vulnerabilities, methods of breaking and entering, methods of making data and communications lines in-secure. Put differently, if they were doing the exact same thing in a different country than ours and not working for the government, we would probably call them “organized crime”.

This is why it makes it so infuriating that a government is using tax money to fund the kind of activity we’ve literally been trying for five decades to eliminate from the technical community, and they’re doing it for short term gains against not just a rival government, but against their own civilian population as well. Against the whole world’s civilian population, actually.

If this were any other industry, this activity — developing technologies to hit millions of people when they’re trusting and vulnerable — would be called sociopathic, at best.

Of course, there’s also the aspect that this is venture capitalism — they’re effectively gambling, using taxpayer money, that these unwanted actors will be commercially successful. Disgusting doesn’t begin to describe this recent phenomenon.

The news here is not that the surveillance agencies are using tax money to fund sociopathic entrepreneurs whose entire business idea is to deprive people of liberty. The specific news item in the Jerusalem Post is that the Israeli Mossad joins at least the US and UK in doing so. This has apparently been a disturbingly accepted practice that has not been discussed publicly at all.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.