Netanyahu Left Flailing Amid New Scandal; Israel Turns 5G Into Spyware

Israel’s phone-spying scandal is no longer foreign policy - it’s a test of whether your government protects you, or protects Israel. Right, so Benjamin Netanyahu has a new scandal round his neck, and this one reaches into the phone network people carry in their pockets and not just in Israel or just the Middle East either. A major digital research group has exposed two covert telecom surveillance campaigns, with attack traffic linked to mobile operator signalling infrastructure and with Israeli-linked networks and surveillance firms very much implicated. Regional coverage has put it more bluntly: Israeli telecommunications infrastructure, from old signalling systems right up to modern 5G, has been used to help turn phones into tracking devices across more than ten countries. Now that is not a claim that every phone in Britain has been hacked, but the hidden machinery behind mobile roaming, texts, location updates and network trust has been abused so phones can be located without the user seeing anything happen. Netanyahu’s problem is that the word security that he constantly mouths off to justify everything, now comes back at him stinking of surveillance, and every government still claiming Israel as an ally and a trusted partner ought to have some explaining to do. The news was broken through investigation by Canadian outlet Citizen Lab and what they’ve pieced together and published is not a vague internet rumours or the contents of a reddit thread from someone whose cousin once rebooted a router. Its report found two phone-tracking operations built around the hidden systems mobile networks use to talk to each other. These are the background systems that let your phone roam abroad, receive texts, connect to the right tower and tell the network roughly where it is.