Israel Defense Forces were searching systems to spy on private social media messages

The Israel Defense Forces has bid to obtain spying systems that will allow monitoring of the private messages of social media users.

Monitoring of social media platforms is a crucial activity for intelligence agencies, almost any government is working to gather intelligence for these systems.

According to the Haaretz, the Israel Defense Forces has bid to obtain spying systems that will allow monitoring of the private messages of social media users.

“The Israel Defense Forces asked cybersecurity companies in 2016 to present proposals for creating a system that would monitor social media users’ personal correspondence.” states the Haaretz.

The newspaper had obtained a document that shows that in 2016 the Israel Defense Forces asked the cyber companies to propose their solutions for the spying on users of the social networks.

Haaretz revealed that the Israeli Defence Forces want to use the system to trace and monitor the activity of social media users, including all information posted or exchanged through the most popular platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

The monitoring system would also monitor posts and information exchanged in several languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and English.

“The system in question would have to scan and store both private and public information from users of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, YouTube and so on.” continues the newspaper.

“It does not specify who would be monitored; or Jewish citizens of Israel, or Palestinian residents of the Jerusalem – who for the most part do not hold Israeli citizenship – would be targeted; or any restrictions set by any outside entity would be imposed on the surveillance activities.“

The surveillance system have to allow government operators to spy on users by searching for targeted keywords, such as terror, resistance, nationality and religion.

Of course, the IDF declared that the document obtained by the Haaretz was a draft of an invitation to submit bids that did not come to fruition.

The Israeli Defense explained added that the bidding process was not carried out for both operational and technological reasons

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Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – social media, surveillance)

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