Google is Acquiring Tech Firm Founded by Ex-Israeli Intelligence Officers for Record $32 Billion
Google's purchase of the the firm Wiz tightens the embrace between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military.
We have a commitment to ensuring that our journalism is not locked behind a paywall. But the only way we can sustain this is through the voluntary support of our community of readers. If you are a free subscriber and you support our work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or gifting one to a friend or family member. You can also make a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation to support our work. If you do not have the means to support our work financially, you can do your part by sharing our work on social media and by forwarding this email to your network of contacts. We know a lot of people have strong opinions about X/Twitter, but it is where many Palestinians are posting updates on the genocide in Gaza. If you use that site, make sure to check out our feed, which we run as a regularly updated news service. We are also on Instagram. Paid subscribers also have access to our internal Discord Server
—Drop Site News
In mid-March, Google announced that it was paying the staggering sum of $32 billion for the acquisition of the Israeli cloud-computing security company Wiz. The acquisition, pending regulatory approval, will be the largest ever of an Israeli firm.
“Organizations of all sizes—from start-ups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organizations—can use Wiz to protect everything they build and run in the cloud,” Google said in a statement announcing the acquisition. The statement added that Wiz would join Google Cloud, but that the Tel Aviv-based company’s security services would still be available across other cloud platforms used by major firms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.
What was left unsaid in Google’s announcement, however, were the personal backgrounds of its four founders. The co-founders of Wiz—Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik—are all veterans of Unit 8200, the signals intelligence division of the Israeli military, which is playing a key role in helping to carry out Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.
Unit 8200 is an elite unit in the Israeli military tasked with intelligence gathering, surveillance, codebreaking, as well as cybersecurity operations and hacking. In addition to its role collecting information for intelligence reports, the unit has also been accused by former veterans of carrying out mass surveillance of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories for the purpose of “political persecution,” as well as providing information used for targeted killings, sometimes based on over-broad interpretations of surveillance data.
In addition to being a vital component of the Israeli military-intelligence establishment, Unit 8200 has become a pipeline for recruitment by Silicon Valley firms. Many prominent tech startups have been created by Unit 8200 veterans, including NSO group, the creator of the Pegasus spyware program implicated in hacking attacks on dissidents and journalists globally.
“While Unit 8200 alumni once talked about their service in hushed tones, they now tout it in press releases to attract clients and investment money for their startups,” noted a Wall Street Journal story, from last year, on the growing relationship between the Israeli military unit and the U.S. tech industry.
In addition to founding their own startups, acquisitions by existing Silicon Valley firms have been a means for Unit 8200 veterans to get a foothold in the U.S. Since the start of the war in Gaza, Silicon Valley has acquired a handful of Israeli tech firms, including a nearly $1 billion purchase by Palo Alto Networks of Dig Security and Talon CyberSecurity—executed just weeks after the war began. Like Wiz, both those firms were also founded by former Unit 8200 members.
The increasingly cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military has alarmed observers of the industry who have been critical of the role of tech firms in facilitating Israeli human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.
“Basically the entire Israeli tech industry is funded by U.S. venture capitalists. It’s a very common situation that you see acquisitions of Israeli firms by Silicon Valley, where the senior people in these firms have formerly served in Unit 8200. It gets them a voice internally,” said Paul Biggar, a software engineer and founder of the activist group Tech for Palestine. Commenting on Google’s huge new acquisition he said, “Wiz should not be trusted, because it takes all user data and runs it through an Israeli company run by former intelligence officials.”
A researcher who works on connections between Silicon Valley and the intelligence world told Drop Site that the Israeli intelligence establishment has built deep and expanding ties with U.S. tech companies, adding that they had documented over 1,400 current and former members of Unit 8200, Israeli Military Intelligence, and the Israeli Defense Forces Cyber Defense Directorate now working for major Silicon Valley companies. The researcher compiled the list from open source information about individuals, some of whom remain reservists in these units in addition their tech jobs, working in both senior and mid-level engineering and leadership roles at major firms like Cisco, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, Google, and many other companies in the U.S. tech sector, with offices based in Israel, the U.S., and Europe.
“If you’re standing in the middle of Silicon Valley and throw a rock you’re going to hit current or former members of Unit 8200,” said the researcher who compiled and analyzed the data, and who asked for anonymity to discuss it safely. “That is not to say that all these people are involved in a giant cabal to influence American companies and steal our secrets—many of them are just people trying to get a career in tech.” But, they added, this could create “situations where there is temptation or pressure to do something that violates the law.”
In recent years, the influence of foreign powers in critical industries like tech has been identified as a national security risk by U.S. security agencies. A 2018 article in Politico highlighted the increasing alarm of FBI officials over counterintelligence and espionage threats in Silicon Valley. The risks include individuals either directly acting as spies for foreign powers, or being pressured by them to cooperate based on personal ties or political allegiances. Cybersecurity experts warn that such relationships create a form of leverage that foreign governments could draw upon when required, and which is heightened when the tech workers themselves are reservists or former intelligence operatives.
“We go on about the dangers of Chinese infiltration of tech firms, but not Israel—even though U.S. intelligence agencies rank Israel as one of their top counterintelligence threats after countries like China, Russia and Iran,” the researcher said. They also highlighted, in the case of Wiz, the risk of a “former member of an intelligence agency working in a sensitive area of U.S. tech, especially something like cloud storage, that has access to a lot of data that is very easy to scrape or download or transfer.”
Cash Bailout
The acquisition of Wiz by Google is a huge cash injection for the Israeli economy as a whole, which has been battered over the past year and a half amid ongoing wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. The company’s 1,800 employees, many of whom are based in Israel, will also receive $1.5 billion in the arrangement. According to Times of Israel, as a result of the purchase, the collective tax benefits paid to the Israeli government by the founders, investors, and employees of Wiz is estimated to be in the neighborhood of $4 billion.
“The estimated tax revenue Israel could earn from the transaction is equal to about 0.6 percent of the GDP,” the article noted, adding that Google’s decision would actually aid the government in continuing its ongoing wars by helping to “relieve government pressure to introduce measures to fund the war’s defense and civilian expenditures and bring down the budget deficit and high debt levels.”
Moody’s, a financial service that forecasts economic stability, had previously reduced Israel’s credit rating twice due to geopolitical uncertainty and economic disruptions related to the war. In late March, the rating agency pointed specifically to the country’s weakening tech sector as a risk to maintaining its tax base.
“Uncertainty over Israel’s longer-term security and economic growth prospects are much higher than is typical, with risks to the high-tech sector particularly relevant, given its important role as a driver of economic growth and significant contributor to the government’s tax take,” the agency said in a report warning of further risks ahad.
Google’s decision to pay massively for Wiz thus amounts to a de facto bailout of the Israeli economy, coming at a time that the company is also attempting to build closer ties with Trump administration regulators. While the Israeli economy, and, in particular, its tech sector have been battered by the war, Google has recently announced plans to rent over 60,000 square meters of office space in Tel Aviv, paying over $300 million over a decade to lease a massive corporate office in the city’s ToHa2 Tower. These investment decisions have aided of Israel even as it has come under increasing scrutiny over its conduct during the war.
Well before the current war, employees of Google had been rallying to demand that the company cancel a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military known as Project Nimbus. The project, signed as a joint project with Google and Amazon, offered advanced cloud computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other technology services to the Israeli government. Among the capabilities that the Israeli government would eventually receive as part of the ongoing deal are access to facial detection, image recognition, and sentiment analysis tools useful to conducting reconnaissance and surveillance. Following internal protests over Project Nimbus, including sit-ins at multiple offices, Google fired dozens of employees who were part of the group “No Tech for Apartheid.”
AI-based platforms reliant on cloud technology, which Google rushed to provide to Israel after October 7, have been integral to the Israeli military’s assault on the Gaza Strip. AI programs like Lavender and Where’s Daddy, first revealed by the Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine, have been used to automatically generate targets for assassination, marking over 37,000 Palestinians and their homes in Gaza as targets. With assistance from the program, officers in the military granted “sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”
The use of Google and Amazon technology by the Israeli military, including cloud-services like those now likely to be augmented by Wiz, has drawn the scrutiny of tech-centric civil liberties organizations like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, which criticized last year the reported use of such technologies to assist with, “detentions, killings, and the systematic oppression of journalists, healthcare workers, aid workers, and ordinary families.”
The acquisition of Wiz by Google is likely to strengthen the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military-intelligence establishment, with veterans of Unit 8200 playing a key role.
“For the biggest acquisition of an Israeli cybersecurity company to come at this moment is a big ‘mask-off’ moment for Google and Big Tech,” said Hossam Nasr, an organizer in a campaign called No Azure for Apartheid, and a former Microsoft employee who was dismissed for participating in a vigil at the company. “You are going to have former Unit 8200 agents getting access to Google technology and data. And I do not trust Google to not allow it to be used for nefarious purposes.”
Nick Rodelo contributed research for this article.
This move by Google will further strengthen the hold that Israel has over the US. The Israeli tail is already wagging the US dog. Support for free speech, justice, and human rights is under severe attack in the US. Just look at what is happening at many of our prestigious universities: it has become a crime to support the human rights of Palestinians.
Excellent piece of reporting, Murtaza. What this reveals are two key points:
1. Silicon Valley multinational corporations have no ethical/moral compass at all. Nor do they have loyalty to the United States -- or any other nation. They are drawn to profit-making like a moth to a flame. Shameless automatons masquerading as human beings.
2. Israel now has the United States in its grip -- to use Taibbi's famous metaphor, Israel is "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of America, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money" -- or reeks of an anti-Israel ethos.
Scary, creepy times we're living in.