@TheBreachMedia:
Israel is conducting secret mass surveillance of Palestinians during its assault on Gaza—and ex PM Stephen Harper’s investment fund helped make it happen.
@Martin_Lukacs & @timmgroves report on the Israeli spy tech firm controlled by Harper & partners.
@salsa111:
becoming increasingly clear that israel’s war on Gaza is providing a live testing ground for AI weapons development. Palestinians sacrificed in order to further their goals and profits. explains the west unwillingness to end it. war is a criminal enterprise.
Alison Creekside@CreeksideAlison:
You can go to the Israeli Corsight spy tech site and see 3 out of the 5 directors are literally listed as Aw[z] directors.
Where is Canadian mainstream media on this?
Source: Corsight AI Board of Directors
2021: Creepy as Fuck:Stephen Harper joined ex-spymasters in company investing in Israeli security tech, Former PM is a partner at firm that includes some of the world’s top former intelligence executives
Former prime minister Stephen Harper is working with former leaders of three major intelligence agencies — the Mossad, the CIA and MI5 — in a Canadian private investment company.
AWZ Ventures invests in Israeli cybersecurity, intelligence and physical security technologies.
Despite the many prominent individuals behind it, the company remains low-profile in Canada.
The head office of AWZ (pronounced Oz) Ventures is at 20 Eglinton Ave. West in Toronto, on the 10th floor of an office tower at the corner of Yonge Street.
… Former Conservative public safety minister Stockwell Day is also involved with the company.
AWZ Ventures has recruited former executives of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. They include Haim Tomer — who spent more than 30 years with the agency, serving as head of Mossad’s intelligence, counter-terrorism and international divisions — and Gary Barnea, a former deputy director of Mossad’s special operations division.
Richard Fadden, former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and a former national security adviser to Harper, also works for the company.
Fadden sits on AWZ Ventures’ advisory committee. … Two major figures from U.S. and U.K. intelligence circles are also part of AWZ Ventures — former CIA director James Woolsey and former MI5 director general Stella Rimington. …
Reynold Reimr:
Harper was a war monger when he was PM. Now he’s a war profiteer. What’s not to love?
Stephen Harper’s firm behind spy tech Israel is using to target Gazans, Former prime minister’s fund controls and is the main investor in Israeli company that developed AI-based facial recognition tech being used by IDF on Palestinians by Tim Groves & Martin Lukacs, Apr 10 2024, The Breach
An investment firm led by former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper that is devoted to launching security companies in Israel has a new “success” story: helping that country’s military conduct secret mass surveillance of Palestinians in Gaza.
According to The New York Times, hundreds of Palestinians have been targeted by an “expansive and experimental” spying effort to “collect and catalogue” the faces of Palestinians.
At times, civilians have been “wrongly flagged” as Hamas militants and then interrogated and tortured.
The facial recognition technology the Israeli military is relying on was created by Israeli tech company, Corsight. Founded in 2019, the company officially launched after receiving a $5 million investment from Awz Ventures, the firm where Harper is a leading partner and president of its advisory committee.
Three out of five members of the Israeli company’s board of directors are Harper’s partners at Awz Ventures, meaning the former Canadian Prime Minister’s firm effectively controls Corsight.
Using Corsight’s spy tech, the Israeli military picked out Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha at a checkpoint in central Gaza in mid-November, as he was attempting to flee with his family to Egypt. He was separated, detained, and beaten.
The surveillance program that uses this technology is being run by the Israeli military’s elite cyber-intelligence Unit 8200.
A former commander of this unit, retired Israeli Brigadier General Ehud Schneorson, is another of Harper’s advisory partners at Awz Ventures. According to a report in Israeli outlet +972 Magazine, Unit 8200 has also overseen an AI-based targeting system that has marked tens of thousands of Gazans for assassination.
Harper’s ‘solidarity’ trip to Israel
Since October 7, the Israeli military has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza and hundreds of thousands face famine as a result of Israel’s blockade of essential supplies.
A previous investigation by The Breach found that Awz Ventures has poured investments totalling at least $350 million into high-tech companies that support the Israeli security industry and military.
Harper, who was a hard-line supporter of Israel while prime minister, has promoted Awz Ventures in Israeli media outlets and has said that the company is a chance to “continue what I did in government.”
He made a “solidarity” visit to Israel in February, and was hosted at the Knesset by Knesset speaker Amir Ohana, who called him “one of Israel’s best friends of all time.”
He also met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel.
In an op-ed published at the same time in the National Post, Harper compared Hamas to the Nazis and said Israel’s attacks on Gaza “should end the same way our war with the Nazis did—by the unconditional surrender of its perpetrators.”
In late March, The New York Times reported that Corsight’s facial recognition technology was first used to search for Israelis taken hostage during the October 7 cross-border attack by Hamas. Corsight was then brought in by the military during their ground offensive in Gaza to create and use the facial recognition program.
After discovering that Corsight’s technology was faulty and had delivered false positives, the Israeli military supplemented it with Google Photos, the corporate giant’s free photo sharing service.
At Corsight, board member and retired Israeli major general Giora Eiland has advocated for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in Israeli newspaper articles.
In October, he wrote that Israel “has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in,” and that “creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal.”
Later, he wrote that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
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