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Unit 8200

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Unit 8200
יחידה 8200‎
Founded1952
Country Israel
Allegiance Israel Defense Forces
Branch Military Intelligence Directorate
TypeMilitary intelligence unit
RoleClandestine operations
Collecting signal intelligence and code decryption
Counterintelligence
Cyberwarfare
HUMINT
Intelligence assessment
Military intelligence
Strategic intelligence
Surveillance
SizeClassified
DecorationsChief of Staff Medal of Appreciation (2)
Commanders
Current
commander		Brigadier General Yossi Sariel[1]
Current deputy commanderAnonymous male officer[2]

Unit 8200 (Hebrew: יחידה 8200, Yehida shmone matayim "Unit eight two-hundred") is an Israeli Intelligence Corps unit of the Israel Defense Forces responsible for clandestine operation, collecting signal intelligence (SIGINT) and code decryption, counterintelligence, cyberwarfare, military intelligence, and surveillance. Military publications include references to Unit 8200 as the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps, and it is sometimes referred to as Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU).[3] It is subordinate to Aman, the military intelligence directorate.

The unit is composed primarily of 18–21 year olds. As a result of the youth of the soldiers in the unit, and the shortness of their service period, the unit relies on selecting recruits with the ability for rapid adaptation and speedy learning.[4] Afterschool programs for 16–18 year olds, teaching computer coding and hacking skills, also serve as feeder programs for the unit.[5] Former Unit 8200 soldiers have, after completing their military service, gone on to founding and occupying top positions in many international IT companies and in Silicon Valley.[5][6]

According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."[7]

Overview

Unit 8200 is the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces, comprising several thousand soldiers.[8] It is comparable in its function to the United States' National Security Agency and is a Ministry of Defense body just as the NSA is part of the United States Department of Defense.

Subordinate to Unit 8200 is Unit Hatzav (Hebrew name for Drimia (Hebrew: יחידת חצב)), responsible for collecting OSINT intelligence. The unit monitors and collects military intelligence–related information from television, radio, newspapers, and the internet. The translation of various items accounts for part of what is termed "basic intelligence", which is collected by the units.

The IDF's most important signal intelligence–gathering installation is the Urim SIGINT Base, a part of Unit 8200. Urim is located in the Negev desert approximately 30 km from Beersheba.[9] In March 2004, the Commission to investigate the intelligence network following the War in Iraq recommended turning the unit into a civilian national SIGINT agency, as is in other Western countries, but this proposal was not implemented.[citation needed]

Staff

Unit 8200 is staffed primarily by 18–21 year old conscripts. Selection and recruitment to the unit usually occurs at age 18 through the IDF screening process after high school. However, the unit also scouts potential younger recruits through after-school computer classes.[5] These after-school computer classes, teaching 16–18 year olds computer coding and hacking skills, sometimes act as feeder programs for the unit, with students receiving invitation letters from the IDF.[5]

The 18-year-olds selected for the unit are primarily chosen for their ability to teach themselves and to learn very quickly as the unit will only have access to their services for a short time before their military service period ends.[4]

Soldiers are not permitted to publicly disclose that they are part of the unit, or their role within it.[10]

Command structure

Brigadier General "Y" (later revealed to be Yossi Sariel) at the unit's change of command ceremony in February 2021

Unit 8200 is led by a commander and a deputy commander, the latter holding the rank of colonel.[11] The identities of both officers are kept secret.[1][2] An additional command role is that of the "Data Science and AI Commander".[12]

Known commanders

  • Brigadier General Yoel Ben-Porat (1970s)[13][14]
  • Reuven Yeredor (1980s)[15]
  • Lior Div (unknown period)[16]
  • Aharon Ze'evi-Farkash (unknown period)[17]
  • Brigadier General Nadav Zafrir (unknown period)[18]
  • Brigadier General Yair Cohen (2001 — 2005)[19][20]
  • Brigadier General Hanan Gefen (succeeding Cohen)[19]
  • Brigadier General "A" (anonymous, mid-2010s)[21]
  • Brigadier General Asaf Kochan (unknown period)[22][23]
  • Brigadier General Yossi Sariel (2021 or earlier — present)[24][1]

History

A Unit 8200 base in the Sinai Peninsula, during the Israeli occupation

Unit 8200 was established in 1952 using primitive surplus American military equipment. Originally, it was called the 2nd Intelligence Service Unit and then the 515th Intelligence Service Unit. In 1954, the unit moved from Jaffa to its current base at the Glilot junction.[25]

According to Peter Roberts, the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale. They are highly focused on what they look at — certainly more focused than the NSA — and they conduct their operations with a degree of tenacity and passion that you don't experience elsewhere."[26]

Activities

On 11 September 2013, The Guardian released a leaked document provided by Edward Snowden which reveals how Unit 8200, referred to as ISNU, receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens, as part of a secret agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency[27]

In 2010, the French newspaper Le Monde diplomatique wrote that Unit 8200 operates a large SIGINT base in the Negev, one of the largest listening bases in the world, capable of monitoring phone calls, emails, and other communications, throughout the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as well as tracking ships. Unit 8200 also reportedly maintains covert listening posts in Israeli embassies abroad, taps undersea cables, maintains covert listening units in the Palestinian territories, and has Gulfstream jets equipped with electronic surveillance equipment.[9]

Ronen Bergman says in a 2009 book that a Hezbollah bomb, disguised as a cell phone, was picked up by agents, and taken for investigation to Unit 8200's headquarters in February 1999. Basic safety protocols were neglected. The device never underwent the necessary x-ray procedures meant to ensure it was explosives-free. Inside the laboratory the cell phone exploded. Two Unit 8200 soldiers were severely injured, one losing a hand.[28]

In 2010, The New York Times cited "a former member of the United States intelligence community" alleging that this unit used a secret kill switch to deactivate Syrian air defenses during Operation Orchard.[29]

In 2014, 43 veterans of Unit 8200 signed a protest letter decrying what they called the electronic surveillance unit's abusive gathering of Palestinians' private information.[30][31][32] In response, 200 other reservists signed a counter-protest letter.[33][34][35]

According to The New York Times, the Unit 8200's hack of Kaspersky Lab allowed them to watch in real time as Russian government hackers searched computers around the world for American intelligence programs.[36] Israelis who had hacked into Kaspersky’s own network alerted the United States to the broad Russian intrusion of US systems.[36]

In March 2024, The New York Times reported that Corsight and Google Photos were being used in a facial recognition program by Unit 8200 to surveil Palestinians in Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas War. Intelligence officers told the Times that the unit uploads databases of known faces to the service and uses its search functions to identify individuals. A Google spokesman commented that the service is free and "does not provide identities for unknown people in photographs." Corsight, a private Israeli company, declined to comment, although its president had recently written on LinkedIn that its technology could identify faces from "extreme angles, (even from drones,) darkness, poor quality."[37]

2023 Hamas attack

In the failure to forecast the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel by Israel's intelligence agencies, Unit 8200 was blamed for having underestimated Hamas activities.[38] Unit 8200 is alleged to have stopped listening to Hamas's handheld radios in 2022, deciding it was a "waste of effort". Monitoring that radio network might have helped the Shin Bet realize a few hours before the attack that the unusual activity they were seeing on the Gaza border was not just another military exercise by Hamas, Times of Israel noted.[39] The New York Times reported in November that a veteran analyst in Unit 8200 had warned in July that Hamas were preparing for a cross-border attack and that the analyst's concerns were dismissed by senior military leadership as "totally imaginative".[40]

The "Spotters", known as tatzpitaniyot, are female members of the IDF who observe the barriers along the border and activate complex technological systems to prevent the enemy from penetrating into Israel. Their responsibilities have been described as a "difficult, cognitively and emotionally demanding job that entails hours of closely monitoring surveillance cameras, with the knowledge that missing even the slightest unusual event along the border could have disastrous effects on the entire country" but "[t]hey didn’t miss Hamas' preparations for the October 7 attack"; one was quoted as saying, "We were all seeing Hamas militants training for exactly what happened: We saw them training to crash the fence, training to kill civilians, training to take back hostages" and another stated "We knew this would happen. We warned the higher ups. But they ignored us. They told us that they know better, even though this is our job—we have to know every tree, every tent, every pothole in our section, and especially to know when something unusual is happening. And we do."[41][42][43] Only two of the tatzpitaniyot on duty on 7 October 2023 evaded death or abduction.[44]

In April 2024, The Guardian claimed that Brigadier General Yossi Sariel (a former head of intelligence for the IDF's Central Command) is currently leading Unit 8200. The identity of the unit's commander is kept secret, but The Guardian "easily" connected an anonymous email account included with electronic copies of a book published under the pseudonym YS to his name.[1]

Duqu

Duqu is a collection of computer malware discovered on 1 September 2011. Non-Israeli sources routinely state it to be the creation of Unit 8200.[45][46]

Companies founded by alumni

Former soldiers of Unit 8200 have gone on to found many high-tech companies, among them:[47][48][6][49][50]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d Davies, Harry; McKernan, Bethan (2024-04-05). "Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  2. ^ a b "Deputy Commander of Elite Intelligence Unit 8200 Reveals Its Secret Weapon". Forbes Israel. 2022-06-30. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  3. ^ בן-חורין, יצחק (11 September 2013). חשיפה: ארה"ב העבירה ל-8200 מידע סודי. Ynet (in Hebrew). Retrieved 11 September 2013.
  4. ^ a b "8200 graduates aren't like 23 year-olds in Texas or Norway" 5 Jun, 2017, Tali Tsipori
  5. ^ a b c d Inside Israel's Secret Startup Machine Richard Behar , CONTRIBUTOR, MAY 11, 2016
  6. ^ a b From The Israeli Army Unit 8200 To Silicon Valley Posted Mar 20, 2015 by Idan Tendler
  7. ^ Unit 8200: Israel's cyber spy agency, Former insiders and whistle-blowers provide a view of the formidable military intelligence outfit JULY 10, 2015 by John Reed, Financial Times
  8. ^ "IDF Record Book 2010". Bamahane (in Hebrew). No. 3052. September 8, 2010. p. 83.
  9. ^ a b Le Monde Diplomatique, 2010 September, "Israel’s Omniscient Ears: Israel’s Urim Base in the Negev Desert is among the most important and powerful intelligence gathering sites in the world. Yet, until now, its eavesdropping has gone entirely unmentioned". http://mondediplo.com/2010/09/04israelbase
  10. ^ Degani, Corin (2021-11-18). "An elite Israeli intelligence unit's soldiers are sworn to secrecy – but tell all on LinkedIn". Haaretz. Archived from the original on 2022-11-06. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  11. ^ Shoval, Lilach (July 20, 2021). "Top IDF intelligence unit gets its first female deputy commander". Jewish News Syndicate. Lt. Col. G., who will be promoted to full colonel for her new position,
  12. ^ Bob, Yonah Jeremy (2023-02-13). "IDF Unit 8200 commander reveals cyber use to target Hamas commander". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  13. ^ Rabinovich, Abraham (15 September 2021). "Worse than the worst-case scenario: The dreadful hours before the Yom Kippur War". The Times of Israel.
  14. ^ Bar-Joseph, Uri (2012). Mass, Zvi Zamir and Efrat; Shalev, Arieh; Zeira, Eli; Ben-Porat, Yoel; Commission, Agranat (eds.). "Confronting the Intelligence Fiasco of the Yom Kippur War". Bustan: The Middle East Book Review. 3 (2). Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies: 133. doi:10.1163/18785328-00032003. ISSN 1878-5301. the head of AMAN's signal intelligence [SIGINT], Brigadier General Yoel Ben-Porat,
  15. ^ Oren, Amir (2013-04-12). "Yom Kippur War as a case study: Intelligence and deterrence did not suffice". Haaretz. Archived from the original on Sep 25, 2022. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  16. ^ Rouhandeh, Alex J. (2021-06-29). "Cybersecurity Firms Take the Offensive While Avoiding 'All-Out War'". Newsweek. Retrieved 2024-04-05. Lior Div served as a Commander in the Israeli Defense Force's Unit 8200, which focuses on signal interception intelligence and code decryption.
  17. ^ "Unit 8200 and Israel's high-tech whiz kids". United Press International. June 4, 2012. Retrieved 2024-04-05. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, another former commander of Unit 8200, is the founder and chief executive of FST21 set up in 2007.
  18. ^ Zilber, Neri (Sep 1, 2018). "The Rise of the Cyber-Mercenaries". The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Retrieved 2024-04-05. Nadav Zafrir, a retired brigadier general and former commander of Unit 8200,
  19. ^ a b "The Unit". Forbes. Feb 8, 2007. Retrieved 2024-04-05. Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of Unit 8200 and current consultant to high-tech companies, [...] retired Brig. Gen. Yair Cohen, the previous Unit commander and current vice president of Elron,
  20. ^ Cordey, Sean (December 2019). Prior, Tim; Cavelty, Myriam Dunn; Wenger, Andreas (eds.). "The Israeli Unit 8200: An OSINT-based Study". CSS Risk and Resilience Reports. Zurich, Switzerland: Center for Security Studies: 8. Yair Cohen, who served 33 years in Unit 8200, the last five (2001–05) as its commander,
  21. ^ "Israel expels 43 intelligence veterans who refused to spy in Palestinian territories". The Guardian. 2015-01-27. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-04-05. The commander of Unit 8200, named as Brigadier-General "A",
  22. ^ Rogers, Bruce (Mar 1, 2023). "Former Israeli Intelligence Officers Found Sentra To Provide Cloud Security". Forbes. Retrieved 2024-04-05. It's [sic] founders include Asaf Kochan, Co-Founder, President and former commander of unit 8200;
  23. ^ "50 Influential Jews: Asaf Kochan - No. 38". The Jerusalem Post. September 15, 2023. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  24. ^ Harel, Amos (2021-10-01). "Top Israeli intel officer goes where no one's gone before. And you can find it on Amazon". Haaretz. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
  25. ^ Amir Kidon (1 September 2008). "Unit 8200: In the Beginning". Israel Defense Forces. Archived from the original on 6 February 2009.
  26. ^ Unit 8200: Israel’s cyber spy agency, Former insiders and whistle-blowers provide a view of the formidable military intelligence outfit JULY 10, 2015 by John Reed, Financial Times
  27. ^ Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill (September 11, 2013). "NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel". The Guardian. Retrieved September 14, 2013.
  28. ^ "Hezbollah got inside MI's inner sanctum", Ynet.com, 13 September 2009.
  29. ^ Stuxnet Worm is remarkable for its lack of subtlety, by John Markoff, New York Times 27 September 2010
  30. ^ Bamfordset, James (September 16, 2014). "Israel's N.S.A. Scandal". The New York Times. Retrieved 2014-09-17.
  31. ^ Williams, Doug (12 Sep 2014). "Wiretaps against Palestinians are wrong, Israeli ex-spies tell Netanyahu". Reuters. Retrieved 12 Sep 2014.
  32. ^ Beaumont, Peter (12 Sep 2014). "Israeli intelligence veterans refuse to serve in Palestinian territories". The Guardian. Retrieved 10 Oct 2017.
  33. ^ "Counter-Letter Published Against Leftist Soldiers - Inside Israel". Israel National News. 12 September 2014.
  34. ^ Netanyahu backs intel unit, as Ya'alon slams intel officers' letter Ynet, 13 Sept 2014
  35. ^ IDF condemns objectors, promises ‘sharp’ punishment Times of Israel, 14 Sept 2014
  36. ^ a b Perlroth, Nicole; Shane, Scott (October 10, 2017). "How Israel Caught Russian Hackers Scouring the World for U.S. Secrets". The New York Times. Retrieved November 16, 2023.
  37. ^ Frenkel, Sheera (2024-03-27). "Israel Deploys Expansive Facial Recognition Program in Gaza". The New York Times. Retrieved 2024-03-27.
  38. ^ Israeli military stopped listening to Hamas handheld radios a year ago, timesofisrael.com. Accessed 29 January 2024.
  39. ^ Isaac, David (30 October 2023). "IDF stopped monitoring Hamas handheld radios, among other intel failures". JNS.org. Retrieved 8 November 2023.
  40. ^ Bergman, Ronen; Goldman, Adam (1 December 2023). "Israel Knew Hamas's Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
  41. ^ The Women Soldiers Who Warned of a Pending Hamas Attack and Were Ignored, haaretz.com. Accessed 29 January 2024.
  42. ^ For Israeli Women the IDF War Room's Glass Ceiling is Constantly Reinforced, timesofisrael.com. Accessed 29 January 2024.
  43. ^ IDF Spotters: The Men Ignored US and We All Paid Dearly, momentmag.com. Accessed 29 January 2024.
  44. ^ Surveillance soldiers warned of Hamas activity on Gaza border for months before October 7, timesofisrael.com. Accessed 3 February 2024.
  45. ^ NSA, Unit 8200, and Malware Proliferation Jeffrey Carr, Principal consultant at 20KLeague.com; Founder of Suits and Spooks; Author of “Inside Cyber Warfare (O’Reilly Media, 2009, 2011), Medium.com, Aug 25, 2016
  46. ^ Cornish, Paul (2021-11-04). The Oxford Handbook of Cyber Security. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-252101-9. Foreign sources routinely assert that Unit 8200 contribured to Stuxnet, Flame, Duqu and other sophisticated cyber campaigns.
  47. ^ "The Unit". Forbes.
  48. ^ "Beyond Israeli Army Unit 8200". Archived from the original on 17 May 2019.
  49. ^ a b Leichman, Abigail Klein (2017-10-15). "12 Israelis making a mark on Boston's tech scene". Israel21c. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
  50. ^ הישראלי שמכר שלושה סטארט־אפים ביותר ממיליארד דולר מסתער על חברה חדשה - ומגשים חלום [The Israeli who sold three startups for more than a billion dollars attacks a new company - and fulfills a dream]. TheMarker (in Hebrew). 25 April 2019. Retrieved 2020-06-26.
  51. ^ Wolman, Yisrael (2019-06-07). "The 'Iron Dome' for mosquitoes". Ynetnews. Retrieved 2022-08-22.
  52. ^ "A CLEAR CAPSTONE STRATEGY: IN CONVERSATION WITH URI LEVINE". Wingman. Retrieved 2020-08-20.
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