Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes

I suspect that many people, like me, now hear "antisemitic" as "anti Israel" and assume it's a politically motivated slur without justification. This is not good. As racism and actual antisemitism continues to be very real, any conflating or exaggeration of a real problem diminishes people's willingness to address the real problems.

They have to be kind of panicking that the smear tactics keep backfiring.

Didn't stop Mamdani. Won't stop Platner.

At this point it is amusing to see them pissing away so many millions of dollars to stop a public opinion tide that has no chance of being stopped.

As a newyorker who was raised a modern orthdox jew, but left that world for the world arts, the last few years have been weird.

On the one hand, it's been the first time I've no longer been able to take for granted that everyone in a room agrees with my political views and doesn't pre-judge me based on my background. On the other hand, I've gone back home to the suburbs and heard some really ridiculous hyperbole about what it's like in NYC.

Then there's the fact that while I support Isreal, I don't support all its actions. Nor do a lot of people in the [Orthodox] Jewish community, but they are afraid to speakup too much.

Modern orthdoox jews are kind of like Mitt Romney is for Mormons. Observant of all the rules, but also raised with a full secular education, encouraged to go to college, and expected to participate in society rather than isolate in thier community.

The 2026 budget for Hasbara is $730 million. That's a lot of push.

I like and have come to, on certain policies and candidates, ally with Mamdani. But I’m struggling to find the relevance to New York City in this article beyond supposition. I went in ready to find a foreign attack on our homeland and come away grasping at straws.

Well previous NYC mayors felt the need to travel to Israel and talk to them about how good of a job he did for them, so it is quite a change

The NY Times coverage of him is abhorrently biased. Every time I see an article about him, the headline, summary, and article itself feel like the editors were desperate to paint him in as negative a light as possible.

The man has almost overnight gotten the city to start doing things that benefit the general public, nto just the wealthy. Actions on bike lane projects that were stalled and actually taking action against slumlords.

All that barely gets a mention, but they seem obsessed with trying to find fault with everything he does.

During the NBA finals, he paid for his own ticket but they still took him to task for its expense ($1000) and the ticket coming from the "VIP ticket pool" like this was some abuse of his position or unethical of him.

Of course the mayor gets access to the VIP pool of tickets? And he didn't abuse the privilege to get tickets for anyone else - not staff, not family, not friends. Just him.

do they mention hwo they meddled? there is a scenario where such firm would expect mamdani elected as a favorable outcome.

Not to be confused with Blackrock or Blackstone, both large American investment companies with their own shady operations.

Nonsense, it'll end up with merely some public head scratching and shrugs, and a "gee whiz monsieur, it sure is a mystery to us too".

Interesting that whatever they wanted to do backfired in NYC.

Europeans couldn't even get Israel out of a silly pop song contest, so it seems a bit hopeless to expect any actual political action.

Rogue states will attack Western democracy. It's a tale as old as... Well, actually, in the past few years, this one has done more on that front than all the others combined.

Not quite. That was Black Cube, a second Israeli spy firm accused of election meddling: https://www.politico.eu/article/robert-golob-slovenia-eu-pro...

The current US administration would have likely been in favor of it. Long term it’s a bad idea but it wouldn’t be the first time we saw groups like this only thinking about the short term.

They think they can do whatever they want. And thus far, they have been right about that.

Quite revealing when this comment has been getting downvoted. I guess some people support the fact that some people dishonestly raise money for a humanitarian cause and then steal that money.

Also Black Cube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Cube

Black, like Leon Black of Epstein fame

Israeli here - I'll try to write this the least political as I can since I on one hand disagree strongly with the government and on the other my experience has been getting antisemstic (yes, not anti-zionist) comments whenever this gets discussed a lot (and likely downvotes but who cares I've been here 10 years and have more fake points than is important anyway).

Israel has several "cores" of technology. The military stuff is shameful (as well as other stuff). It's not just the NSOs (or less infamously the Wiz's/Palo Altos etc).

There are plenty of good things though - startups in the biotech/health/classic "tech" space. I'll spare you the long list of stuff like Mellanox that drives Nvidias in data centers and leave the googling of medtech to you. Lots of neutral stuff too.

Regardless of what good things other Israeli companies might be doing, it's clear that the Israeli government doesn't have a problem with these malware / spyware companies.

there's not much controversy that would pull media attention in green tech or medical research

IDF conscripts astroturf on social media all day, and a lot of people do the same for free on behalf of the concept of Israel

Don’t worry about the deflections and karma flagging censorship as consensus, because its not

Jewish and Jewish Israeli people are raised to be afraid of the entire world, and think losing a perception game will result in their eradication perpetuated by everyone around them. This is due to a 1,000 year history of exactly that, so I can empathize, but not at the expense of fiction. I don’t want anyone to hurt them. I want the corrosive traits in their culture to be checked and go away.

Put all those PhD’s that some people are so proud of into other pursuits.

At this point just file it under "Tech-washing".

As if Rudolph Höss' innovations in chemical and civil engineering somehow excuse Auschwitz.

People need to start being clear about subversion and inhumanity exported from Israel and not attempt to bookkeep that against their B2B SaaS'.

This demonic rhetoric would not be valid in any other circumstance.

> ... because apparently there's many more Israeli startups working on medical research, green technology and world peace.

> If there are, they certainly would do no harm in being more vocal ...

Perhaps, but - talk to someone who's done PR work for startups. Ask them what it would take for an Israeli startup working on, say, home bagel-making machines to get the sort of world-wide media attention that any Israeli creep-tech firm can get - for free - by association with a few nefarious deeds.

Selling spyware and 0days is a significant industry in Israel [1]. This includes Pegasus [2][3]. Countries around the world pay Israeli companies to hack the phones of politicians, opposition leaders, union leaders, journalists and basically anyone they don't like. This is actually a common structure for intelligence agencies who are often restricted from spying domestically or on citizens. They simply farm that out to the intelligence agencies of other countries or these spyware companies. Israel has become kind of an extrajudicial cheat code. Saudi Arabia has been a big user [4]. All of this is just objective fact.

No one was officially blamed for Stuxnet years ago but it's widely believed that the US and Israel were responsible [5]. And of course we had the pager operation [6]. If anyone else had done the same, they'd be labelled as terrorists and be under economic and diplomatic sanctions.

As for BlackCore, I guess it's part of the wider story of Israel's extensive influence campaign on foreign elections and politicians. We've seen this get really overt. For example, Thomas Massie's primary was the most expensive in history when AIPAC and AIPAC affiliates spent a combined ~$35M. I actually think it's this extreme and overt because Israel has lost the PR fight and are increasingly desperate.

Another less-talked about example was the character assassination of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, which was essentiallya Zionist takeover of the Labor Party and, lo and behold, a few years later we're locking up grandmothers indefinitely for holding up signs that say "Palestine Action" [7].

And of course we have the Jeffrey Epstein of it all where it's really obvious that Epstein was an Israeli access agent and likely Ghislaine Maxwell was as well, particularly when you look at the entire history of Robert Maxwell from WW2 to arming Jewish militias pre-1948 and the IDF after that until finally "falling off" his own yacht.

Oh and there are claims that some unidentified hacker breached the FBI's systems in 2023 and accessed files related to Jeffrey Epstein. There are claims that 500TB was destroyed and 400TB of that was recovered [8]. That's so weird.

It's depressing to me how many people support a state that is functionally the Nazi Germany of our times. Like go ahead and find me the functional distinction between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. But also how impervious Western politicians are to public opinion on this issue, which has drastically switched in the last few years. Opposition movements are suppressed with brutal violence.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfOgm1IcBd0

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)

[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/8/what-you-need-to-kno...

[4]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2021/07/the-...

[5]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-12633240

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Lebanon_electronic_device...

[7]: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250807-uk-pensioner-...

[8]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47184683

The Nazis did a ton of cutting edge research too.

Remilk is an Israeli food-tech startup using yeasts to produce milk proteins. Frankly I find your comment rather odd, why should a startup be more loud because other people are biased? Diplomacy is the job of the state. We have innovative index on which Israel does well and large number of unicorn per capita.

In addition to this malware, which comes from an Israeli company and is used for the purpose of subverting democratic elections in foreign countries (we don't really know who mandated these interventions, but the target, John Swinney and fellow ministers, have been vocal in their criticism of the Israeli government's actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and have imposed a form of sanctions on the Israel Defense Forces by withholding state grants to arms firms that supply the IDF and freezing support for exports to Israel), they have also infiltrated some countries like the UK and US with very powerful pro-Israel lobbies acting behind the curtain by directly contacting prominent politicians.

In the UK, the Israeli company Elbit Systems produces arms for Israel through its British subsidiary, which holds major Ministry of Defence contracts including the Watchkeeper drone programme (worth over £800 million) and the Jupiter training system (around £130 million) – sources: UK Companies House and MoD contract notices. People protesting for Palestinians at Elbit sites have been arrested: between 2020 and June 2024, over 140 arrests were made at more than 50 actions by Palestine Action, but police and court records show that no terrorism charges were filed, and the High Court rejected a legal challenge against policing of these protests in May 2024. Two main lobbies cover both major parties in the UK: Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel.

In the US, a similar two‑party structure exists but with far greater financial power. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its super PAC spent over $4.5 million in the 2023–2024 election cycle, mostly to defeat progressive Democrats critical of Israel, including successfully spending $14.5 million to unseat Congressman Jamaal Bowman (source: Federal Election Commission filings). The Democratic Majority for Israel and the Republican Jewish Coalition mirror the UK's Labour and Conservative lobby groups, while the US provides Israel with roughly $3.8 billion in annual military aid – a sharp contrast to the UK's limited sanctions on the IDF. Unlike the UK, no US protester has been arrested under terrorism laws for actions against arms companies supplying Israel.

In practice, Israel and Russia do similar things: they affect or subvert foreign elections by manipulating information and social media, and they directly influence politics via foundations, think tanks, and by cultivating politicians and influencers. For Russia, this includes organisations like the Russian House in Washington and sympathetic think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation – though the Heritage Foundation is American, Russian state media and proxies have actively courted its positions.

Russia has also influenced figures like Tucker Carlson, who repeatedly echoes Kremlin talking points, and JD Vance, who has opposed military aid to Ukraine; no public evidence proves formal recruitment, but both have amplified narratives favourable to Moscow and JD Vance made a powerful endorsement of Orban, a corrupted pro-russian statesman, in the past election in Hungary.

There's a lot of offensive security talent, but this has nothing to do with Palestinians. Israeli intelligence is very advanced and is why Israel has been able to eliminate the leaders of Hezbollah and Iran.

Not everything in Israel is about or related to Palestinians. The Palestinian bias only exists in circles where every thought regarding Israel is immediately evoking a Palestinian connotation. In reality, most Israelis never interact with Palestinians.

To suggest that a sector of Israeli startups exists on the experience of people "suppressing Palestinians" is definitely biased, absurd, and is a slippery slope.

why would the First Amendment apply to foreign nationals working for a foreign corporation in a foreign country?

We've had discussions about this sort of stuff before.

As an Israeli (note the article exposing them is Israeli too) I was not aware until I saw this and I definitely intend to protest/organize about this (though to be fair I've been protesting about other stuff in the past and the climate here sucks).

>Sure someome will argue things here get flagged cause they are political, but I don't buy that.

Are you saying that this isn't political? It's literally about politics. The comments section will be predictable and it will be flagged for that.

Do you disagree?

it isnt all that interesting from a tech perspective without details about the code and techniques used for doing it.

its worth a flag in that its rage bait, and not surprising or new by any means that israel is aiming to meddle in elections

Nope, the war in Iran is testament to that.

Nope, foreign lobbyists in the guise of AIPAC spent record amounts to primary Thomas Massie.

You don't see a difference between local and foreign organizations influencing an election?

Most countries only allow citizens to vote. By your logic, they should let anyone vote, because what's the difference between a citizen and a foreigner when it comes to elections?