Across the world, anonymous users on the social-media platform X are reporting that data from Google Trends shows their real names are being mass searched in Israel, Alan MacLeod reports.
Elon Musk, owner of X, with Israe’s President Yitzhak Herzog in Jerusalem, Nov. 27, 2023. (Haim Zach / Government Press Office of Israel/ Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Alan MacLeod
MintPress News
A wide range of anonymous X (Twitter) users have reported that their real names are suddenly being Googled in Israel shortly after they began criticizing the country for its actions in Palestine. Some connected the phenomenon to Au10tix, the software X requires users (even anonymous ones) to use in order to verify their real identities.
Au10tix is an Israeli company founded and staffed by former Israeli spies from the elite Israeli military intelligence group Unit 8200. MintPress News investigates this disturbing phenomenon.
‘Largest Honeypot Operation On Planet’
“I’m not even kidding when I say my full legal name, including my middle name, has been searched up in Israel 11 times in the past day,” wrote TransFemPOTUS, an anonymous X user who has been highly critical of Israel’s actions.
This was not an isolated incident. “So apparently my full legal name got searched for in Israel the other day,” revealed TheAtlantean9, an anonymous far-left user with a Palestinian flag in their bio.
Meanwhile, artist Bionico Bandito stated that “My full name got searched 100 times in Israel when I posted this,” referring to a cartoon depicting associates of Jeffrey Epstein being executed.
Across the world, from conservative Japanese accounts to American conspiracy theorists, anonymous users are reporting that data from Google Trends shows their real names, not divulged anywhere online, are being mass searched in Israel.
How could this be happening? Some laid the blame at Au10tix’s door. “Only Au10tix and X holds my data obtained from ID verification,” wrote one user in a viral post, adding, “The rumors are absolutely true.”
“Israel is now 100% confirmed to be Googling anonymous users on X and their family members shortly after they speak out against the country,” wrote another, concluding that, “X is now the largest honeypot operation on the planet.”
The theory centers around Israeli security company Au10tix, which, in 2023, was tasked with verifying users’ identities, a prerequisite for joining X’s premium service which allows users a far greater reach.
The process requires individuals to upload a picture of their passport or other photo I.D., and allow Au10tix to scan their face via their device’s camera. Au10tix claims that it deletes users’ data within 72 hours of receiving it.
However, the fact that the company was founded and is staffed by veterans of notorious Israeli spying group Unit 8200 — a group that has been behind many of the most outrageous hacking, infiltration and cyberwarfare scandals of the past decade — has led many to be extremely suspicious.
Unit 8200’s base in Sinai, between 1967 and 1982. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The idea that Au10tix itself, or the Israeli government could be using the data given to it by users in order to combat online criticism is far from outlandish.
The Department of Homeland Security is already known to be doing the same, sending hundreds of subpoenas to Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Discord, and other large social media apps demanding they share the personal information and identities of anonymous users who have criticized the actions of Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE).
Government officials confirmed to The New York Times that platforms have often complied with their requests.
Au10tix: Authentically Israeli
Au10tix was founded in 2002 by Ron Atzmon, a Unit 8200 veteran whose father was treasurer of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party. It got its start providing hi-tech security systems at airports and other venues, before branching out into the online sphere.
Atzmon does not hide his strong political views. His professional LinkedIn profile is littered with posts supporting Israel, or condemning American students protesting Israel’s attack on Gaza, comparing them to the Ku Klux Klan, or reposting videos of far–right commentator Douglas Murray presenting the protestors as antisemitic supporters of terror.
A significant number of Au10tix’s employees are also ex-Israeli spooks. Until 2016, Eliran Levi was a Unit 8200 agent. In 2022, the company hired him as a developer.
Others, however, go straight from the intelligence services into Au10tix. Lior Emuna, for instance, left her job as an intelligence analyst at Unit 8200 to join Au10tix. She is now an analytics manager.
And in 2019, Sara Benita left her position as a mobile communications systems operator at Unit 8200 to become an engineer for the company. Director of product management, Shay Rechter, meanwhile, was a senior Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) commander before joining the organization.
Unit 8200 is the IDF’s most elite intelligence unit. Often described as “Israel’s Harvard,” it serves as the centerpiece of the country’s hi-tech spying and military apparatus. The unit is dedicated to surveillance, cyberwarfare and online manipulation operations, and has been responsible for many of the most shocking acts of tech-based sabotage and terror in recent years.
This includes the 2024 Lebanese pager attack, where agents smuggled thousands of booby-trapped electronic devices into the country, exploding them en masse, killing 42 people and wounding thousands more. The event was widely condemned, even by former director of the C.I.A., Leon Panetta, as an act of terrorism.
Unit 8200 also created the notorious Pegasus software that was used to spy on more than 50,000 journalists, politicians, diplomats, business leaders and human rights defenders worldwide. Confirmed targets included President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Imran Khan of Pakistan and Iraqi President Barham Salih.
Known purchasers of Pegasus include the Central Intelligence Agency and the government of Saudi Arabia, which used it to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye. All sales of Pegasus had to be approved by the Israeli government, which reportedly had access to the data Pegasus’ foreign customers were accruing.
Unit 8200 also reportedly produced malware that attacked Microsoft Windows operating systems, using loopholes it found to attack control systems, delete hard drives and shut down key systems, such as the energy infrastructure of Iran.
Surely their most deadly endeavor, however, is Project Lavender. The group developed the Lavender software, which uses A.I. and big data to develop a profile on every person in Gaza (including children), assigning them a score of 1-100, based on individuals’ perceived connections to Hamas.
A wide range of characteristics, including sharing similar work schedules to or being in a WhatsApp group with a known Hamas member, would raise one’s score. If an individual’s number reached a certain level, they would automatically be put on a list.
Israeli military drone IAI Heron, used to monitor, target and bomb buildings or individuals. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0)
These A.I.-driven kill lists allowed the IDF to find a way around what they called “targeting bottlenecks,” with Lavender identifying over 37,000 Palestinians to be executed in the first few weeks of the attack alone. There was little-to-no human oversight on these systems.
Lavender is known to be distinctly hit-or-miss. Many professions with similar communication patterns to Hamas, including police and firefighters, or even people with the same name as a resistance fighter, were flagged for execution. IDF sources themselves suggest a 10 percent false positive rate.
Unit 8200 was able to do this thanks to the massive surveillance apparatus it has built up over time. Palestinians’ every public move is watched over by facial recognition cameras. Their calls, texts and emails are monitored.
Dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, sex lives and search histories, are compiled, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel.
One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in conversations.
This is why X working with Au10tix, an organization established and run by agents of foreign power, compelling users to give it their most intimate personal details, is so controversial. Unit 8200 exists to carry out cyberwarfare and clandestine spying operations around the world, and it is an open question to what extent anyone ever truly retires from the business of espionage.
While its reputation is highly controversial around the world, Unit 8200 is considered the most prestigious group within the Israeli military.
In a country with mandatory national service, parents spend fortunes on science and math classes for their children, hoping they will make the highly-competitive selection process, knowing that it represents a fast track to a lucrative career in the country’s burgeoning hi-tech sector. Hundreds end up working at Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other big American tech platforms.
Au10tix has insisted that it does not store users’ personal data, including their identities. But when a company is founded, headed and staffed by individuals from one of the most infamous spying organizations on the planet — one whose modus operandi has been to infiltrate, surveil, and blackmail both its allies and its opponents — the question arises: why would we trust them?
Alan MacLeod is senior staff writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.
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Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Do you remember sometime back when
Joe summoned Grok for his name
and found out he was a weatherman .
It’s Beginning to Look Like Gaza
Song by
Bang Crosby
It’s beginning to look a lot like Gaza
Everywhere you go
Traveling at Mach five and ten, glistening once again
With hospitals and shelters aglow
It’s beginning to look a lot like Gaza (Gaza)
Empty shelves in every store
But the prettiest sight to see, is the blood that will be
On your own front door
A pair of military boots and a pistol that shoots
Is the wish of Donald and Ben
Dolls that will scream and will have no legs
Is the hope of Mark Levin
And Mom and Dad can hardly wait for schools to be bombed again
It’s beginning to look a lot like Gaza
Everywhere you go
There’s a fire in the Grand Hotel, one in the park as well
The burning kind that doesn’t mind the snow
It’s beginning to look a lot like Gaza
Soon the sirens will start
And the thing that will make them sound, is the hatred that abounds
Right within your heart
It’s beginning to look a lot like Gaza
Karma is in store
But the purdy-est sight to see, is the blood that will be
On your own front door
Sure, it’s True Promise four
“If you want to know who rules you, find out who you are not allowed to criticize”
It has never been truer than now. If you didn’t know ALL “social media” (facebook, all of them) go through israhell when you hit send, they you deserve to be checked out. It’s been public knowledge for years. Morons just simply don’t pay attention.
Or it could be AI.
“The internet is rife with anonymous accounts as users adopt pseudonyms, sometimes for genuine reasons like speaking freely, and other times for nefarious ones. But this era of online privacy could be coming to a close. In a study available on the arXiv preprint server, researchers demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) can identify the people behind these accounts at scale.”
techxplore.com/news/2026-03-ai-online-anonymity.html
arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800
arXiv is the premier, open-access repository for AI and machine learning research, serving as a critical data source for training and informing Large Language Models (LLMs)
sad
Facebook demanded a video of myself. They lied that I was suspected of being a robot. What are they going to do with this? I wouldn’t give it so they locked me out. Good riddance.
This obviously has a chilling effect on an already cowed media. But if a person is getting involved with Elon Musk by using X, they’re taking a significant risk, IMO. Especially since there are reportedly a number of neo-Nazis that frequent that platform.
And Au10tix‘s claim that they delete all info after 30 days (or whatever they say) could even be true, especially if they first transferred/sold the info to a sister organization from which it could easily be accessed as desired.
Whatever it takes to shut this evil Zionist government down, it must be done asap. We cannot tolerate this level of evil to persist.
Thank you this telling information ^^
The picture looks like ham shack .
Tranmitters , recievers and wide variety test equip and scopes .
I am sure there are early , calcs , early prototypes ?
The granddaddy of the WWW , toss in some experimental phone snooping AI ?
Maybe just a Big Bad Typewriter .
This is almost certainly with in the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statements accepted by X users. Such statements usually include big, gigantic loopholes which state that they can ‘share’ your data ‘with third parties’. Third parties of course includes anyone the corporation does business with, or will do business with in the future. And, since Unit 8200 (under a pseudonym) is involved in the operation of the system and verification of the users in the system, then the data is probably also authorized to go to them on more narrow grounds of operating the system.
I know almost nobody reads those things, but one would think that ‘conspiracy theorists’ might be a rare group that might dig into the details? And ‘conservatives’ might be another group that might believe in reading something before they sign it?
But, today ‘conservative’ appears to mean ‘radicals’ who want to completely change the system, while ‘liberals’ have become the people who protect the system and attempt to prevent all change. It’s a surrealistic world out there, and logic has fallen softly dead.
OMG, you mean to tell me that Elon Musk is not on my side and not my friend? Was I wrong to trust Elon Musk to keep me anonymous? OMG! How shocking! I thought he was a fine and moral person (end sarcasm mode). Maybe he’ll claim that this only happened because he was microdosing?