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.
"The Largest Honeypot Operation On the 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, who, 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.
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 CIA, 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, who 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, who 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.
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% 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?