Khaberni - During the last conflict between Israel and Iran, known as the "12-Day War," Israel surprised Tehran with a precise airstrike in the early hours, targeting top leaders in the Revolutionary Guard and the army, among them the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, Hossein Salami, and the chief of staff, Mohammad Bagheri, along with several senior officers and nuclear scientists.
This systematic targeting created a leadership vacuum within the Iranian military institution and disrupted the decision-making process during the first two days of the war. Several analyses suggested that these field data slowed Tehran's response and cost it the initiative at a critical moment.
However, what was notable in this strike was not only the extent of material losses but also the tools that enabled Israel to target its objectives precisely. Instead of relying solely on traditional military systems, Tel Aviv resorted to arming supposed civilian and peaceful technologies, such as messaging applications and navigation systems.
According to Iranian reports, mobile phone tracking was used in assassinating individuals inside Iran, utilizing some well-known platforms marketed as secure due to their "end-to-end encryption." These platforms assert that no one - including the company itself - can access or trace the messages.
But reality is more complicated than what these companies promote. Metadata, which includes the sender and receiver's identity, their location and timing of messages, and even their size, remains exposed despite the encryption. These details, while seemingly secondary, are enough to build a comprehensive picture of communication and movement patterns among related individuals, giving intelligence agencies like Mossad the ability to track people and pinpoint their locations accurately.
Moreover, with direct hacking of the phone using sophisticated spyware like "Pegasus," privacy completely disappears, and the smartphone transforms from a personal communication medium into an open secrets vault in the hands of adversaries.
In addition to this, the Global Positioning System (GPS) played another role in this conflict. Jamming and spoofing technologies made some Iranian missiles less accurate, causing them to deviate from their paths and fail to reach their targets. Of course, this doesn't negate what we all saw from the arrival of several missiles with massive destructive power to areas in the heart of Israel, with explosion levels previously unseen by the state.
Here, the implications of this operation were not limited to the military front but also extended to civil navigation. On June 15, the oil tanker "Front Eagle" collided with another tanker near the Strait of Hormuz after transmitting conflicting location signals, veering off its course and catching fire. Hundreds of ships and planes also recorded similar disturbances in their location data.
This blending of civilian and military is not an exception, but rather part of a broader approach in which Israel has shaped a security philosophy based on blurring the boundaries between the two domains, turning everyday tools into weapons embedded in the arsenal of modern warfare. And this is not new, as the first field for these experiments was not in Iran, but on the bodies and land of the Palestinians.
In the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, advanced surveillance systems were tested over the past years, facial recognition algorithms and video tracking were trained, and drones were tested as the "first responders" to incidents.
This way, the Israeli occupation authorities practice a form of governance that harnesses "civilian" technology for security and military purposes, then re-markets them to global markets as "smart solutions" for cities, industry, or healthcare. This phenomenon, which can be called the "dual-use deception," reprocesses control expertise in a colonial context to become profitable global products.
Whitewashing Repression Tools
Dual-use implies that the good or technology can be employed for both civil and military purposes, from communication tools and the internet to navigation systems and drones and advanced software.
This trade is subject to a network of international agreements and national systems, with the Wassenaar Arrangement being among the most notable. This arrangement defines the lists of dual-use goods and compels member states to monitor their exports to prevent their transformation into military capabilities that can be used for illegitimate purposes.
However, Israel has not officially joined Wassenaar and instead relies on a domestic law that imposes controls over the export of military goods or those with dual use. Yet in reality, the oversight is full of loopholes. While the law focuses on conventional weapons, technologies such as facial recognition systems or video analysis programs pass as civilian and are later sold as solutions for public security and safety.
This loophole is known as "purpose washing," where control tools are marketed as if they were innocent products, like re-presenting software that tracks Palestinians at checkpoints as traffic management systems in Western cities. With the absence of strict oversight and genuine transparency, this "flexibility" becomes an open door allowing Israeli companies to export technologies initially tested in the occupation environment, before being showcased in global markets as civic innovations for safety and service management.
From Occupation to Smart Cities
One of the prominent examples of the intersections between civil and military use is the Israeli company "BriefCam" (BriefCam), which developed a technology known as "video synopsis," an algorithm that analyzes hours of surveillance camera recordings and condenses important events into a few minutes, making tracking individuals and objects much faster than traditional human searches.
This technology was not limited to its function as a mere commercial innovation but quickly became a tool in the hands of the Israeli security forces to enhance surveillance in East Jerusalem. It was used to monitor movement in the Old City and neighborhoods like Silwan under the guise of "protecting settlers," while in reality, it was part of a broad security control network where the city was divided into areas managed through control centers linked to a central system, allowing precise real-time monitoring, making the algorithm a primary tool in enforcing surveillance on Palestinians, the first use that proved its effectiveness.
After this field trial, the company re-marketed itself globally as a public safety platform. In 2018, it was acquired by the Japanese company Canon, adopting "BriefCam's" narrative about "smart cities" robustly.
On its official website, the company promotes the benefits of its technology in enhancing safety, fighting crime, and even managing traffic, with examples from cities like Chicago. However, what many clients in the West do not know is that this algorithm was initially designed with Israeli military features. While it is marketed as a tool for building safer cities, its roots were tied to monitoring residents under occupation.
Thus, the narrative is reshaped, from a "control and surveillance tool" in the narrow alleys of Jerusalem to "protecting citizens" in Western cities.
The irony is that the same tool that imposes surveillance in Jerusalem can be used in a European city to monitor traffic or control troublemakers at a football match. While these applications may appear legitimate on the surface, their essence is the same, and the capability of these technologies to gather and analyze personal data, transforming any city into a comprehensive surveillance space that threatens privacy, remains unchanged.
While "BriefCam" and its ilk disclaim responsibility, viewing the technology as "just a tool" and attributing the usage to the buyer. However, the fragility of this justification was first exposed within Israel itself before collapsing globally. In 2020, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Israeli government decided to task the Internal Security Agency (Shin Bet), primarily responsible for counter-terrorism, with tracking infected individuals and their contacts through phone location data.
This redirection of surveillance tools, originally designed for pursuing Palestinian activists, to cover all residents within the Green Line, sparked a broad controversy regarding privacy and prompted "Israeli human rights organizations" to file a complaint with the Supreme Court.
A Drill on Surveillance under the Guise of Health Care
It wasn't just the Shin Bet. The notorious "NSO" company, owner of the "Pegasus" spyware, also attempted to present itself as a tech savior during the pandemic.
In March 2020, the company announced the development of a tracking system for COVID-19 patients, dubbed "Fleming," and promoted that it was capable of monitoring the locations and phones of patients and alerting authorities to their contacts without violating privacy, a claim that was widely scrutinized.
At that time, the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett supported and promoted the initiative, while the company quickly marketed the system to several governments around the world, including the United States and some European countries. This was the company that built its reputation on selling hacking tools to oppressive regimes; it tried temporarily to don the garb of public health preservation.
But the truth soon emerged. In May of that year, an independent security researcher found an NSO database, posted online without any protection, associated with the "Fleming" system, containing half a million movement records involving about 30,000 real phones in several countries, including Arab countries.
This discovery showed that the company most likely used real data to train its system. Despite its denial of leaking personal information and its claim that what was displayed was just "masked data for demonstration," the Israeli company's explanations appeared contradictory and unconvincing, as the investigations clarified that the movement patterns in the data could not have been fabricated, but match real phone data, deepening fears of granting spy companies access to highly sensitive health information under the guise of "public service," while observers considered it as new evidence of the company's record in violating privacy, and a general indication of the Israeli companies' employment of their civilian technologies as a backdoor for spying and surveillance.
The Soldiers' Competitions and the Digital Prison Industry
Another example shows how a technology with a civilian appearance can transform into a military tool for control—this occurred with the "Blue Wolf" and "Red Wolf" systems. While facial recognition is marketed globally as a tool for traffic management or enhancing public safety, it was used in Palestine to build a massive biometric database, turning people's faces into keys for passage or denial at checkpoints.
"Blue Wolf" is a smartphone app developed by the occupation army, allowing soldiers to photograph any Palestinian they encounter, then the app conducts an immediate facial match with a central database, similar to a "secret Facebook for Palestinians." When scanned, a color signal appears determining the person's status; green means allow passage, yellow means detain them, while red indicates a need for arrest.
To enrich the database associated with the app, the army organized competitions in 2020, where soldiers competed to capture the most photos, including of children and the elderly, and awarded prizes to the most active units.
In parallel with "Blue Wolf," the occupation deployed fixed cameras at the entrances of towns and military checkpoints, linked to another facial recognition system named "Red Wolf." This integrated digital system is one of the broadest biometric monitoring operations against an occupied people in the world, being the most advanced and complex, as it blends random field photography, fixed cameras, and central databases. And the result is a "digital prison" equivalent to the physical walls and barriers.
Despite this grim picture, these systems are not classified as conventional weapons but as dual-use technology. Facial recognition software can theoretically be employed in civilian applications, such as unlocking phones with a face scan or managing secure building entries. Thus, they are marketed abroad as civilian security tools.
Reports reveal that some "Blue Wolf" technologies have reached other markets through intermediary companies, as human rights organizations have warned against their use against political opponents in different countries. And the problem is that current international laws do not include explicit texts prohibiting the sale of facial recognition software, as these technologies are not detailed in the traditional "Wassenaar" lists.
Israel exploits this legal loophole to promote its industry, field-tested in Palestine, before repackaging and marketing it as urban security solutions in countries searching for advanced tools for population monitoring or border control.
Narratives of Beautification
Israel and its companies rely on a positive narrative in marketing their dual-use technologies, as they are presented as peaceful tools for public safety or civil development, serving noble goals if used in a different context. But tracking the path of these tools from the laboratory to the Palestinian field reveals that most were born for purposes of control and military superiority, then repackaged with a civil narrative.
This is done using beautifying marketing language that hides the reality of the technologies. Systems for monitoring crowds are renamed to become "crowd management systems," while thermal cameras designed to detect living bodies behind walls used for hunting resistors are sold as night vision devices for rescue. This verbal packaging merely changes the exterior without altering the essence of the use, where the technology itself does not change, but the narrative shifts according to the targeted audience.
One of the companies that embody this beautifying marketing language is the Israeli company "Exodigo," established in 2021 by Jeremy Sward and Ido Gonen, both graduates of Israeli military intelligence units. The company developed advanced technologies for detecting tunnels, starting from experience gained in the military context against Palestinians, yet it avoided any mention of its actual use in Gaza. Instead, it re-marketed the technology as a civil solution for enhancing border security or for land assessment before implementing high-speed rail projects in the United States and Europe.
Thus, Israel plays on the mental separation between the origin and the current product, presenting systems developed in an oppressive context as neutral innovations or civil tools. And if the buyer or the public opinion is not aware that these technologies were first tested in controlling a people under occupation, no initial ethical aversion will arise. On the contrary, they may be viewed as "advanced and necessary technology," sold under the banner of security or development.
However, the experience shows that surveillance systems by nature tend to expand in powers. A system that allows governments comprehensive visibility rarely resists the temptation to use it beyond the stated goal. In Minneapolis, the American city that witnessed the spark of the George Floyd protests in 2020, the authorities had begun using the "BriefCam" system during the protests of the "Black Lives Matter" movement.
In conclusion, changing labels or civil marketing will not alter the DNA of these systems, as a system born for spying will continue to incline towards spying, even if placed in a traffic department or wrapped in public safety phrases.
