The Strongman’s Surveillance State

Paragon Solutions, Israel’s premier mercenary spyware firm, is headquartered on the top five floors of a glass panel skyscraper that sits next to a discount bank branch in central Tel Aviv. When I stopped in for a visit last month, I encountered twenty-somethings with smartwatches gliding through open floor plans, dogs lounging on shag carpets, fridges stacked with glass bottles of sparkling water, and conference rooms angled to gaze out over the hazy Mediterranean. The breezy atmosphere was at odds with the controversies the company has recently faced. But perhaps by then most of the staff knew the tide had changed.

Earlier this month Paragon scored one of its heftiest deals yet when the Trump administration reactivated a $2 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), following the firm’s acquisition by Florida-based investment group AE Industrial Partners last December. The company builds surveillance weapons such as Graphite, a zero-click smartphone hack that can access encrypted communications, turn on the camera and microphone, and vacuum up every text, direct message, intimate photograph, and personal file stored on the device—all without the user noticing. The technology gives those who deploy it a power once reserved for the top commanders of the world’s most vaunted spy outfits.

The technology gives those who deploy it a power once reserved for the top commanders of the world’s most vaunted spy outfits.

Scandal came for the company earlier this year when Italian authorities reportedly used Paragon’s spyware to surveil prominent journalists and human rights activists. For the Trump administration, it might have been a proof of concept. The news of the DHS deal—quietly announced on a federal procurement form that was circulated by journalist Jack Poulson—reversed a U.S. government freeze on a deal originally minted in 2023. Over the last decade, American law enforcement agencies have tested and even procured spyware offered by companies with spotty human rights records. Yet outrage surrounding the abuse of Pegasus—another zero-click surveillance tool sold by Paragon’s main rival, the NSO Group, itself based just north of Tel Aviv in Herzliya, near Mossad’s headquarters—propelled Biden to sign an executive order clamping down on government use of commercial spyware.

Trump’s reelection has changed all that. Over the last eight months, he has aspired to govern the United States like a strongman. The summer began with federal agents dispatched to round up undocumented migrants at gun point in Los Angeles. It ended with U.S. military forces carrying out a drone strike in the Caribbean, killing eleven Venezuelans in a brazen execution that legal experts say amounts to a war crime. Arming DHS with Paragon’s mercenary spyware spells only further escalation.

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Like a reaper drone, mercenary spyware is an expensive weapon usually reserved for elite military operations. The technology became popular with national security agencies in the early 2010s at the height of U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns in the Middle East. Militant organizations were hiding behind state-of-the-art encryption, and superpowers were lacking in the ingenuity needed to hack their phones. The NSO Group was the first to capitalize on the opportunity. 

Within a few years’ time, a handful of companies came to dominate the industry. Whether headquartered in Israel or elsewhere, they were often staffed by Israeli veterans of elite intelligence outfits such as Unit 8200. Military-trained developers had spent years honing their surveillance skills in the occupied Palestinian territories and neighboring countries; now they could apply them for eye-watering salaries at the behest of governments eager to shore up their power. Israel’s foray into the private surveillance industry was a natural update to the country’s old brand as the world’s ultimate security state.

The technology was initially marketed as a weapon, for use in military conflicts or intelligence operations. But despots, keen to surveil and terrify their enemies, found it hard to resist a tool that can decipher the secrets stored in anyone’s personal phone, and spyware companies found it hard to resist the prospect of more paying customers. Soon enough, the industry was embroiled in a number of public relations disasters. Governments in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Latin America became enthusiastic customers. A technology marketed to clamp down on terrorism, drug cartels, and pedophilia was used to monitor, blackmail, and arrest journalists, human rights advocates, and opposition politicians. Among the victims was journalist and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, who in 2018 was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul where he was murdered and dismembered. Pegasus was found on the phones of his wife and at least one other associate. Though most victims of mercenary spyware evade such cruel fates, they still describe the technology’s effects as debilitating. “Pegasus was (the authorities’) sending me a message that anything they wanted they could have, that nowhere was free from their control,” Salah Hamouri told me when we spoke in Ramallah in 2022. The lawyer was one of six Palestinian activists who found the NSO group’s spyware on their devices in late 2021. Hamouri, also a French citizen, figured something was amiss when he picked up his phone after gym sessions to find he had been active on Instagram during stretches of time he stored the device in a locker. But news of the hack—confirmed by a forensic scan on his iPhone—sent him spiraling. In the aftermath, Hamouri spent months offline, not even speaking to his wife and kids in Paris over encrypted messaging apps. By the time we met he was carrying a pink Motorola flip phone and still limited his communication to just a few people. “The only time I feel secure is when I’m not using any kind of technology, but it’s impossible to live like that,” he said. Painstaking documentation of similar travails led to international investigations and lawsuits here in the United States. For the Biden administration, which had toyed with buying the technology, the mounting pressure was enough to shift their course: rather than signing deals with the firms, it wound up blacklisting a number of them. Unable to access their biggest market, the industry seemed, for a moment, to be on the wane: the NSO Group and its peer companies teetered on the edge of bankruptcy; in recent years three other Israeli spyware outfits folded.

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Then came Trump’s return. He campaigned on a pledge to build up American military power, and even before taking office, he promised Silicon Valley titans hefty contracts to develop surveillance and weapons systems for U.S. security agencies—in August, the surveillance firm Palantir scored a $10 billion contract with the Department of Defense—while casually talking of conquering Greenland. In campaign speeches, Trump offered an alternative to the last few decades of liberalism: belligerent nationalism, hard militarism, and a frontier ethos. Many tech CEOs were eager to cash in. They parroted conservative talking points, vowing to inject Silicon Valley with a warrior spirit to protect Western civilization. Executives from Meta, OpenAI, Palantir, and Thinking Machines enlisted in a special unit within the newly renamed Department of War. Others signed deals with DHS to make the agency over into what its secretary, Kristi Noem, has called a “vigilant and proactive and innovative” force. And all of this has been helped by the massive entanglement of the U.S. and Israeli military-tech complex—a longstanding economic relationship that Trump has not invented whole cloth. The late twentieth century’s steady supply of tanks and Uzis morphed into a twenty-first-century exchange of predator drones, facial recognition algorithms, and, now, spyware. Still, DHS’s contract with Paragon marks escalation, coming amid Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s brutal crackdown that critics say is flouting constitutional checks on the agency’s power. In recent months the DHS has sought to ramp up its mass surveillance capacities; ICE has detained valid visa holders based on social media posts at odds with the Trump administration’s position on Palestine. It has offered Palantir a $30 million contract to develop ImmigrationOS, a surveillance database that advocates worry “concentrates enormous power in the hands of AI-driven platforms with minimal public oversight.” And in February, The Intercept reported that it was courting companies to develop a tool—making use of “social and behavioral sciences” and “psychological profiles”—allowing the agency to monitor individuals who criticized it on social media.

All this has been helped by the entanglement of the U.S. and Israeli military-tech complex. The steady supply of tanks and Uzis has morphed into the exchange of predator drones, facial recognition algorithms, and, now, spyware.

The Paragon deal also demonstrates how the U.S.-Israel alliance will endure despite plummeting domestic support for the war in Gaza. Calls for sanctions on Israeli armaments have mounted in recent months, as Israeli officials barrel ahead with an expanded offensive in Gaza City. Endless documentation of war crimes, skyrocketing civilian casualties, allegations of famine have fueled calls for sanctions on Israeli armaments. Various EU member states have frozen the import of Israeli manufactured weapons and surveillance systems. Germany and Spain have halted all arms sales to Israel, while many members of the Hague Group, a collective of several countries in the Global South, has banned arms transfers and sales. Though 84 percent of Americans support an immediate ceasefire, the Trump administration has balked at even the most tepid of sanctions. There are old and strategic interests at play. The United States has long relied on Israel’s military prowess to further its interest in the Middle East, from the CIA, the NSA, and Mossad tag-teaming targeted assassinations in Syria and Iran to Israeli and American security bodies sharing a steady stream of surveillance data extracted from governments, militant networks, and civilians. Despite campaigning on an “America First” campaign platform, Trump is keen to maintain these relations and often praises Israel as a bulwark against Iranian influence in the region. More than anything else, though, Trump is a power-monger. He finds a compelling model in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strongman rule and the military arsenal that backs it up. Indeed, Netanyahu has managed to cling onto power through brute displays of military force. Exploding pagers in Beirut, suicide drones beelining toward Iranian nuclear scientists’ bedrooms, 2,000 munitions dropped on civilian complexes in Gaza city, bombing Hamas negotiators in Doha: all of these have distracted from charges of corruption, the dismantling of Israeli democratic institution (imperfect as they may have been), and the fact that more Israelis have died under his watch than any government since the 1970s. Last week, as Israeli troops invaded Gaza City and a United Nations inquiry accused Israeli officials of genocide, Netanyahu told a group of American congressmen the he was remaking Israel into a warrior nation. “We’re going to be Athens and Supersparta” he said, “we’ll have to defend ourselves and know how to attack our enemies.” Trump has copied a few of Netanyahu’s strategies in the months since he assumed the presidency. Since March, U.S. airstrikes in Yemen have killed over 500 combatants and more than 200 civilians, more than all those killed in two decades of U.S. bombings in the country. As of June, Trump had deployed thousands of National Guards into the heart of U.S. cities. Noem requested “drone surveillance support” to turbocharge their efforts to find and arrest undocumented migrants in Los Angeles. ICE has detained a record-breaking number in recent months, though actual deportation numbers are lagging behind the “millions and millions” promised. For those living under this expanding offensive, the results are catastrophic. Some have been held for months on end in crowded detention centers. Others, including legal residents, have simply been deported without due process. And that’s just within U.S. borders. Abroad, the embrace of aerial targeting and drone strikes with vanishingly few efforts to minimize civilian casualties mark an unrestrained phase of U.S. militarism, one that shirks even the most symbolic adherence to human rights norms and international rule of law. Instead, allegations of war crimes are touted by those in power as proof of a job well done.

Which returns me to the Tel Aviv skyscraper where Israeli developers build out mercenary spyware at the behest of America’s DHS. On the sunny day I stopped in for a visit, a surveillance UAV hummed somewhere just beyond cloud cover. Fighter jets rumbled overhead on their way to launch guided munitions toward Gaza City. To some, the scene might conjure a kind of dystopia. To others, it offers a model of martial strength. Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.

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