A leak within a leak: extradition requests with Israel as of May 2022
A previously unreported spreadsheet of 2,152 international legal requests with the State of Israel was hidden within last year's "Anonymous for Justice" leaks.
“The Department of State is aware that Tom Artiom Alexandrovich, an Israeli citizen, was arrested in Las Vegas and given a court date for charges related to soliciting sex electronically from a minor,” wrote the U.S. State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs division on the social media platform X on Monday morning. “He did not claim diplomatic immunity and was released by a state judge pending a court date,” the division continued.
Previously unreported hidden spreadsheet data from within the massive “Anonymous for Justice” leak of Israeli Ministry of Justice emails – widely speculated to originate from Iranian intelligence – provides a fulsome accounting, as of May 2022, of incoming and outgoing international legal requests involving the Israeli government. A review of numerous child sexual abuse cases in the dataset indicates that the Israeli government has been less than eager to comply with U.S. extradition requests.
A complete copy of the unmasked spreadsheet, with the sole redactions of six individuals’ government identifier numbers, is directly embedded within this article for further analysis.
Mr. Alexandrovich, 38, executive director of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, was one of eight “child sex predators” named in a Friday press release regarding an undercover operation conducted by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. The Israeli cyber official acknowledged during an interrogation to have been in town for the 25th annual Black Hat cybersecurity conference, which took place from August 2 to 7 prior to its more community-oriented analogue, DEF CON 33.
A $10,000 bond was paid to the Henderson Detention Center southeast of Las Vegas for Mr. Alexandrovich’s case, according to reporting from Reuters, and paperwork indicated that he is due back in court on August 27.
Alexandrovich returned to Israel after being released by the Las Vegas police and was placed on leave from the National Cyber Directorate, according to reporting in The Jerusalem Post on Saturday. Two days later, the Israeli-born acting U.S. attorney for Nevada, Sigal Chattah, publicly criticized a “liberal district attorney and state court judge in Nevada” for “FAIL[ING] TO REQUIRE AN ALLEGED CHILD MOLESTER TO SURRENDER HIS PASSPORT, which allowed him to flee our country.” Chattah’s office announced the previous day that Alexandrovich’s case would be handled by the Clark County district attorney, with no reference to federal prosecution.
(Following scrutiny of her public claims that all Palestinians in Gaza are terrorists, Chattah subsequently deleted her personal account on the social media platform X.)
According to an August 7 arrest declaration from Henderson Police Department officer Mark Kohut – first reported by the American journalist Saagar Enjeti – Mr. Alexandrovich attempted to lure an undercover officer, whom he believed to be a 15-year-old girl, into taking an Uber to a sexual encounter at a Cirque du Soleil event. Alexandrovich was said to have admitted to using the pseudonym “Adam” as part of his solicitations the previous day on the Swiss anonymous dating application Pure and then through Meta’s messaging application WhatsApp.
According to Mr. Kohut’s summary of an interview conducted with Alexandrovich at 8 p.m. on August 6 by an FBI special agent, the Israeli cyberofficial was staying on floor 53 of Hilton’s Conrad Hotel while attending the Black Hat cybersecurity conference and had met with several officials from both the FBI – “one white guy who was tall and bald and one black guy” – and the National Security Agency.
The interview summary described Alexandrovich as being “in shock” and needing “to contact someone about his international flight back to Israel,” further stating that Alexandrovich “did not know the numbers for the Israeli government.”
The more than 2,000 hidden case overviews in the leaked spreadsheet further includes a new detail regarding the extradition request timeline for the famed director and convicted pedophile Roman Polanski, as well as previously unreported information regarding the U.S. extradition request for the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Joseph Snowden. They also summarize four international legal requests relating to the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group and one involving the Mossad-affiliated private intelligence firm Black Cube.
Case number 15-13-11 assigned the U.S. Government’s “state security” extradition request for Snowden to Israeli Ministry of Justice lawyer Enumah Kelemen on July 11, 2013, during the former government contractor’s roughly 40-day confinement in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport.
A “sex with minors” entry in the spreadsheet provides background to Roman Polanski’s July 2007 visit to Israel, where he narrowly escaped extradition. As an apparent consequence of Mr. Polanski fleeing the United States after pleading guilty to sexual intercourse with a minor in 1978, the Israeli Ministry of Justice opened a case for the U.S. request for the filmmaker’s extradition on July 9, 2006.
The Israeli government requested additional information from the Los Angeles district attorney during Polanski’s 2007 visit to the country, and an official timeline provided by the district attorney noted that, “By the time the information arrived, Polanski had left Israel and was not arrested.”
(The Swiss government subsequently denied a U.S. extradition request for Polanski after his September 2009 arrest in the country.)
Two notable entries of the more than 2,000 in the leaked spreadsheet relate to an investigation published by CBS News in early 2020 regarding how the New York City-based organization Jewish Community Watch tracked down American pedophiles who had escaped to Israel.
After pleading guilty in 2002 to abusing three children from ages 8 to 10 and serving time in jail, the Los Angeles-based Rabbi Mordechai Yomtov violated his probation by fleeing to Israel by way of Mexico, where he acquired a fake passport. A December cache of Jewish Community Watch’s website reported that Yomtov was still at large, with his last known address being in Israel.
The American citizen Jimmy Julias Karow similarly fled the United States after being accused of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl in Oregon in 2000 and was sentenced to 13 years in jail by an Israeli court in early 2021 regarding a separate case involving dozens of rapes of two girls, ages three and seven, between December 1999 and October 2001.
According to the leaked overview of active international legal requests, the Israeli Ministry of Justice opened cases regarding U.S. Government extradition requests for Karow and Yomtov – both categorized under “sex with minors” – on November 30, 2017 and September 13, 2021, with case numbers 41-17-11 and 32-21-11, respectively.
Other U.S. child abuse extradition requests focused on the former Yeshiva principal Gershon Kranczer and his son, Asher, as well as the Israeli “sextortion” practitioner Elad Gaber.
While the “Anonymous for Justice” leaks have led to numerous published investigations and have been prominently mirrored by the U.S.-based transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, the detailed contents of an attachment within a May 22, 2022 email had gone unnoticed. The bulk of the information was apparently accidentally included as part of a request from the legal assistant Shahar Barak for a review of 79 active cases assigned to Chana Leib within the international affairs department of the State Attorney’s Office.
The United States requested the extradition of Yeshiva Rabbi Gershon Kranczer in December 2011, one year after he fled the United States to Israel to escape charges of sexually assaulting children. Kranczer was ultimately extradited back to the United States nearly a decade later, in March 2021, where he was sentenced to 9 years in prison after pleading guilty to sexual conduct against a child.
Israel has not chosen to act on the closely related 2012 U.S. extradition request for Rabbi Kranczer’s son and co-abuser, Asher Kranczer, who fled with his father to Israel in 2010.
A similar case was opened by the Israeli justice ministry in July 2011, after the U.S. requested the extradition of Israeli citizen Elad Gaber for “computer sex with minors.” According to federal prosecutors, “since at least 2010, Gaber executed a systematic ‘sextortion’ scheme on dozens of victims, beginning with obtaining compromising videos of the girls.” Israel extradited Gaber back to the United States to stand trial nine years after opening a formal case for the request.
Technology and private-intelligence legal requests
At least four of the international legal requests in the leaked May 2022 spreadsheet relate to the Israeli developer of the infamous Pegasus cellphone spyware, NSO Group. In addition to Panama requesting help from the Israeli government regarding alleged fraud and deception relating to NSO in April 2015, Mexico requested help regarding “NSO Pegasus” in December 2017. Israel likewise requested “state security” help from the Singaporean government regarding NSO in June 2018 and then from the U.S. in December 2019.
Beyond NSO Group, case 11-16-21 documents Romania requesting help from the Israeli government regarding “fraud and deceit” related to the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube in April 2016. According to a 2020 report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, the late former honorary president of Black Cube, had suggested that the company work as “an arm of” the Romanian Intelligence Service prior to two of its employees being arrested in Bucharest for their alleged hacking campaign against former state prosecutor Laura Kovesi.
Other cases of interest include a February 26, 2018 request from the Israeli government to Meta’s social media platform Instagram for information regarding Yarden Bidani (ירדן בידני), and a subsequent September 9, 2021 case regarding “threats on Instagram.” The Bidani request appears to refer to an Israeli with the online pseudonym AppleJ4ck who was arrested in 2016 at the age of 18 by Israeli police after an FBI tip regarding his for-profit distributed denial of service (DDOS) tool, said to be named vDOS.
Another case documents an Israeli government request to the Phoenix-based domain name provider Namecheap being opened on March 20, 2022, presumably for information regarding who registered a particular domain.
Given the 2,152 legal requests in the spreadsheet, a more comprehensive investigation into the accounting of Israel’s international legal requests would be guaranteed to turn up further cases of interest.
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