Israeli competitor to Palantir is proposing "BORDERINT" traveler risk assessments
Rayzone Group's proposal for BORDERINT directly quotes Babel Street executive Declan Trezise, who previously proposed "BorderGPT."
2024-05-01: The opening paragraph was modified in its reference to Intelligence Online’s article on Palantir’s deal with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which appears to ignore, rather than contradict, the more detailed information contained in an earlier article from Globes asserting that Palantir was rejected by Israel’s more secretive Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) despite having a deal with the broader Ministry of Defense. The Globes reporting of Aman’s alleged rejection of Palantir appears to be broadly ignored by U.S. journalists.
The question of which American and Israeli surveillance contractors are supporting the Israel Defense Forces’ ongoing artificial intelligence-driven killings in Gaza — which many governments and human rights organizations have labeled a genocide due to the deaths of more than 20,000 women and children — has been front of mind for myriad national security journalists for the last six months. The most detailed account has come from Israeli business news website Globes, which reported in late January that Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (Aman) passed over the American data-fusion giant Palantir in favor of an unnamed domestic solution, despite signing a deal with Israel’s Ministry of Defense earlier that month. Intelligence Online reported in early February that the Ministry of Defense had chosen Palantir over the domestic competitor Rayzone Group, which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported in October to have assisted the U.S.-blacklisted offensive cyberintelligence company NSO Group in tracking Israeli hostages.1
Despite Aman’s access to a litany of international surveillance technologies, director Aharon Haliva announced his resignation on Monday over his agency’s failure to predict the Hamas attacks of October 7, which killed an estimated 695 Israeli civilians. Rayzone co-founder Yohai Ben-Zakai was previously deputy director of Aman’s elite cyberintelligence component, Unit 8200, which is a rough analogue of the U.S. National Security Agency.
A previously unreported webinar given by Rayzone Group earlier this month, on April 17, proposed that airports adopt the company’s surveillance capabilities for “BORDERINT” — short for Border Intelligence — which Rayzone defined as “the ability to automatically assess the risk of every passenger preemptively, and identify threats long before they arrive.” Rayzone’s concept is motivated by a similar solution pitched by American competitor Babel Street last year, which Babel vice president of global solutions engineering Declan Trezise pitched alongside a hypothetical “BorderGPT,” in reference to a border surveillance analogue of OpenAI’s popular large language model ChatGPT. Rayzone’s recent presentation on BORDERINT directly quoted Mr. Trezise’s argument that “99% of all [border] traffic may be completely legitimate, but the risks associated with that small element of malefactors is huge.”
While the webinar’s focus would be on airline passengers, a Rayzone blog post from February proposed BORDERINT after opening with a bullet list of border challenges including: ‘Smuggling and Trafficking’, ‘Terrorism’, ‘Illegal Immigration’, and ‘Public Health Emergencies’.
Babel Street’s explicit focus for “BorderGPT” was on the U.S.-Mexico border, whose closest analogue for Rayzone is the heavily policed boundary between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. And, just as Rayzone was co-founded by a former second-in-command of Israel’s Unit 8200, Babel executive vice president Patrick Butler previously worked in the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center, which later renamed to the Counterterrorism Mission Center, and Babel’s board of advisors currently includes former Central Intelligence Agency chief data scientist Barbara Stevens. Babel’s board of advisors also previously included Robert P. Ashley, a former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency director, and Scott Howell, a former commander of the elite U.S. counter-terrorism organization Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
While Rayzone’s “BORDERINT” presentation does not explicitly reference a large language model analogue of Babel’s proposed “BorderGPT,” it corresponds to a risk assessment proposal from Mr. Trezise which the author reported on last June. As noted in the slides, the idea is to combine traditional watchlists with facial recognition capabilities and broader forms of open source intelligence, as well as “Advanced Passenger Information,” which Rayzone defined to include: “Biographic information, flight history, [and] data owned by airlines.”
As reported in December 2020 by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Rayzone has exploited weaknesses in the Signalling System No. 7 (SS7) telephony protocol through a partnership in the Channel Islands off the coast of Normandy in order to geolocate phones worldwide. The next day, The Times of Israel reported that the product was known as GeoMatrix. While much of the information was previously published on Rayzone’s website, the company’s surveillance product portfolio circa 2019 has also been publicly available through the SABIT international defense cooperation component of the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
Rayzone’s Echo product was advertised through SABIT as a “Global Virtual Sigint [Signals Intelligence] System,” and the tool was widely revealed last year to be hoovering up data from online advertising exchanges, which is colloquially referred to as “ADINT” for “Advertising Intelligence.” Babel Street’s publicly known cellphone location-tracking tool, Locate X, has reportedly been sourced through software development kits managed by Gravy Analytics, which was acquired by the Norwegian firm Unacast in late 2023. But a closer American analogue to Echo operated under the name VISR — short for Virtual Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance — and was revealed by journalist Byron Tau to have funneled ad exchange data to JSOC through a maze of corporate intermediaries.
Rayzone Group did not respond to a request for comment on how its tools have been used in Gaza, or on whether it has a formal relationship with its American peer Babel Street.
As reported by the Israeli tech news site CTech in February 2020, Rayzone Group co-founder Eran Reshef intermediated a deal to sell NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to an unnamed government in 2011. Fellow co-founder Matan Caspi reportedly also organized a meeting between NSO Group and venture capitalist and Donald Trump associate Elliott Broidy, though both Caspi and Broidy were allegedly both ultimately cut out of the deal.