Israeli Spy Chief Accidentally Blows Cover with Amazon Self-Publishing

With social media, location services, tracking cookies, and all kinds of personal identifiers on the internet these days, it can be hard to protect your privacy. But you’d think a national security professional would know better. As it turns out, one of Israel’s top spy chiefs does not.

Yossi Sariel has accidentally revealed himself as the commander of Israel’s Unit 8200, one of the most sensitive roles in the country’s military, heading up a powerful surveillance agency. He left his identity exposed online thanks to publishing a book on Amazon, The Guardian reported.

When publishing the book, Sariel accidentally tied it to a private Google account in his name. The Google account came with a unique ID, as well as links to calendar profiles and maps.

In its report, The Guardian was able to confirm with multiple sources that Sariel wrote The Human Machine Team, which is about the use of artificial intelligence in military operations. Sariel had published the book using the pen name “Brigadier General YS.”

The book, released in 2021, discusses the A.I. systems currently in use by the Israel Defense Forces in their brutal war in Gaza. The system was described in November by one former intelligence officer as creating a “mass assassination factory,” and a more recent report detailed a lack of oversight and lax protections against casualties.

It’s more bad news of late for Unit 8200, which has been compared to Britain’s GCHQ and America’s National Security Agency. The organization was criticized for failing to predict and thwart Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel, which killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and led to 240 hostages being taken. Since then, Israel has conducted a full-scale massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, killing more than 33,000 people, including 13,000 children, and has come under recent criticism for its bombing of a World Central Kitchen convoy that killed seven aid workers.

A rare, 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck New Jersey on Friday, rattling denizens all the way from the Garden State to Massachusetts. But shortly after the tremors settled, New Yorkers had just one thing on their minds: What the hell was Mayor Eric Adams going to say about this?

“The first thing I thought of was how scary it is that Eric Adams is the Mayor while there was an earthquake. Because if we need that man to put together a plan or a response or anything we are all doomed,” wrote PodSavethePeople host DeRay Mckesson.

Other New Yorkers used the opportunity to rag on their mayor for his reliance on hiring more cops as a supposed answer to all of the city’s problems.

“Eric Adams about to send 500,000 cops to the earth’s core,” posted Maysles Documentary Center’s guest programmer, Kazembe Balagun.

“Eric Adams sending 1,000,000 more cops to the subway stations to deal with this earthquake as we speak,” wrote comedian Otto Fernandez.

Or for his tangential and repetitive speeches that have recently turned to using the same proverbial crutch of comparing the city to … pretty much anywhere else that’s suffering.

“Eric Adams is like New York City is the San Andreas Fault of America,” wrote Politico’s Jeff Coltin.

“Stowing myself for what our insane mayor will say about the earthquake,” posted journalist Rebecca Fishbein. “Eric Adams: ‘That’s what I love about New York. You wake up every day and a new small business could open or the magic crystals underneath us could get angry and shake the whole city.’”

Or for his reported nightlife habit.

“Eric Adams still at the club, thought the earthquake was heavy bass,” wrote entertainment editor Marlow Stern.

In actuality, the city issued a delayed response, notifying New Yorkers that little damage had occurred inside the city during the historic geological event.

“Our preliminary reports do not indicate major life safety or infrastructure issues from the earthquake. We are performing thorough inspections of critical areas,” Adams posted to his personal account more than an hour after the quake occurred, warning New Yorkers about the effects of aftershocks—after the period in which they’re most likely to happen ended.

At his Wisconsin rally on Tuesday, Donald Trump taunted President Joe Biden with an empty lectern on stage, claiming he’s been “trying to get him to debate.” But his allies don’t seem to have a very good idea of what Trump could actually attack him on.

In a Newsmax interview on Thursday, Trump’s daughter-in-law and co-chair of the Republican National Committee, Lara Trump, decided the best way to conjure Biden for another one-on-one with Trump would be to levy such a wildly vague accusation that she said … pretty much nothing.

“Joe Biden needs to be asked multiple questions about a whole host of different things going on in this country and around the world. He has a lot of answers to give the American people,” Trump said on Newsmax Thursday. “I can only assume he doesn’t have the answers to the questions that he will be asked.”

Donald Trump has so far refused to participate in any debates this election cycle. In fact, he often tried to upstage Republican primary debates with counterprogramming of his own.

Trump hand-picked Lara Trump and former North Carolina GOP Chairman Michael Whatley to replace former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel last month. The pair have proven the final nail in the coffin for a GOP MAGA makeover.

And their help comes at a critical juncture for the Republican presidential nominee, who is struggling to pay for a legal comeuppance that so far includes more than half a billion dollars in judgments and mountains of cash for his four upcoming criminal trials.

Even after bragging about his assets and businesses got him in legal trouble, Donald Trump just can’t stop.

After a rough week for his new social media venture, Trump Media & Technology Group, or TMTG, the former president ranted on his Truth Social account Thursday about how great the platform is doing—at least, in his opinion. But Trump may have broken some Securities and Exchange Commission rules in the process.

SEC laws prohibit the use of “manipulative and deceptive devices” to pump up stocks. Trump’s bragging in the face of heavy losses by his company could fall under that category, Trump critic George Conway tweeted Thursday afternoon.

The Truth Social posts in question could be seen as the former president trying to talk up his company to increase its stock price after a rough week. Trump Media’s initial public offering started strong last week, reaching a high of $79.38 per share. But then, SEC filings released on Monday showed that the company had losses in 2023 of a whopping $58 million, with just $4.1 million of revenue. Then, on Wednesday, two of the company’s top investors pleaded guilty to using the company’s private information to engage in insider trading.

As a result, TMTG’s stock price has dropped rapidly. It currently sits at just under $43 a share. To make matters worse, stock traders are short-selling the company, betting its share prices will plummet even further.

Trump has a long history of bragging about his finances, and ended up in legal trouble when a New York judge ruled that he committed bank fraud and issued a final judgment of a $350 million fine for inflating his net worth and lying about the value of his various real estate assets. His recent posts about one of his newest business ventures would seem to fit that pattern. Trump certainly can’t afford any new legal cases right now, especially when he has enough trouble paying the legal bills for the cases he already has.

New York Attorney General Letitia James has some questions about Donald Trump’s $175 million bond insurer—mainly, if it can even guarantee the full amount if push comes to shove.

In a court filing on Thursday, Knight Speciality Insurance Company revealed that its liquid assets don’t meet the needs of Trump’s already minimized bond. According to a financial assessment, the company, owned by billionaire Don Hankey, has just $138 million in “surplus.” Knight would therefore need to spend 127 percent of its reserves in order to cover Trump’s bond—far more than the 10 percent of a state-regulated suretor’s surplus that’s allowed by New York law.

Lawyers for the attorney general’s office also noted that the insurance company was trying to operate “without a certificate of qualification” in the state.

But that was, apparently, the plan all along, according to Knight’s president, Amit Shah.

“Knight Specialty Insurance Company is not a New York domestic insurer, and New York surplus lines insurance laws do not regulate the solvency of non-New York excess lines insurers,” Shah told CBS.

Shah also claimed that his company had more than $1 billion in equity, despite financial statements—which were only obtained after New York court clerks rejected the company’s original bond posting and ordered it to refile—indicating the firm only held $26 million in “cash and bank deposits,” with $483 million in stocks and bonds.

James’s office has given Trump and his new financial bedfellows 10 days to “justify the surety.”

“At this venture, with so much at stake, to make these kinds of mistakes, it’s almost unthinkable. And it amps it up with the missing financial statement. That adds all the drama,” an attorney for Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, told The Daily Beast.