Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who at the start of his political career in the mid-1990s served as the director-general of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office, was the first person to demand of the participants in the meetings he conducted to dismantle their mobile phone and pull out the battery. Having come from Russia, Liberman already knew back then that cellular phones were, for all intents and purposes, potent surveillance devices and that those with appropriate means could connect to them via remote from anywhere in the world and eavesdrop on the events taking place in the room.

That was almost 20 years ago. The incumbent prime minister — Benjamin Netanyahu again — prefers to hold particularly secret discussions at the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv rather than at his shielded office in Jerusalem. Only there, at this Mossad facility, which is optimally protected against outside surveillance, does Netanyahu feel safe from wiretapping. Incidentally, Bibi [Netanyahu] is not concerned by wiretapping from Syrian or Egyptian intelligence agencies, but rather from the colossal and daunting US National Security Agency (NSA). The working premise of Israel’s senior politicians and defense officials is that the Americans pick up, record and transcribe every word that’s uttered here. These are the rules of the game, and nobody in Israel really complains about this state of affairs. If you ask Dan Shapiro, the popular US ambassador to Israel, he will tell you that even though it is common knowledge that everyone listens to everyone else, Israelis have never grumbled.

And maybe the reason they haven’t grumbled is because they’re also, strongly and deeply, involved in this line of work. Take a guess what the largest unit in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is. The answer is Unit 8200, an intelligence body (known better as eight two-hundred). Its size, based on foreign sources, is equivalent to or larger than an armored division. Israel’s sharpest minds are dispatched to this unit. In the last two decades, it has turned from a modest and minor intelligence project, which relied on agents and missions behind enemy lines that would make your hair rise, into a gigantic empire that dominates the entire Middle East and well beyond. The software programs developed by Israeli engineers and young startup entrepreneurs, who were recruited to this unit, are cutting-edge. Once they are discharged from military service, they launch a startup company, after which you see them making an impressive exit with Google, Facebook or some other giant. It all started there — at 8200 — which has been a standard-bearer for many years.

An international cybersecurity conference is being held in Israel these days by the Institute for National Security (INSS) headed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, who until two years ago served as the director of military intelligence. Here are a few examples of the deliberations at the conference, which have seen the participation of senior officials from the World Bank and the global high-tech industry: “Cyber Protection of the Stock Trade”; “APT — It Hits All of Us” (with the participation of CERT-EU Director Freddy Dezeure); “Strategic Challenges in Protecting the World’s Financial Sector” (with the participation of Ziyu Wang of Venustech Inc. in Beijing). I could go on and on with this conference agenda. Discussions, workshops and brainstorming — all revolving around the new and modern warfare arena, none other than the Internet. There was a time when in order to stave off terrorism you simply had to quickly nab the mustached man armed with a knife who was ready to jump at you from the corner of an ally. Later, it progressed to handguns, submachine-guns, hand grenades and explosives. Solutions were found for all of these problems. But then someone introduced the Internet into our life; boundaries were broken and rules shattered, the more digitized our life has become, the greater the risks that have come along. It is possible today to run a hands-free sophisticated terrorist ring via the Internet. And not before long, terror attacks would take place without anyone being physically present on the ground. When Yuval Diskin — until recently the director of Shin Bet — retired, he set up an international cyber warfare and defense company. The highly regarded former Shin Bet director has his hands full.