Everyone seems to be focusing on the "always" in your statement, so i'll ignore that and give you a straight answer.
Strong investment in STEM education, after school programming and computer security programs, mandatory military service where they get a chance to evaluate everyone and funnel the smart technical folks in to Unit 8200, and heavy investment into security startups.
Israel also benefits from everyone else depending on their tools. Not only do they get to see the intelligence being collected by other countries and gain insights into their espionage operations, they also would be able to piggy back into any networks that were of particular interest.
...Is ethis taught in any CS curriculum?
It sure wasn't in mine (but to be fair, that was in Switzerland).
Ethics in software is something we should all probably talk about a little more often.
Viewed from the lens of "CS is a researcher/PhD candidate mill", a lack of focus on ethics makes some sense to the cynic in me.
Knowing Ethics doesn't really mean much, given ethicists aren't more ethical than normal people [0].
As an aside, another consideration is this isn't some private corporation, it's every government, you've got to consider the number of people before someone like Snowden popped their faces out.
[0] https://qz.com/1582149/ethicists-are-no-more-ethical-than-th...
Philosophy 101 (and every equivalent) heavily focuses on the classical and modern teachings on morals and ethics.
It remains to this day the one course whose lessons I apply every day in my life, moreso than any of the computer related courses.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200#Companies_founded_by...
Well Israeli has been treating palestinians pretty badly so it's not like it isn't justified.
At least critising Israel for genuine reasons isn't deemed anti-semitic in the latest international standard of the definition, oh wait!
And defenders of Israeli actions using the defense of people 'hating on Israel' instead of reflecting on the fact that people have genuine policy disagreements with what Israel does has been a popular deflection tactic for decades.
You can't divorce what Israel does on a daily basis from its image and then act surprised when it is being criticized.
Why does this shining light of democracy allow/encourage it's companies to perpetuate authoritarianism for their neighbors? Not a very democracy-loving thing to do.
I also don't remember Italy bulldozing people's homes while the occupants watch and then turning that land over to their preferred ethnic group, but you know my history isn't so great.
That'd probably be Super Mario.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-government-okayed-sale...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-nso-exclusive/e...
A few years ago bluecoat systems was caught providing deep packet inspection gear to the Syrian government. But that wasn’t Israel so no biggie and you either never heard about it or didn’t pay much attention because it wasn’t Israel.
American and European companies do this all the time but it’s not sensationalized to the same degree. That’s just business as usual.
Don't people routinely get called anti-semite for just criticizing the Israeli government? Except for some small circles, I don't think your statement is true, it's certainly not true for mainstream US politics.
Personal opinion, but I think the mandatory army service in Israel seems to teach that everything is 'defense' and Israel is always 'defending itself', no matter what, this sort of thinking then bleeds into the private sector as these guys leave the military and use the skills they learned there to establish businesses.
Having interacted with the Palestinians during their army service as 'the enemy', the victims of NSO undoubtedly fall into the same category, thus not worth loosing their sleep over.
A country of its size and only relative recent independence, is punching well above its weight being the 8th largest arms exporter in the world over the last decade.[1]
I had a former customer there _go out of business_ when the Barack Hussein Obama (mmm mmm mmm!) administration supportd an attempted putsch by (in my customer's words) "The Retarded F___ing Nazis who killed Sadat for making peace with the Jews."
Israel and the non-Brotherhood Arab countries face the burdensome situation that their most reliable "ally" is a country that depending on the politics is going to support the Brotherhood _and_ the large wannabe-hegemonic Russian satellite state trying to develop nuclear weapons. (Oh, and funded said state's reconquest of Syria in the process). Said schizophrenic state also has a massive surveillance system of its own.
My guess: they all don't look at this as a violation of civil rights or ethics, they look at this as a means for the little countries like them to get a leg up on some of the insane intelligence agencies of the large countries that are funding enemies both domestic and foreign.