http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/69f150da-25b8-11e5-bd83-71cb60e8f08c.html
By John Reed
FT.com
July 10, 2015
In a searingly hot afternoon at a campuslike new science park in Beer
Sheva, southern Israel, I watched as a group of bright, geeky teenagers
presented their graduation projects. Parents and uniformed army personnel
milled around a windowless room packed with tables holding laptops, phones
or other gadgets. There was excited chatter and a pungent smell of
adolescent sweat.
This was a recent graduation ceremony for Magshimim (which roughly
translates as “fulfilment”), the three-year after-school programme for 16
to 18-year-old students with exceptional computer coding and hacking
skills. Magshimim serves as a feeder system for potential recruits to Unit
8200, the Israeli military’s legendary high-tech spy agency, considered by
intelligence analysts to be one of the most formidable of its kind in the
world. Unit 8200, or shmone matayim as it’s called in Hebrew, is the
equivalent of America’s National Security Agency and the largest single
military unit in the Israel Defence Forces.
It is also an elite institution whose graduates, after leaving service,
can parlay their cutting-edge snooping and hacking skills into jobs in
Israel, Silicon Valley or Boston’s high-tech corridor. The authors of
Start-up Nation, the seminal 2009 book about Israel’s start-up culture,
described 8200 and the Israeli military’s other elite units as “the
nation’s equivalent of Harvard, Princeton and Yale”.
With a female IDF minder at my side, I listened as the teenagers described
their projects. More than half were boys but there were girls too, and
8200 is open to both. Omer, 19, had designed a USB key that can suck
information out of one computer and organise it on another: essentially, a
hacking tool. “We made it appear like a keyboard so you can infiltrate any
company in the world,” he told me. “It’s a proof of concept.”
[...]
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