What I find odd is that their staffers may join the company, and leave for the military/intelligence agency again after less than a year, and like that few times over.
That's not how anybody's career can work. And nobody in his sane mind will accept severe demotion on rejoining the service, nor will choose a very different branch of service.
A diplomatic security corps officer, will not be making a good sailor. Those things are just screaming "a good pretext to station uniformed spy abroad" - these two for example, are pretty much the only two ways Israel can put a man in uniform into another country legally.
>> What I find odd is that their staffers may join the company, and leave for the military/intelligence agency again after less than a year
> What is the source for this?
NSO Group Technologies founders are Unit 8200 alumni (Niv Carmi, Omri Lavie, Shalev Hulio). While the "revolving door" between NSO and 8200 is pretty well understood and undisputed in many security circles, I don't have any other public reference. But I'd like to point something: confusing 8200 veterans and common veterans is extremely naive. I don't think anything going on inside NSO is unknown to the government/intelligence (even if they're supposedly separate entities).
I gave a tip in the previous HN discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19006477), and now a broader pattern has been publicly exposed. How many other "phishing expeditions" can you discover by going to look for websites that follow the same pattern (Namecheap, Wix, etc)?
Christiana Markou -> www.eneinvestments.com , Alaa Mahajna -> www.lyndonpartners.com , Masri Mazen -> www.apoiconsulting.com , John Scott-Railton -> www.cpw-consulting.com
Following the crumbs would give more reasons to think that distinguishing whether these are orchestrated by NSO or Israel is pointless.
I know that 8200 veterans[0] are well represented in the Israeli startup/hi tech scene, I'm asking for a source for the other direction which I have never heard of: 8200 (or other intelligence units) veterans going back to the army for anything other than reservist duty.
[0] Of which there are tens of thousands, since 8200 is one of the biggest units in the IDF (maybe the biggest). And if you count veterans of 8200 spin-offs then you're at some 10s of % of Israelis working in software.
Israel has mandatory universal military service with a few exceptions, not a "draft". A draft is "Selective" service, where some people get picked (as in the US Vietnam war or NBA/NFL college-grad hiring process).
