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Having worked on Israel/Palestine human rights issues over the years and protected organisations who have been targeted by Israeli private/state intelligence due to their work. Here are just a few other methods our organisation has seen used against well respected human rights defenders (all of these are confirmed by the way, not speculation):

-Sending people to their homes claiming to sell paintings, usually in order to fix their location, get current pictures of them, ask neighbours questions, scope their homes and/or offices etc.

-Sending of verbal and written death threats. Calls on phone, stuff sent in the post.

-Covert entry operations against individual's homes and/or offices

-Following and open photography of human rights defenders (living in European cities) and their children in parks and outside schools.

-Pictures or knowledge of their children, schools etc sent to them.

-Smear campaigns design to make them look like terrorists (even through they were human rights defenders / lawyers) sent to people in their community. Designed to make them either look radical or in some cases attack them on a personal level (sexual in a conservative community). Sometimes this included organised protests against offices based upon totally false representation.

-Overt and covert physical surveillance of them as they travelled to and from their place of work and home.

-Doxing of their personal details online so people knew where they lived and called

-Threats made to them based upon knowledge that likely could only have been gathered through bugging and in other cases insider threats.

-Attempts to entrap individuals with online conversations (personal/sexual information etc)

-Abuse of flight stop lists and other measures to prevent people doing their work and travel.

-Abuse of bank, company, charity, data protection complaints etc to try to harass them in their work

-Abuse of medical healthcare (e.g allowing relatives who live in Gaza to travel to get urgent cancer/heart treatment) to pressure individuals to stop investigating human rights abuses.

-Sending of fake journalists etc as send above.

-Malware etc as above. Also DDoS, orchestrated campaigns online etc



Heh, coming on the heels of MLK day, this looks like the table of contents of the USA FBI playbook for civil rights advocates.


Sounds about right




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