Many people count on their VPNs to provide some sense of anonymity and protection from government restrictions and spying, but an investigation into who owns and runs some of the largest ones raises alarms.
There are 1.6 billion people who use VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), reports Alan Macleod at MintPress News. And some of the most popular, including ExpressVPN, are owned by a company—Kape Technologies—with significant ties to Israeli intelligence. Kape Technologies is owned by Teddy Sagi, who, with an estimated worth exceeding $6 billion, is among the ten richest Israelis. The company’s co-founder and many-year CEO Koby Menachemi began his tech career working for Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a secret division tasked with developing software for spying. Liron Peer, currently the company’s head of accounting, served three years in Unit 8200. The new CEO, Ido Erlichman, is a veteran of IDF Unit 217, trained in intelligence operations and assassinations of Palestinians. And the company’s CTO from 2019-2023, Daniel Gericke, was revealed by Reuters to have been involved in spying on dissidents in the U.A.E.
Macleod writes: “Both the Gericke hire and its sale to an Anglo-Israeli corporation with a more than questionable past led to an exodus of staff at ExpressVPN and raises many questions about what exactly this cyber-mercenary, who was under investigation by the U.S. government for stealing sensitive data from tens of millions of people and passing it on to a foreign government, was doing as an executive at ExpressVPN for all that time, especially with the company’s user data.”
