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burgess should offer his resignation and albo should accept it....

Revelations about overseas training, intelligence failures and police responses raise urgent questions that cannot be left to internal reviews.

In a sharp piece of investigative journalism, the ABC’s Sean Rubinsztein-Dunlop this week reported that the alleged Bondi terrorists, Sajid and Naveed Akram, travelled to the Philippines for ‘military style training’. This occurred in November, just weeks before they opened fire on the Jewish Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach.

 

Greg Barns,  Kym Davey

Bondi demands answers – and a Royal Commission

 

The story emerged after earlier reports that the alleged younger gunman, Naveed Akram, had longstanding links to members of the pro-Islamic State (IS) terrorist network. It is noted that the ABC journalist’s source is a ‘senior counter-terrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity’. Thank goodness for the public-minded discloser!

ASIO boss Mike Burgess, best known for his wolf-warrior approach to China, has been extremely careful to date in his handling of the Bondi massacre aftermath. He replied to a question last Sunday about prior ASIO knowledge of the Akram family with the revealing observation that “its too early to give any more details”. There was no denial that he had more details. Just an assertion to journalist Phil Coorey that its not time to make them public. Burgess then confirmed that “one of these individuals was known to us, but not in an immediate threat perspective”. He then moved to end the questioning of him by stating the glaringly obvious: “We need to look into what happened here”.

That “look into” should not be an internal ASIO review or some kind of Director-General’s inquiry. It should be a focused Royal Commission seeking to lay bare all the apparent failures and shortcomings in security and intelligence leading up to the Bondi massacre. That includes any relevant failures of the NSW Police – as well as a missing link in international counter-terrorism liaison.

NSW Premier Chris Minns has been more candid than Burgess. Reacting to the human tragedy on the ABC’s 7.30 on Monday he lamented that “if we had our time again we would have responded differently, as would police”. He was referring to questions raised about the adequacy of the police security arrangements for Hanukkah and their response to the armed assault. He went on to concede that as Premier he “doesn’t know the answer” to a question about a claimed breakdown in communication between ASIO and the NSW Police gun licensing division.

Minns says he now wants urgent gun law reform to be put before the NSW parliament to tackle issues such as licences in perpetuity, age limits and criminal intelligence criteria, instead of evidence of a criminal record, for gun licence approvals. Meanwhile, he says he wants a “significant investigation into the NSW police response to the Bondi massacre that our counter-terrorism command will lead”.

Thanks, but no thanks, Premier Minns. The stakes in human lives are too high after this appalling assault. We need a national Royal Commission to examine all the domestic policing, security, and intelligence aspects of the matter. History tells us that internal inquiries by security and police agencies are too often limited in scope and held in secret.

Royal Commissions, on the other hand, can compel witnesses to attend, seek documents from relevant agencies and make a wide range of recommendations. And there are plenty of ex High, Federal and state Supreme Court judges for the Albanese government to choose from. Here are some questions that might form a terms of reference.

Given the revelation that the alleged terrorists trained recently in the Philippines, a close security and military ally of Australia, what, if any, was the role of that nation’s National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NACA) in surveilling foreign nationals travelling to known terrorist training hotspots? The NICA is ASIOs sister agency. It is responsible for national security information gathering and carries out overt, covert and clandestine intelligence activities, presumably including counter-terrorism operations. It is mandated to prepare intelligence estimates on local and foreign national security matters. Although not advertised as such, ASIO and NICA would have a professional working relationship focused on protecting their respective national interests, particularly concerning terrorism and regional security. They would operate within established international intelligence cooperation protocols.

In fact, last year both countries celebrated 30 years of law enforcement cooperation with Australia’s Ambassador to Manila Bill Tweedell saying that “Australia and the Philippines will continue to value the law enforcement links between our two nations, which reflect the importance of regional and bilateral partnerships in addressing security challenges and disrupting criminal activity.”

Given the investigation of Naveed Akram by ASIO in 2019 over his associations with a Sydney-based IS terrorist cell, it is relevant to ask why his travel to the Philippines – possibly to the terrorist training camps in southern Mindanao – raised no red flags in either jurisdiction.

Australians need to be reassured that their police and intelligence services are fit for purpose in an age of international terrorism.

For all these reasons, and more, we need a Royal Commission into how Bondi was allowed to happen.

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/12/bondi-security-failures-time-for-a-royal-commission/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

chez bibi's....

NOT heard in Bibi’s bunker by a fly on the wall…..

 

BIBI: how did we not know in advance about the Bondi massacre?

Major General Roman GOFMAN — head of MOSSAD: Er…

BIBI: We had nothing to do with it, did we?

GOFMAN: Er….

BIBI: We have the best intelligence in the world, don’t we?

GOFMAN: Sure do….

BIBI: I heard the ASIO chief say that MOSSAD had warned him about “something was about to happen”, and…

GOFMAN: yes, we warned him… but we could not tell him what… He’s a pompous blabber….

BIBI: so we knew?

GOFMAN: sort of ….

BIBI: don’t we know precisely when someone is about to fart, with PALANTIR and all our secret spying tools around the world?

GOFMAN: Did we suggest to ASIO. to drop the surveillance on the father and son — and gave ASIO an incomplete cross-reference ALERT tool that would have rung alarm bells when the father went for his SIXTH gun licence?

BIBI: did we?

GOFMAN: Nor did we give the EXCELLENT cross-reference tool when the pair went to the Philippines to study “terrorism” with our… I MEAN a branch of ISIS… ASIO is too busy looking at dick-pics… and/or charging anti-genocide ordinary citizen… Good lads at ASIO...

BIBI: So I can blame the PRIME MINISTER of Australia… He’s got a Lebanese sounding name… Calbanosee or something like that?

GOFMAN: Sure… ALBANESE… and like all good LEBANESE his first name is ANTHONY…

BIBI: done…. Is there another terror attack, MOSSAD is planning soon… Iran? Qatar? Moscow? Paris? Berlin?

GOFMAN: Top secret… Bugger, what is this fly doing on the wall….

END OF TRANSMISSION.

 

=============

 

OUR HEARTS BLEED FOR ALL THE FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THIS ACT OF TRAGIC TERRORISM. 

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIA DESERVE AS MUCH PEACE AS ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.

mossad inc.

 

The Former Israeli Spies Overseeing US Government Cyber Security

NATE BEAR

 

A company with deep ties to Israeli intelligence oversees cyber security across more than seventy US government agencies, including the Department of Defense and Homeland Security.  

Axonius was founded by former spies in Israel’s Unit 8200 and its software, which allows an operator ‘visibility and control over all types and number of devices,’ collects and analyses the digital data of millions of US federal employees.

The stated aim of the Axonius platform is to centralise IT tools to identity and fix security breaches. As a product of Israeli intelligence, however, the scale of Axonius’s use across the US government raises serious questions.

Axonius was founded and is currently run by Israelis Dean Sysman, Ofri Shur and Avidor Bartov, who met in the 2010s while working on the same team within Israel’s Unit 8200 spy service. On his LinkedIn profile, Sysman offers few details of their work for the IDF, describing it simply as having ‘far-reaching implications.’

Sysman left the IDF in 2014 after five years and set up a cyber hacking outfit, while Shur and Bartov stayed on until 2017, a period which encompassed Israel’s 2014 war of aggression against Gaza, during which the IDF murdered more than two thousand Palestinian civilians. 

Axonius was established with curious speed. After leaving the IDF in 2017, Shur and Bartov teamed back up with Sysman and immediately received $4 million in seed funding from Yoav Leitersdorf, a San Francisco-based Israeli-American and fellow Unit 8200 veteran, to start Axonius. Leitersdorf, the managing partner at US-Israeli venture capital firm YL Ventures, is a prolific early-stage investor in Unit 8200 cyber start-ups.

The same year Sysman, Shur and Bartov also received millions in seed financing from Israeli firm Vertex Ventures which is run by veterans of Israel’s spy units. Tami Bronner, a partner at Vertex, spent four years in Israeli military intelligence.

Following this early financing from investors close to Israel’s intelligence establishment, the company went on to receive hundreds of millions in investment from a network of US venture capital firms with intelligence links to Israel.

These include Palo Alto-based Accel Partners, which has invested in more than thirty Israeli tech companies, including another Unit 8200 cyber spin-out, Oasis. Nir Blumberger, an Israeli who served in the IDF, was recruited by Accel from Facebook to open its Tel Aviv office in 2016.

Other Axonius backers include San Francisco-headquartered Bessemer Venture Partners which employs former Israeli intelligence operatives in a Tel Aviv office led by Adam Fisher. An American who emigrated to Israel in 1998, Fisher has acted as an intermediary between Zionists in Silicon Valley and the IDF, and during the genocide gave a presentation on how Israel can win the online war. Israeli Amit Karp, a partner at Bessemer Ventures and another former Israeli intelligence officer, sits on the Axonius board.

Menlo Park-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has backed Axonius with around $200 million over numerous funding rounds, also has significant ties to Israeli spy units. Yonit Wiseman, a partner at Lightspeed, spent six years in Israeli military intelligence, leaving in 2018. Her colleague, Tal Morgenstern, was a special forces commander in the IDF.

Given the evidence that Axonius is an Israeli intelligence cut-out, the scale of its penetration within the US federal government structure is extraordinary. 

The company says its platform is ‘deployed in more than 70 federal organizations’ and is used by four of the five major US Department of Defense service agencies. The US federal government contract award website shows Axonius awards for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, which in itself means millions of personnel and their devices. 

In November 2024, the company was selected by the Department of Homeland Security to modernise its cybersecurity abilities by centralising ‘data coming from hundreds of separate data sources residing across dozens of federal, civilian, and executive branch agencies.’ Just a month later, in December 2024, the company was contracted by the Department of Defense to upgrade its system of 24/7 surveillance which oversees all on-site and off-site DoD computers and IT networks, a capability known as ‘continuous monitoring and risk scoring.’ And in April this year Axonius obtained authorisation for any US federal agency to use its cloud-based cyber surveillance system.

Other federal departments integrating Axonius software include energy, transportation, the US Treasury and many others. Data from the US spending awards site shows the US Defence Logistics Agency, responsible for managing America’s global weapons supply chain, is the single largest Axonius customer, spending $4.3 million in 2023 alone. The Department of Agriculture has paid nearly $2 million for Axonius tools and the Department of Health and Human Services has spent $1.3 million since 2021.

Axonius is commonly described as an American company. While its headquarters and administrative functions are in New York, its founders, senior executives, and its primary financiers are all Israeli, and, critically, its software and engineering functions are based in Tel Aviv. Axonius has more than eight-hundred employees, and a search of LinkedIn profiles confirms that a majority of Axonius’s engineers in Tel Aviv have a background in Israeli military intelligence.

The pitch for the Axonius system is that it centralises data from all the security and IT tools an organisation uses into one place for easier analysis, control and fixes. And that place is Tel Aviv, where the hundreds of former Israeli spies working as engineers for Axonius have unprecedented access and visibility into the habits and movements of millions of US federal government employees. 

With this visibility an Axonius operator can connect individual devices with individual IDs as well as seeing all login/logoff data and website usage. An operator can also order an account to be disabled, a device to be quarantined, or a user to be removed from a group.

In addition to this, Axonius has a separate R&D division within the company known as AxoniusX, a skunkworks unit focused on developing new cyber tools, run by another Unit 8200 spook, Amit Ofer.

Perhaps none of this matters, and Axonius is simply indicative of the sleazy, symbiotic nature of the relationship between the US and its colonial outpost.

This would be a fair argument if it wasn’t for Israel’s long history of espionage in the United States. From recruiting Hollywood producers who ran front companies that stole nuclear technologies, to selling bugged software to foreign governments, spying (especially cyber spying), has been central to Israel’s foreign policy. Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, was a spy for Israel, and a significant amount of circumstantial evidence suggests Jeffrey Epstein was also an Israeli military intelligence asset. More recently, during Trump’s first term, Israel planted miniature spying devices around the White House and other US government buildings in Washington DC to monitor US officials.

US authorities, then, have allowed former spies from a country with a known history of espionage within the United States to establish a framework of cyber intelligence access across almost the entire federal government apparatus. 

To put it another way, the US has effectively subcontracted its federal-level cyber security infrastructure to Israeli intelligence.

Whether Axonius has used, or has any intent to use its unprecedented access maliciously, is impossible to know. For anyone with knowledge of Israel’s history of spying, however, the embedding of cyber software made by former Israeli spies within the US federal computer system network should raise serious alarms.

More broadly, Axonius shows how a militarised Israeli state takes billions in American funding every year to build its digital architecture of apartheid and genocide, and then sells these capabilities back to the US. American taxpayers, then, effectively pay Israel twice. And when the US buys back the technologies their taxpayers funded in the first place, they are inviting in trojan horse capabilities and making Israeli war criminals rich in the process. 

The good news is that millions of ordinary Americans are wising up to the reality that Israel is not the great deal for the US that political leaders have, for so long, sold it as.

The Axonius story confirms, once again, just how bad this deal is.

(I am forever grateful to everyone who supports me financially. It is invaluable in enabling me to focus on writing, especially these types of investigations. If you value my work and can afford to do so, consider upgrading to a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. Thanks, as always. Nate).

 

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-former-israeli-spies-overseeing

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

OUR HEARTS BLEED FOR ALL THE FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THIS ACT OF TRAGIC TERRORISM. 

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIA DESERVE AS MUCH PEACE AS ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.