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How A Tech Professionals Collective Shut Down Israel’s Extortion Website

Above photo: Propaganda leaflets dropped by Israeli Forces over Rafah on Friday, February 10, 2024. Bashar Taleb/APA Images.

An international collective called The Zionism Observer took down an IDF extortion website and reverse-engineered its evacuation map website.

And it was easier than you might think.

In May this year, as part of its psychological torture campaign on the Palestinians of Gaza, Israel’s army rained down yet another batch of leaflets on the besieged population of Gaza. The leaflets stood out for many reasons, but most of all for the extortion website associated with them.

The Zionism Observer collective, made up of software developers, cartographers, translators, and archivists, traced the website’s registrar to NameCheap and the hosting service to Webflow. They immediately lodged a complaint with both companies.

Webflow removed the IDF’s extortion website within 24 hours.

“All of a sudden, in response to my thread, dozens of people were asking Webflow about this obviously immoral and likely illegal website,” says a member of the collective. “A lot of software developers — a community very important to tech companies like Webflow — got involved. People started tagging the CEO. I think people even started writing to the investors as well. Then poof! It vanished. 404 Not Found.”

This would be the first time the IDF extortion website had been taken down, and no hacking was necessary—just old-fashioned public pressure, magnified through social media.

Webflow followed up with an email to inquirers suggesting (without stating) that it never hosted the website.

‘Competent people’ in the Israeli tech scene ‘left for San Francisco or New York a long time ago‘

The collective recently began a mapping effort, looking in detail at a second IDF website. Again, they found that it was not competently built.

The extortion website was built using consumer-level tools called “no-code” designed to help people who are not software professionals. According to the Zionism Observer’s software developer, the second website containing the “evacuation” (or, more accurately, forced displacement) map was exceptionally badly built. This second website left secret data publicly available.

“We recently attempted to reverse-engineer the IDF’s forced displacement map from the IDF’s Arabic language ‘Iron Swords’ mini-site,” a member told me. “This doesn’t involve any sort of hacking or specialized tools. We literally just looked at the source code delivered to any web browser on every single page request.”

Data leaks and embarrassing errors abound. While parsing the data they retrieved, Zionism Observer’s software developers discovered that Israel’s army accidentally, through “very sloppy coding,” leaked a table from its intelligence database.

“At the start of this work, in December, we thought the IDF was high-tech competent. They accidentally delivered this data to every visitor on the map’s page. Both the English and Arabic versions! We’re starting to suspect the competent people in the Israeli ‘tech scene’ left for San Francisco or New York a long time ago.”

Second takedown and partial resurrection

Nine days after the initial complaint, Namecheap removed the extortion website without contacting the complainants. The IDF quickly found a new host with GoDaddy, but the site had significant changes. The child victims and ominous countdown timer were gone, its search function only partly functioning, and it never followed through with the threatened release of personal information.

“We, of course, have no idea why the IDF moderated the website and backed down from their threats,” said a Zionism Observer member, “but we strongly suspect it was the result of our public pressure campaign, the multiple de-platforms, and the IDF’s sudden realization that impunity doesn’t apply everywhere.”

The collective restarted the campaign, but GoDaddy was quick to resort to legalistic obfuscations.

“GoDaddy seems to have made a decision, at what we suspect is a higher level of management than normally would apply to questions about an abusive website on shared hosting, that they will not take down the website,” the collective said but keeps an easy-to-use call to action on the campaign website, encouraging people to make a complaint to GoDaddy’s abuse department.

Cartographic resistance

Once they reverse-engineered the army’s abusive evacuation map website, the collective cartographers were surprised at the messy data. They spent over a day cleaning up the geospatial data. According to a cartographer in the collective, the IDF “should learn more about topology.”

The collective recently recruited two cartographers and began building an interactive mapping application. The website gazamaps.com is little more than a placeholder now, but the collective expects a meaningful launch in a matter of weeks. The vision is that visitors will be able to click on an area on the map and see the genocidal TikTok videos posted by soldiers that the team collected, the relevant evacuation orders, and more.

Zionism Observer’s maps are just one of its many projects, and the collective is part of a group of software developers building Palestine-solidarity software. When it comes to web applications, solidarity with the Palestinian people might just — for the first time ever — have a tech advantage over the famed “Startup Nation.”

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