On hand at the launch (of The Institute at Ben-Gurion University), according to coverage, were officials from global firms like Microsoft and General Motors, as well as top-tier Israeli politicians, like Herzog, the president. (A spokesperson for GM told The Intercept they could not confirm the company’s attendance.)

An American auto maker showing up at the opening of a secretive cyberspying training academy in Israel is concerning.

A small blurb from The Guardian on why Andres Freund went looking in the first place.

So how was it spotted? A single Microsoft developer was annoyed that a system was running slowly. That’s it. The developer, Andres Freund, was trying to uncover why a system running a beta version of Debian, a Linux distribution, was lagging when making encrypted connections. That lag was all of half a second, for logins. That’s it: before, it took Freund 0.3s to login, and after, it took 0.8s. That annoyance was enough to cause him to break out the metaphorical spanner and pull his system apart to find the cause of the problem.

Patent trolls rank right up there with private equity firms that own massive amounts of housing. Scum of the earth right here.