Saudi using Israeli tech firm to ‘identify terrorists’

An Israeli technology firm said it was contacted by the Saudi royal family who asked it to help identify terrorist threats in the country, Bloomberg Business Week reported on Thursday.

Israeli Shmuel Bar, the founder of IntuView, a company whose software can scan four million Facebook and Twitter posts per day, said he was contacted by a Saudi official two years ago asking him to a Skype call. The official said the government wanted to use Bar’s software to “identify terrorists” on condition he setup a sister company which was not based in Israel.

“It’s not as if I went looking for this,” Bar explained. “They came to me.”

In the interview with Bloomberg, Bar said he now works freely with a number of Arab countries, all be it quietly.

“If it’s a country which is not hostile to Israel that we can help, we’ll do it,” Bar said. Only Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Iraq are off-limits.

“The Arab boycott? It doesn’t exist.”