There is a company woven so deeply into the digital infrastructure of American corporate and government life that removing it would be, in practical terms, nearly impossible. It protects banks, defense contractors, hospital systems, intelligence agencies, and virtually every major corporation operating on American soil. It was founded in Israel by veterans of the Israeli military. Its roots run directly into Unit 8200, Israel's equivalent of the NSA. And for thirty years, almost nobody in the mainstream American policy conversation has thought it necessary to ask what that arrangement actually means for American sovereignty.
The Company Inside Your Company
Check Point Software Technologies was founded in 1993 in Ramat Gan, Israel, by Gil Shwed, Marius Nacht, and Shlomo Kramer. It was an Israeli military intelligence operation that produced civilians who then built a private company. Within a decade it had become the dominant enterprise cybersecurity firm in the world. Today it operates in over 60 countries, protects more than 100,000 organizations globally, and by its own published marketing materials it serves 100% of the Fortune 100 and 98% of the Fortune 500.
Read that again slowly. Ninety-eight percent of the five hundred largest corporations in America. Every major bank. Every defense contractor with a publicly traded parent company. Every pharmaceutical giant. Every media conglomerate. Every energy company. Sitting behind all of it, reading the traffic, managing the gates, deciding what comes in and what gets flagged, is software built by Israelis with military intelligence backgrounds and sold through a company that remains deeply integrated with the Israeli defense establishment.
Up to 10% of Check Point's North American revenue, per Bloomberg reporting, comes directly from the public sector. Federal agencies. Government contracts. The same government that is currently asking whether Chinese technology companies like Huawei and TikTok represent unacceptable national security risks because of their ties to a foreign state.
By the Numbers Check Point claims 98% of Fortune 500 and 100% of Fortune 100 as clients. Up to 10% of North American revenue comes from U.S. public sector and federal contracts. More than 100,000 organizations globally run Check Point infrastructure at their network gateway.
The cognitive dissonance required to hold both of those positions simultaneously is remarkable. We are willing to ban a Chinese owned video app from government phones because of theoretical access to user data. We are not willing to have a serious conversation about an Israeli company that processes the actual network traffic of the majority of American corporate and federal infrastructure. One conversation happens loudly and publicly. The other does not happen at all.
Unit 8200: Where Check Point Came From
To understand Check Point properly, you have to understand what Unit 8200 is and what it produces, because the two are inseparable in ways that Check Point's corporate biography tends to glide past quickly.
Unit 8200 is Israel's signals intelligence organization, roughly equivalent in function and sophistication to the American NSA, though analysts who have studied both operations suggest that in certain domains involving cyber offense and signals collection, Unit 8200 operates at a level of technical sophistication that rivals or exceeds its American counterpart. It was founded in 1952 and has become over the subsequent seven decades the most consequential military intelligence unit in the history of the modern state of Israel.
Its alumni have also become the most consequential single source of cybersecurity and surveillance technology in the history of the modern world. The list of companies founded by Unit 8200 veterans is a directory of the global security technology industry: Check Point Software, Waze, NSO Group (Pegasus spyware), Cellebrite (mobile device extraction tools used by law enforcement on every inhabited continent), Verint (communications analytics embedded in global telecom networks), Nice Systems, and CyberArk — which is trusted by more than half of the Fortune 500 for privileged access management, meaning it controls who gets administrative access to the most sensitive systems in American corporate infrastructure.
What Unit 8200 Has Produced
The Wall Street Journal, in an August 2024 piece, celebrated this pipeline enthusiastically, praising Unit 8200 veterans for their "high-pressure culture and on-the-spot thinking" and noting that major Silicon Valley venture capital firms including Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital were actively hiring partners and backing companies built by Unit 8200 founders. The piece framed this as straightforwardly good news. The question of what it means for American data sovereignty was not raised.
The Intelligence-to-Silicon Valley Pipeline
The flow between Israeli military intelligence and American corporate technology infrastructure is not incidental. It is structural, deliberate, and accelerating.
When Unit 8200 veterans leave military service, they bring with them something that no civilian technology training produces: deep, operational experience in signals collection, network penetration, surveillance architecture, and intelligence analysis at a state level. They have built systems designed to intercept, analyze, and exploit the communications of adversaries. They have operated inside the networks of targets at the highest levels of sophistication. They then take that expertise into the private sector, often founding companies that build the infrastructure through which the private communications and data of hundreds of millions of people flow every day.
As one careful 2026 analysis put it, when Unit 8200 veterans move into American firms they bring with them "a tolerance for aggressive data collection that can clash with American privacy expectations." More pointedly, because these individuals are generally not subject to FISA oversight that governs American intelligence employees, there is a legitimate concern that corporate entities could function as vectors for foreign intelligence collection — not necessarily through deliberate conspiracy, but through what the same analysis described as "cultural osmosis": the natural tendency of people trained to think in terms of intelligence value to build systems that incidentally optimize for intelligence collection.
The Israeli government retains export control authority over many of the most sensitive technologies produced by Unit 8200 alumni companies. NSO Group's Pegasus, for instance, is treated by Israel as a strategic diplomatic tool whose export requires government approval. This means that a private American company purchasing Israeli surveillance technology is, in a meaningful sense, purchasing a product whose terms of sale and conditions of use have been approved by the Israeli state. The technology is not simply a commercial product. It is an instrument of Israeli foreign policy.
"The same government that banned Huawei from federal networks for theoretical data access concerns has never had a serious public conversation about an Israeli company sitting inside 98% of its Fortune 500 corporate infrastructure."
Israel Has Spied on America Before. Repeatedly.
This is where the conversation requires the kind of directness that American political discourse has historically been extremely reluctant to apply to Israel. Because the record is not theoretical. It is documented, it is extensive, and it involves incidents of a seriousness that, applied to any other country, would have produced lasting and fundamental changes in the relationship.
The most consequential is Jonathan Pollard. In 1985, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy, was arrested and subsequently pleaded guilty to passing what intelligence officials described as massive quantities of classified American intelligence to Israel. The damage assessment, classified for decades, was later described by officials who reviewed it as catastrophic. Pollard served 30 years before being released in 2015. He relocated to Israel in 2020 and was received as a hero. The Israeli government, which had denied running Pollard as an asset for years before eventually acknowledging it, awarded him Israeli citizenship and celebrated him publicly at his arrival.
In 2019, surveillance devices known as IMSI catchers or StingRays were discovered in multiple locations in Washington, D.C., including in the vicinity of the White House. American officials privately attributed the devices to Israel, according to reporting by Politico. The Israeli government denied it. The incident received limited coverage and produced no formal diplomatic consequences.
In 2021, Apple notified 11 U.S. diplomats that their iPhones had been compromised using Pegasus spyware, the tool built by NSO Group, the Unit 8200 alumni company. These were the first confirmed cases of Israeli developed surveillance technology being used against American government officials. The Biden administration subsequently placed NSO Group on the Commerce Department's Entity List — the same designation applied to Huawei. In 2025, a U.S. court ordered NSO to pay Meta over $167 million for unlawfully hacking 1,400 devices. NSO Group's Pegasus had also been used against the phones of journalists, human rights activists, and political figures in at least 45 countries.
In 1967, Israeli fighter jets and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American intelligence gathering vessel, in international waters during the Six Day War. The attack lasted two hours, followed six hours of repeated close range aerial surveillance of a ship flying American flags, and resulted in the deaths of 34 American sailors and the wounding of 171 more. Israel claimed it was a case of mistaken identity. Multiple American officials and survivors disputed that account. NSA documents relating to the incident remain classified to this day — nearly 60 years later.
The Pattern Pollard passed classified intelligence to Israel. IMSI catchers appeared near the White House with Israeli attribution. NSO Group's Israeli technology hacked American diplomats' phones. The USS Liberty was attacked with 34 Americans killed. In each case, the American government accepted Israel's explanations, minimized the incident publicly, and allowed the relationship to continue unchanged. No other ally has compiled a comparable record without facing a fundamental reassessment of the terms of that alliance.
When an Israeli CEO Called for Limiting the First Amendment
In January 2026, Shlomo Kramer, the Israeli tech entrepreneur who co-founded Check Point Software and later Cato Networks, appeared on CNBC's Money Movers program. What he said deserves to be read carefully and in full, because it captures something important about the orientation of a certain class of Israeli tech executives toward American political and social institutions.
Kramer told the CNBC host directly: "I know it's difficult to hear, but it's time to limit the First Amendment in order to protect it." When pressed, he elaborated. "We need to control the platforms, all the social platforms. We need to stack, rank the authenticity of every person that expresses themselves online and take control over what they are saying, based on that ranking." He then confirmed, when asked explicitly, that he believed the American government should do this.
Sit with that for a moment. One of the co-founders of the company that sits inside 98% of Fortune 500 network infrastructure is a man who went on American national television and advocated for government control of American speech, the ranking of Americans by authenticity, and the restriction of expression based on that ranking. He did this as a foreign national. A citizen of Israel. A man with no vote in American elections, no personal stake in American constitutional rights, and no accountability to the American people whose speech he was proposing to regulate.
The reaction was muted. The story broke through briefly on Fox Business. It did not generate the kind of sustained national conversation that an American CEO calling for the same thing would have produced. And Check Point continues to sit inside 98% of Fortune 500 infrastructure.
The Myth of the Unconditional Ally
None of what follows is an argument that Israel is America's enemy. It is not. It is an argument for something more important and more difficult: treating Israel the way America treats every other country on earth, which means honestly assessing where interests align and where they diverge, and building a relationship around that honest assessment rather than around a mythology of unconditional alliance that serves certain political interests on both sides of the relationship while obscuring the actual costs it imposes.
The old saying about keeping friends close and enemies closer has a corollary that American foreign policy has consistently failed to apply to Israel: the distinction between the two categories is not determined by sentiment, historical ties, or shared values. It is determined by behavior, by the alignment of interests, and by whether the relationship, honestly examined, produces outcomes that are good for America.
Israel is a sophisticated state actor that pursues its national interests with extraordinary skill and ruthlessness. That is not a criticism. It is a description of what competent states do. The problem is not that Israel pursues its interests. The problem is that America has allowed the pursuit of Israeli interests to be treated as synonymous with the pursuit of American interests, when the documentary record makes clear that these interests diverge significantly and consequentially on a regular basis.
The USS Liberty. Jonathan Pollard. The IMSI catchers near the White House. The NSO Group diplomats. Section 224 of the 2027 NDAA attempting to fuse the two countries' militaries. AIPAC spending over $100 million to shape which Americans serve in Congress. Israeli tech executives with no American citizenship calling for limits on American constitutional rights. The $3.8 billion in annual military assistance that flows to Israel regardless of how that assistance is used. The United Nations Security Council vetoes cast on Israel's behalf that have cost America diplomatic credibility across the Global South for decades.
Each of these is, individually, explicable. Together they form a picture of a relationship in which one party consistently extracts value, shapes the other party's internal political process, and faces no meaningful accountability when its behavior crosses lines that would be considered intolerable from any other country.
2025 Israeli Tech Exits: The Scale of Financial Integration In 2025 alone, Israeli tech companies completed exits worth nearly $59 billion in the American market, including Google's $32 billion acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity firm Wiz — the largest deal in Alphabet's history. Israeli cybersecurity raised $4 billion in 2024, more than double the prior year. The financial integration between the Israeli tech sector and American capital markets is now so deep that the two economies are functionally entangled in ways that create structural incentives against honest security assessment.
What a Sober National Security Framework Actually Looks Like
The United States applies a consistent framework to technology from countries it views as potential adversaries: it asks whether the company building the technology has meaningful ties to a foreign government, whether that government has demonstrated willingness to use commercial technology for intelligence purposes, and whether the scale of the technology's penetration into American infrastructure represents an unacceptable concentration of foreign access to sensitive systems.
That framework, applied to Chinese technology, produced the banning of Huawei from American 5G networks, the effective forced sale or ban of TikTok, the restriction of numerous Chinese software and hardware companies from government procurement, and a comprehensive legislative effort to reduce American dependency on Chinese technology across critical sectors.
Apply the same framework to Israeli technology and the conclusions are uncomfortable. Check Point was founded by Unit 8200 veterans. Unit 8200 is an active military intelligence organization with a documented history of operations against American interests. The Israeli government treats several of the most sensitive products built by Unit 8200 alumni as state diplomatic tools requiring Israeli government export approval. NSO Group's Pegasus, built by Unit 8200 veterans, was used to hack American government officials. Israeli intelligence has been credibly linked to surveillance operations on American soil. The Israeli government has demonstrated, through the Pollard case and others, that it is willing to run intelligence operations against the United States when it calculates that doing so serves Israeli interests.
A sober framework would ask: given all of that, is it appropriate for a company with these roots to control the network security infrastructure of 98% of Fortune 500 companies and a significant portion of the federal government? The answer does not have to be a binary yes or no. It could be a set of conditions: mandatory third-party auditing with American oversight, prohibition on data sharing with any Israeli government entity, rigorous vetting of any personnel with active or recent ties to Israeli intelligence services, and a clear legal framework establishing American jurisdiction over any data processed through Check Point infrastructure.
What it cannot be is the current answer, which is to not ask the question at all.
The Question We Need to Start Asking
Every serious conversation about American national security begins with an assumption that feels so obvious it barely needs stating: the foreign policy, the military posture, the technology infrastructure, and the intelligence apparatus of the United States should serve American interests. Not the interests of allies. Not the interests of lobbying organizations. Not the interests of foreign companies with deep roots in foreign military intelligence services. American interests, defined by American citizens, accountable to American voters.
That assumption is being violated right now, in ways that are documented, quantifiable, and accelerating. A foreign company controls the network gateway of 98% of American corporate infrastructure. The founders of that company served in a foreign military intelligence unit. That same intelligence ecosystem has produced technology used to surveil American government officials. The country that produced this ecosystem has a documented history of running intelligence operations against the United States. And the political environment in Washington makes it structurally impossible to have an honest conversation about any of it, because the lobbying infrastructure that has been built around the U.S.-Israel relationship makes criticism of that relationship politically suicidal in both parties.
This is not about antisemitism. It is not about whether Israel should exist or whether the United States should have a relationship with Israel. It is about something far more basic: whether America is capable of applying its own stated principles to all of its relationships equally, including the ones that are most politically sensitive to examine.
The standard we apply to Huawei should be the standard we apply to Check Point. The standard we apply to TikTok should be the standard we apply to the Unit 8200 pipeline into Silicon Valley. The standard we apply to Chinese intelligence penetration of American institutions should be the standard we apply to documented Israeli intelligence operations on American soil.
One standard. Applied equally. To every foreign actor operating inside American borders, inside American companies, inside American political institutions, and inside the network infrastructure that carries the data of every American who uses a computer.
That is not a radical position. It is the minimum that national sovereignty requires. And the fact that stating it plainly feels dangerous is itself the most important evidence that something has gone very wrong.
Related Reading For a close-up case study of how this pipeline recruits American capital and credibility, see Steph Curry's Quiet Bet on Israeli Intelligence: Inside Penny Jar Capital's Unit 8200 Investments.