In September 2017, I got a “cease and desist” email from an organization called outlawbds. They informed me that because of my activism around BDS, I had been put on a “blacklist”—yes, they used that word, twice—and that I had a limited window of time to change my tune on BDS in order to get my name removed from the blacklist and avoid the legal consequences of my advocacy. “You have been marked,” the email warned me. “You have been identified.”

Turns out the whole thing was part of an operation of an Israeli intelligence firm called “Psy-Group.” Whose activities have now been exposed in The New Yorker.

Here are just a snippet of the items that might be of interest to those of us on CUNY campuses and in the New York area.

The campaign, code-named Project Butterfly, initially targeted B.D.S. activists on college campuses in “a single U.S. state,” which former Psy-Group employees have told me was New York. The company said that its operatives drew up lists of individuals and organizations to target. The operatives then gathered derogatory information on them from social media and the “deep” Web, areas of the Internet that are not indexed by search engines such as Google. In some cases, Psy-Group operatives conducted on-the-ground covert human-intelligence, or HUMINT, operations against their targets. Israeli intelligence officials insist that they do not spy on Americans, a claim that is disputed by their U.S. counterparts. Israeli officials said, however, that this prohibition does not apply to private companies such as Psy-Group, which use discharged Israel Defense Forces soldiers and former members of elite intelligence units, rather than active-duty members, in operations targeting Americans.

You can read more here.

And here’s the email I got.