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First Palestine, Now Scranton: Organized Intelligence Collection Might Be Coming To Your Town Next

September 4, 2026September 4, 2026By Vinnie V.
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First Palestine, Now Scranton: Organized Intelligence Collection Might Be Coming To Your Town Next

The surveillance system Scranton wants to build next to City Hall was designed for the occupied West Bank, refined on Palestinians, and is maintained today by engineers in Tel Aviv. Axon is the storefront. Israel is the back office.

The Pocono Review reported in July that the old Fidelity Bank branch at 334-346 N. Washington Ave. is the future home of a Scranton Police Real-Time Crime Center. The city bought the building for $1.88 million from a bank tied to the mayor’s family, with no competitive process, on a lame-duck council’s vote. It is one piece of an $8.3 million surveillance buildout the mayor is assembling while she runs for Congress and crime falls. Chief Thomas Carroll called it “a gold mine for us.” That story was about the deal. This one is about what goes inside.

What Scranton Is Buying

Carroll wants 41 license plate readers, body cameras, dash cameras, dispatch, records, mapping, and a registry of private cameras from hospitals, the university, the mall, and homeowners, all in one room, on one screen. He calls it a “common operating picture.” The resolution says it will serve “the county and beyond.”

Imported From Israel

In Hebron, the Israeli military runs a CCTV grid it calls “Hebron Smart City,” described by the IDF as sensors that identify “in real time what is out of the ordinary” and push it to soldiers on the ground. Former soldiers told the Washington Post the cameras sometimes see into homes. Layered on top is a facial recognition database built by soldiers photographing every Palestinian they met, children and the elderly included, competing for prizes based on volume. One soldier called it the army’s “Facebook for Palestinians.” Amnesty International’s 2023 report on the system is titled “Automated Apartheid.” Foreign Policy found companies working with the military prototyping new systems on Hebron’s civilians before selling them abroad.

The map is one to one. Hebron’s camera grid is Scranton’s camera registry. Hebron’s database is Axon Evidence. Hebron’s operations room is the building next to City Hall. The difference is that in Hebron, the population had no vote. In Scranton, council tabled the funding 5-0 in June and hasn’t voted yet.

Who Built It

The people who build this come from Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence arm. Netanyahu, asked on Fox News about Israel’s rise as a cyber power, called it “a very deliberate policy.” The policy has a name in Scranton: Axon.

Axon Enterprise, formerly TASER, was worth $48.8 billion at the end of August. Scranton’s grant money means nothing to a company that size. The money is a bonus. The data is the product.

What Axon wants is the contract, because the contract never ends. Grant money builds the room. After that Scranton pays every year for the Fusus platform, Evidence.com storage, camera licensing, analytics, and 911 routing. Lawrence, Kansas had 100 terabytes in Axon’s cloud when it re-signed for $3.2 million; the city’s own agenda item said moving it would be “overwhelming.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Beryl Lipton: Axon is “trying to basically make the cost to the customer to switch vendors too high a barrier.”

Fusus runs one in five real-time crime centers in America. Axon 911 handles emergency calls in 49 states. Axon 911 was an Israeli company called Carbyne until February, when Axon paid $625 million cash for it. Carbyne’s chairman was Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel. Its board included the former commander of Unit 8200, who sat on AIPAC’s board at the same time. Its first American customer, New Orleans, was warned by civil rights groups in 2020 that the platform let the city surveil people “in crisis dialing 911 without regulations or limits.” It pulls the caller’s location and can stream video from their phone. Every call becomes a location, a voice, a feed, logged in Evidence.

Axon kept Carbyne’s development center in Tel Aviv. Eighty Israeli engineers still write and maintain the code. Axon announced this itself.

No foreign-investment review touched the deal, because the buyer was American. No congressional hearing was held. In July the House passed, 216-212, an NDAA provision creating a “United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative” to make it easier for exactly this kind of company to win federal contracts.

Whoever writes the code controls the system. The hardware in Scranton is a terminal.

What These Companies Do When Nobody Is Watching

Axon has $90 million invested in Cellebrite, the Israeli company that breaks into phones. In Serbia, police used it on a journalist and an activist in custody and then planted spyware; Cellebrite cut Serbia off only after Amnesty published. In Hong Kong it was used on 4,000 phones during the pro-democracy crackdown; 36,000 people petitioned the company to stop and it kept selling. In Belarus it supplied state security during a protest crackdown the EU sanctioned, while saying it doesn’t sell to sanctioned regimes.

The only body that licenses these exports is the Israeli government. An Israeli human rights lawyer has petitioned it repeatedly to pull Cellebrite’s licenses. Every petition that reached a ruling lost. When Amnesty sued to revoke NSO Group’s license after Pegasus spyware turned up on journalists’ phones worldwide, the court sided with the ministry. Amnesty Israel called it “a rubber stamp.”

That is the accountability structure standing behind the building next to City Hall.

You Paid For It Already

The United States sends Israel $3.8 billion a year in military aid, $174 billion since 1948, more than any other country. Under a carve-out no other recipient gets, Israel has been allowed to spend more than a quarter of it on its own defense industry, the industry that produced Unit 8200’s companies.

So American tax dollars fund the apparatus. The apparatus builds the tools and tests them on Palestinians. Veterans turn the tools into companies. Axon buys the companies. Scranton applies for a federal grant to buy the product back. The code stays in Tel Aviv, the data flows back with it, and every subscription payment after that keeps the Tel Aviv operation running.

What This Means Here

Asheville approved a Fusus contract 6-1 in May with a chamber full of residents opposing it past midnight. Dearborn’s Arab-American community fought one over fears it would be aimed at protesters and immigrants. Denver dropped Flock under public pressure and the mayor proposed Axon instead. Same system, different logo.

Those cities already had cameras. Northeast Pennsylvania doesn’t. Outside Scranton and Wilkes-Barre there is no camera network, no plate reader grid, no surveillance backbone at all. This region goes from nothing to a full intelligence collection hub in one project, and the resolution says the hub is for “the county and beyond.”

It goes live in a county that spent the spring fighting over whether to cooperate with ICE. Nowhere this system has gone was it limited to the purpose it was sold for. In Serbia it found a journalist. In Hong Kong it found a democracy movement. In Hebron it found everyone. The same room that can match a plate to a deportation can match a face at a school board meeting to a name, or log who parked outside the township building the night of a contested vote. Today it’s ICE. Tomorrow it could be every gun owner and everyone in their immediate family. Nobody has asked whether it will. But you can rest assured the system can do all of the above.

Have information about surveillance technology contracts in Wayne, Monroe, Pike, or Lackawanna counties? Contact Pocono Review.

Sources

Scranton

Hebron / Unit 8200

Axon / Carbyne / Fusus

  • SlashGear, Axon market cap and Fusus camera figures, Sept. 2, 2026
  • PRNewswire, Axon FY2025 results ($2.78B revenue), Feb. 24, 2026
  • Lawrence Times, July 25, 2025 (100 TB, “overwhelming,” Beryl Lipton quote)
  • EFF Atlas of Surveillance (Fusus share of U.S. RTCCs) — https://atlasofsurveillance.org
  • Axon press release, Carbyne acquisition announced November 2025; closed Feb. 18, 2026 — https://www.capturecascade.org/events/2025-11-04–axon-acquires-carbyne-625-million/
  • Axon, “Axon 911: From Call to Closure” (49 states)
  • Prepared by Axon company blog (Tel Aviv R&D, ~80 engineers)
  • TRT World, Carbyne leadership and investors, December 2019 — https://www.trtworld.com/article/12727769
  • Crunchbase, Pinchas Buchris (Unit 8200 commander, AIPAC board)
  • Forbes, March 17, 2020; Eye on Surveillance (New Orleans Carbyne contract, civil rights objections)
  • Military.com, “US-Israel Defense Integration on Horizon as House Keeps Section 219 in NDAA,” July 2026
  • PRNewswire, Axon acquires Fusus, Jan. 31, 2024

Cellebrite

U.S. Aid to Israel

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