Ori Cohen Hard to Trace His Roots

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In reference to my earlier diary Egypt’s Internet Spying on Bloggers with U.S. Support and the comment by Mattes about Ori Cohen, the founder of Narus.

Narus knows what you are doing on the network

(Forbes) Aug. 1999 – Narus has come up with a way to distinguish between the various packet types (such as video or voice) and then send that information straight into a database for billing purposes. The idea for this software came to Cohen when he was working for VDOnet, an Israeli video streaming software company. Cohen, a 33-year-old Israeli immigrant discovered that ISPs were reluctant to deploy streaming video products, because there was no way to bill the customers.

Cohen saw an opportunity, and he left to start Narus about 3 years ago. The company has labored in anonymity for almost two and a half years, even though it has raised $30 million in two rounds from investors such as the Mayfield Fund, Chase Capital and Walden Ventures. The end result of all those efforts is a software called Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA), which runs on powerful Sun workstations, operating like a web probe that is hooked straight into the network.

AT&T’s Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens

Police officials, FBI and DEA agents, and major telecommunications companies eager to cash in on the “war on terror” had gathered in the hometown of the CIA to discuss their special problems. Among the attendees were AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Sprint and Verizon. Narus founder, Dr. Ori Cohen*, gave a keynote speech.

One of the devices in the “Cabinet Naming” list is particularly revealing as to the purpose of the “secret room”: a Narus STA 6400. So what does the Narus STA 6400 do?

Dr. Cohen is an accomplished entrepreneur and the founder of several technology companies, most notably Narus and Skyrider.
Ori founded and served as CEO of Narus, the dominant player in real-time traffic intelligence for large IP networks, and the only company that provides security, intercept and traffic management solutions within a single, flexible system.
Narus’ patented technology is deployed on the largest IP networks around the world including AT&T, KT (Korea), KDDI (Japan), France Telecom, Reliance (India), Saudi Telecom, and US Cellular.
Prior to founding Narus, Ori was the Vice President of Business and Technology Development for VDOnet, a leading provider of Internet video conferencing and video on demand software solutions.
Before joining VDOnet, Ori served as the CEO of IntelliCom Ltd. and got his Ph.D. in Physics from Imperial College (London, UK). Info founder CRight

Ori Cohen founded a new company in Singapore Fotografik-labs

During my MBA studies at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, I spent time in the US and in general traveled a lot, and I have lived in various continents since childhood.

Our products are currently targeted to solve real life problems in two main areas: Media and Security. Our team comes from a strong digital media background, and traditionally we designed our products for this industry. However over time we were approached by various government security agencies and commercial security companies that were amazed by how unique and advanced our technology is and the numerous problems that it can solve in their space.

Our two main technologies are: a) A visual search platform & b) an automated image tagging system, both are offered in a license model or as a SaaS platform for developers.

Video analytics for security – a very powerful and cutting edge toolset for Command and Control centers and crime investigators that allows them to quickly locate suspect vehicles and people in large live installations of CCTV cameras, solely based on a visual description of an eye witness.

The connection with the Israeli company, was made possible through my academia network. I looked for a team that can genuinely complement our domain knowledge and and I was privileged to locate a great group of world leaders in the area of machine vision, in a company called RTC Vision. The synergy between the two companies was perfect – Fotografik brought a great deal of market knowledge and deep technology understanding and experience, and they brought their very unique IP in the form of very advanced algorithms and 15 years of prior research.

The successful combination brought us to the Singapore-Israel Industrial R&D Foundation (SIIRD-F) of EDB in Singapore, who awarded us a generous grant that funded our mutual bi-national research for the last 2 years.

Joint Venture Singapore Israel and Homeland Security

According to Tian, who is also the PKR strategic director, APCO’s topmost international advisory council comprised many leading figures with direct and indirect links to the Israeli and U.S. secret services.

These include APCO Chief Executive Officer Gad Ben-Ari, a personal adviser of the late Israeli PM Yishak Rabin, Carl Truscott, a high-ranking but tainted public servant under the U.S. Bush Administration, and most startlingly, Doron Bergerbest-Eilon, the former security chief for the Israeli government.

Tian pointed out that Doron had held a position equivalent to the rank of major-general in the Israeli Security Agency (ISA) and his dedication to his country’s secret service has even earned him a prestigious Director’s Recognition Award by the U.S. Secret Service.

Doron is also the founder and president of APCO’s sister company ASERO Worldwide, a homeland security and risk management consultancy.