When Edward Snowden released thousands of classified NSA documents in June 2013, one detail barely registered in Tel Aviv but should have: a 2009 memorandum of understanding under which the NSA shared raw surveillance data with Israel’s SIGINT National Unit, including data on American citizens, with minimal filtering. The relationship, one leaked document noted, had become “the catalyst for a broader intelligence relationship between the United States and Israel.”

Thirteen years on, the world that Snowden revealed has not been reformed. It has fractured. The single, borderless internet that once seemed as inevitable as gravity is splintering into rival blocs, each governed by its own rules, its own infrastructure and its own conception of sovereignty. China’s Great Firewall, once mocked by Bill Clinton as an exercise in nailing jelly to a wall, now shields 1.1 billion users from the global web and is being exported as a turnkey product to Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Myanmar. Russia’s sovereign internet decree, which took effect in March 2026, gives Moscow the legal authority to reroute domestic traffic in real time and, if it chooses, to sever the RuNet from the outside world entirely. The European Union has staked out a third position through GDPR, the Digital Services Act and the AI Act, constructing a rights based regulatory perimeter that imposes its own form of extraterritorial control. India, meanwhile, conducts more internet shutdowns than any country on earth while simultaneously championing its open digital public infrastructure as a........

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