Zencity is owned by a cyberwarfare expert who learned his sinister trade in an elite unit of the Israel Defense Force. The use of the firm has been subject to growing complaints and scrutiny in America
‘Powered by Commonplace’: Jason Perry’s council has handed its Council Tax survey to an AI company owned by an Israeli spyware expert
Croydon’s “digital first” council has outsourced its public consultation on Council Tax Support (Perry looks to inflict pain for his failures on Croydon’s poor) to a company owned by a former member of the Israel Defense Force’s elite cyber warfare unit.
Piss-poor Perry’s survey to find out from whom he should snatch vital support – The poor? The old? The disabled? – is being hosted by Commonplace Digital Ltd. Commonplace was taken over in 2025 by Zencity. The company’s founder and chief executive is Eyal Feder.
Feder, 39, describes himself as an “urban innovation geek”. Which is nice. A planner and computer scientist, he is the former COO of Tel Aviv University’s City Center and was previously a member of the World Economic Forum’s “Future of Cities” advisory board.
SIGINT: Eyal Feder, CEO of Zencity
Feder is listed on Companies House records as an American living in the United States. What those records fail to state is that Feder served in the IDF’s Unit 8200.
That unit is the IDF’s elite signals intelligence – SIGINT, to give it its military acronym – and cyberwarfare branch.
8200 operates a mass-surveillance system that has intercepted up to 1million civilian phone calls per hour across Gaza and the West Bank, compiling thousands of terabytes of data to map out the daily lives of Palestinians. It has been widely reported that the information gathered has been used to intimidate individuals and provide the IDF targets for its bombs to rain down on.
In the US, Bob Goonin of the Jewish Voice for Peace organisation campaigned against the Minneapolis city council and its police department from using Zencity. He and others argued that letting a company whose founder was trained in IDF Unit 8200’s spy machine should not be trusted in harvesting, analysing and presenting community feedback.
In Britain, according to Zencity, “Over 600 local governments [sic]”, including Jason Perry’s council, are already using the company’s “AI-native infrastructure for community-driven workflows”.
Outsourced: can we trust Croydon Council’s contractors, declared on in the small print, with our personal data?
Goonin warned that Zencity has developed a product that is “a surveillance technology that law enforcement can use to collect millions of data points from social media platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, Nextdoor and LinkedIn”.
Or simply by datascraping the online forms which local councils, such as Croydon, are obliged by law to distribute and analyse, but for which there are very few legal controls on how that information might be used.
So, in Croydon in 2026, Big Brother is watching you, and his name is Jason Perry. Anything that you say online may be used against you. So that’s us fucked, then…
Read more:Perry looks to inflict pain for his failures on Croydon’s poor
Read more: ‘Challenge remains enormous’ as Perry hikes Council Tax again
Read more: 33% Council Tax increase: Mayor Perry’s legacy for Croydon
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Perry will ignore inconvenient replies to his loaded questions. He only ‘listens’ to what he wants to hear
The easiest way to avoid any involvement with this cyberwarfare spook is to not bother responding to the (sham) consultation, but that is exactly what Piss-Poor wants. If nobody/few people respond to the consultation, he can say nobody objected so there is nothing to stop him robbing the poor to feed him and his rich friends !