BlackNest: Pro-Israel Doxxing Group Has Secret Website to Celebrate Punishing of Pro-Palestine Activism
Washington (QNN)- Notorious pro-Israel doxxing website, Canary Mission, has a secret website called BlackNest, where the shadowy group celebrates the deportions and firings of pro-Palestine voices, according to a collection of unlisted websites discovered by Drop Site.
BlackNest is just one of the names of several unlisted websites and content management systems used by Canary Mission. The information on these unlisted websites includes dozens of names of workers and contracted vendors, internal communications about meetings and quarterly plans, and even strategic planning documents.
Canary’s non-public websites promise expansion into new avenues to continue the group’s mission of punishing Americans for pro-Palestine speech via doxxing, pressure campaigns, and now arrests and deportations carried out by the Trump administration.
In July last year, The US government acknowledged its use of Canary Mission to identify pro-Palestine students for deportation, sparking anger and concern by rights advocates.
Activists have long suspected that the Trump administration is gathering information from the Canary Mission website to target students and professors.
The suspicion was confirmed when a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official testified in a court case challenging Trump’s efforts to deport pro-Palestinian student protesters.
Heba Gowayed, a sociology professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), said the government’s reliance on an online blacklist that posts personal information to harm and intimidate activists is “absurd and fascist”.
“Canary Mission is a doxxing website that specifically targets people for language that they deem to be pro-Palestinian and therefore, they’ve decided, is anti-Semitic. Its sole purpose is to target and harass people,” Gowayed said.
Before the presidential elections, the Heritage Foundation, a prominent right-wing think tank, released a policy document titled Project Esther designed to dismantle the Palestine solidarity movement in the US.
Project Esther called for identifying students and professors critical of Israel who are in violation of their visas, and it cited Canary Mission extensively.
The website was founded in 2015, and it has been expanding since. Nevertheless, barring a few media leaks over the years, the operators and funders of Canary Mission remain anonymous.
In 2018, Haaretz reported that Israeli authorities have relied on the website to detain people and bar them from entering the country.
That same year, the outlet The Forward found that Canary Mission is linked to an Israel-based non-profit called Megamot Shalom. Since then, media reports have revealed the names of a few wealthy American donors who have made contributions to the website through a network of Jewish charities.
According to Drop Site revelations, BlackNest categorizes the group’s impacts into categories: “Change of behavior,” job loss, denials of entry to the U.S., arrests, and “deportation/forced to flee.”
The site also collects mentions of Canary Mission in media, mostly from U.S. news outlets, and celebrates mentions of their impact.
Much of the BlackNest content has a corporate business tone and offers a view into a hierarchical and professionalized operation. A “Team Overview” page lists a staff achievement of someone named “Cheri,” who “identified the activist from” a viral video, and “Nora” is lauded for completing “the Stanford Arrest Profiles.” A “Team Updates” section offers a “Branding Update,” with instructions to the team to add a tagline to all posts about New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani: “A vote for Mamdani is a vote for chaos in NYC.”
Canary Mission added several students to the site after they were arrested at pro-Palestine protests at Stanford University in 2024, and emails and Instagram posts in June from Canary Mission contained the Mamdani tagline.
BlackNest also collected and posted news articles about Canary Mission, including deportations and instances of people choosing to flee the U.S. in the wake of arrests that unfolded since President Donald Trump took office. When NBC reported that the Department of Homeland Security testified in court that they used Canary Mission to choose targets for deportation in July, BlackNest uploaded a PDF of the article to the “Impacts” section of the site.
Canary Mission has sections of the site dedicated to campaigns at those universities, and it has a section dedicated to grassroots organization Palestinian Youth Movement or PYM. The content team was broken down into four smaller teams—profiles, editorial, reports and social media. The social media subteam was tasked with a KPI, or key performance indicator of five posts per day, focusing on Iran and Mamdani.
On the Impact section of BlackNest, the website celebrates “company impacts” to “track external influence.” In June, in a section called “profile impact tracking,” a blurb from a piece in The Nation was tagged as “High Impact,” with a subcategory button reading “self-deportation.”
The excerpt was from a May editorial by Abdelrahman ElGendy, an Egyptian writer who fled political imprisonment in Egypt. He wrote about deciding to flee the U.S. after seeing the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, knowing he, too, was on Canary Mission’s site as a target.
One of the categories of the Impacts page is simply called “ICE” and another is dedicated to English rap duo Bob Vylan, targeted by Canary and other Zionist voices for chanting “Death to the IDF” at a concert.
Last year, Palestine Legal, an advocacy group, accused the Trump administration of racism for relying on the website.
“Under Trump, ICE has now publicly admitted they are abducting pro-Palestinian student activists based on an anonymously-run blacklist site,” Palestine Legal said in a social media post.
“Both the mass deportation machine, and these horrific blacklists, clearly run on racism.”
J Street, a group that describes itself as pro-Israel and pro-peace, also decried the government’s use of the website.
“Canary Mission is feeding the Trump Administration’s agenda, weaponizing antisemitism to surveil and attempt to deport student activists,” it said. “This isn’t about protecting Jews — it’s about silencing dissent.”
Source: Drop Site, Al Jazeera, Haaretz
