Fwd: Israel and the NSA: Partners in Crime
sma...@comcast.net
From: "Kick.The.NWO" <kickt...@yahoo.com.au>
Sent: Monday, October 28, 2013 1:10:30 AM
Subject: Israel and the NSA: Partners in Crime
Israel and the NSA: Partners in Crime
Justin Raimondo
Oct 28th, 2013
It wasn’t the US government breaking into the private communications
of former French President Nicolas
Sarkozy, according to top secret documents unearthed by Edward
Snowden and published in Le Monde – it
was the Israelis.
A four-page internal précis regarding a visit to Washington by two
top French intelligence officials denies the NSA or any US
intelligence agency was behind the May 2012 attempted break-in –
which sought to implant a monitoring device inside the Elysee
Palace’s communications system – but instead fingers the Israelis,
albeit indirectly:
The visit by Barnard Barbier, head of the DGSE’s technical division,
and Patrick Pailloux, a top official with France’s National
Information Systems Security, was intended to elicit an explanation
for the break-in, which the French media blamed on the Americans.
The NSA’s inquiries to the British, Canadians, Australians, New
Zealanders, and other US allies all turned up negative. However, one
such close ally wasn’t asked.
As Glenn Greenwald and Jacques Follorou, citing the NSA document, put
it in their Le Monde piece: the NSA "’intentionally
did not ask either the Mossad or the ISNU (the technical
administration of the Israeli services) whether they were involved’
in this espionage operation against the head of the French
government."
An interesting omission, to say the least, one justified by the
author of the memo with some odd phraseology: "France is not an
approved target for joint discussion by Israel and the United
States." Meaning – exactly what? This is a job for Marcy Wheeler! But I’ll
hazard a guess: the US is well aware of Israeli spying on France and
wants nothing to do with it, and/or the author of the memo is simply
invoking some obscure protocol in order to justify going any
farther.
In any case, the Israeli connection to the NSA’s global spying
network – including its all-pervasive surveillance inside the US –
has been well-established by Greenwald’s previous reporting on the
subject: a September 11 article
detailing how the NSA shares raw intercepts from its data-dragnet
with Israeli intelligence, scooping up purloined emails and other
data – in effect giving the Mossad a "back door" into a treasure
trove of information on the private lives and activities of American
citizens.
The Guardian published
a five-page memorandum of understanding between Tel Aviv and
Washington, provided to Greenwald by Snowden: rife with references
to the legal and constitutional constraints "pertaining to the
protection of US persons," it goes on to state forthrightly that the
Israelis are permitted access to "raw Sigint" – unredacted and
unreviewed transcripts, Internet metadata, and the content of emails
and telephonic communications. While the Israelis supposedly
solemnly swear to not "deliberately" target any American citizen,
the agreement explicitly rules out a legal obligation on the part of
the Israelis to follow the rules:
"This agreement is not intended to create any legally
enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an
international agreement or a legally binding instrument according
to international law."
The Israelis are allowed to retain raw NSA data on American citizens
for up to a year, as long as they inform the NSA, but when it comes
to US government communications – those must be destroyed "upon
recognition." This interdict presumably covers the internal
communications of our law enforcement officers, but as both James
Bamford and Fox News’s Carl
Cameron have reported, Israeli penetration of this vital
sector is already an accomplished fact.
In his book, The
Shadow Factory, and a 2012 Wired piece,
Bamford details the NSA’s connections to "secretive contractors with
questionable histories and little oversight" which were used "to do
the actual bugging of the entire U.S. telecommunications network."
According to Bamford, who cites a former Verizon employee,
Verint/Comverse Technology – a company with direct ties to the
Israeli government and founded by former Israeli intelligence
officers – "taps the communication lines at Verizon." Over at
AT&T, "wiretapping rooms are powered
by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a
discovery made by AT&T
whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004." As Bamford puts it:
"What is especially troubling is that both companies have had
extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s
intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history
of spying on the US.
In short, much of the surveillance technology in use by the NSA
originated in Israel, and was developed by Israeli companies with
ties – direct subsidies, board memberships, etc. – to the Israeli
government, and specifically its intelligence services. This would
make is easy for the Israelis to construct a “back door” that would
give them access to the system. For one early example, the
eavesdropping software that allows US law enforcement to wiretap
reportedly has just such a "back door," as reported
by Fox’s Carl Cameron, one that has enabled Israeli Mafia and others
to shield themselves from surveillance. The problem became so bad
that, in October 2001 a group of law enforcement officials sent a
letter to then Attorney General John Ashcroft warning that the
system had been compromised. Cameron reports that the suspects in
the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks may have taken advantage of the
system’s vulnerabilities: "On a number of cases," says Cameron,
"suspects that they had sought to wiretap and survey immediately
changed their telecommunications processes. They started acting much
differently as soon as those supposedly secret wiretaps went into
place."
The agreement between the NSA and the Israelis, then, merely made
official what was already operationally true: the Israelis can
directly tap into the NSA’s data dragnet, and indeed have been doing
so for years. And it looks like Snowden wasn’t the only ex-employee
to reveal the NSA’s secrets: according to Bill Binney, a former NSA
official cited by Bamford,
a "mid level" NSA official "who was a very strong supporter of
Israel" turned over the NSA’s "advanced analytical and data mining
software" to the Israelis. The big difference, however, is that Snowden
didn’t hand it over to a foreign country – he handed it over
to us.
In the case of the attempt to penetrate the communications system of
the French President, what’s interesting is that Washington said
nothing in public about its strong suspicions the Israelis were
behind it, even as anti-American sentiment over the incident reached
a fever
pitch in Paris. US officials were and are willing to sit
silently while their country is excoriated, letting Uncle Sam take
the heat for our "allies" in Tel Aviv.
Not only that, but the unbalanced relationship between the US and
Israel when it comes to intelligence sharing is openly acknowledged
by NSA officials in top secret documents
unearthed by Snowden and reported by the Greenwald-Poitras-Guardian
team:
"On the one hand, the Israelis are extraordinarily good Sigint
partners for us, but on the other, they target us to learn our
positions on Middle East problems. A NIE [National Intelligence
Estimate] ranked them as the third most aggressive intelligence
service against the US.”
Both Bamford and Cameron have reported that it is "career suicide"
for anyone inside the US government to question the one-sided
"special relationship" between Israel and the US when it comes to
intelligence gathering. The reason for this is the political
power of the Israel lobby, and its ability to target and
destroy opposition within the national security bureaucracy. No
doubt their unlimited access to our communications has much to do
with this: I wonder how many dark secrets they have on our politicians?
Anyone who thinks the Israelis would hesitate to use this
information, handed over to them so eagerly by the supine US
authorities, is being willfully blind.
This is one aspect of the NSA scandal we are hearing very little
about, yet the Israel connection may be key to seeing the big
picture. So let’s step back, then, and look at the portrait of the
Panopticon as painted by the Snowden documents, and reported
on by Greenwald and others.
The US has constructed this global
system of interception, which monitors, records, and stores
virtually all electronic and telephonic communications. It’s an
elaborate apparatus, requiring tremendous resources and complex
systems that sort, file, and organize this vast databank so as to
make it readily available to an analyst
sitting in his cubicle at an NSA facility. Sitting in the center of
this vast spiderweb, with access to all its manifold threads and
extensions, is not only the US government, but, standing behind
them, the Israelis – who are spying on us, as well.
The Israel lobby and its amen corner continually
carp about how any attempt to negotiate with Iran – or any of their
other perceived enemies – is "appeasement." Yet the real appeasers
are those in our government who allow Israel to walk all over us, in
public and in private – even to the extent of handing them the keys
to our entire communications system. I wonder if any of the
politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, who are now making
noises about the NSA’s surveillance have the courage to buck
the Israel lobby and bring up this matter in a public forum. Where
is the congressional investigation into this serious breach of US
national security? Where are the hearings?
I’m not holding my breath on this one, and neither should you. But
let’s just put it out there, for the public record.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/10/27/israel-and-the-nsa-partners-in-crime/