Reply #26: James Bamford sheds even more light on the extent of NSA wiretapping. [View All]

[seafan]

From Christopher Ketcham at AlterNet:


March 10, 2009

.....

Best-selling author James Bamford now adds another twist in this history of infiltration in a book published last October, “The Shadow Factory,” which forms the latest installment in his trilogy of investigations into the super-secret National Security Agency. Bamford is regarded among journalists and intelligence officers as the nation’s expert on the workings of the NSA, whose inner sanctums he first exposed to the public in 1982. (So precise is his reporting that NSA officers once threw him a book party, despite the fact that he continually reveals their secrets.) The agency has come a long way in the half-century since its founding in 1952. Armed with digital technology and handed vast new funding and an almost limitless mandate in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bamford writes, the NSA has today “become the largest, most costly, and most technologically sophisticated spy organization the world has ever known.” The NSA touches on every facet of US communications, its mega-computers secretly filtering “millions of phone calls and e-mails” every hour of operation. For those who have followed the revelations of the NSA’s “warrantless wiretapping” program in the New York Times in 2005 and the Wall Street Journal last year, what Bamford unveils in “The Shadow Factory” is only confirmation of the worst fears: “There is now the capacity,” he writes of the NSA’s tentacular reach into the private lives of Americans, “to make tyranny total.”

Much less has been reported about the high-tech Israeli wiretapping firms that service US telecommunications companies, primarily AT&T and Verizon, whose networks serve as the chief conduits for NSA surveillance. Even less is known about the links between those Israeli companies and the Israeli intelligence services. But what Bamford suggests in his book accords with the history of Israeli spying in the US: Through joint partnerships with US telecoms, Israel may be a shadow arm of surveillance among the tentacles of the NSA. In other words, when the NSA violates constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure to vacuum up the contents of your telephone conversations and e-mail traffic, the Israeli intelligence services may be gathering it up too – a kind of mirror tap that is effectively a two-government-in-one violation.

.....

By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the US in a big way. The key to the kingdom was the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was Congress’ solution for wiretapping in the digital age. ..... Without CALEA, the NSA in its spectacular surveillance exploits could not have succeeded.

AT&T and Verizon, which together manage as much as 90 percent of the nation’s communications traffic, contracted with Israeli firms in order to comply with CALEA. AT&T employed the services of Narus Inc., which was founded in Israel in 1997. It was Narus technology that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, a 22-year technician with the company, famously unveiled in a 2006 affidavit that described the operations in AT&T’s secret tapping room at its San Francisco facilities. (Klein’s affidavit formed the gravamen of a lawsuit against AT&T mounted by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, but the lawsuit died when Congress passed the telecom immunity bill last year.) According to Klein, the Narus supercomputer, the STA 6400, was “known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.” The Narus system, which was maintained by Narus technicans, also provided a real-time mirror image of all data streaming through AT&T routers, an image to be rerouted into the computers of the NSA.

According to Jim Bamford, who cites knowledgeable sources, Verizon’s eavesdropping program is run by a competing Israeli firm called Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, which was founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer in 1984. Incorporated in New York and Tel Aviv, Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government: 50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. The Verint technology deployed throughout Verizon’s network, known as STAR-GATE, boasts an array of Orwellian capabilities. “With STAR-GATE, service providers can access communications on virtually any type of network,” according to the company’s literature. “Designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers or disrupting service.” As with the Narus system, the point is to be able to tap into communications unobtrusively, in real time, all the time. A Verint spinoff firm, PerSay, takes the tap to the next stage, deploying “advanced voice mining,” which singles out “a target’s voice within a large volume of intercepted calls, regardless of the conversation content or method of communication.” Verint’s interception systems have gone global since the late 1990s, and sales in 2006 reached $374 million (a doubling of its revenues over 2003). More than 5,000 organizations – mostly intelligence services and police units – in at least 100 countries today use Verint technology.

What troubles Bamford is that executives and directors at companies like Narus and Verint formerly worked at or maintain close connections with the Israeli intelligence services, including Mossad; the internal security agency Shin Bet; and the Israeli version of the NSA, Unit 8200, an arm of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps. Unit 8200, which Bamford describes as “hypersecret,” is a key player in the eavesdropping industrial complex in Israel, its retired personnel dispersed throughout dozens of companies. According to Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily, “Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by veterans.” A former commander of Unit 8200, cited by Bamford, states that Verint technology was “directly influenced by 8200 technology….(Verint parent company) Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.” The implications for US national security, writes Bamford, are “unnerving.” “Virtually the entire American telecommunications system,” he avers, “is bugged by companies with possible ties to Israel’s eavesdropping agency.” Congress, he says, maintains no oversight of these companies’ operations, and even their contracts with US telecoms – contracts pivotal to NSA surveillance – are considered trade secrets and go undisclosed in company statements.

.....

US intelligence officers have not been quiet in their concerns about Verint (I reported on this matter in CounterPunch.org last September). “Phone calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators by Verint, which claims that it has to be ‘hands on’ with its equipment to maintain the system,” says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. The “hands on” factor is what bothers Giraldi, specifically because of the possibility of a “trojan” embedded in Verint wiretap software. A trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access to the secure system. Allegations of widespread trojan spying have rocked the Israeli business community in recent years. “Top Israeli blue chip companies,” reported the AP in 2005, “are suspected of using illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and enemies.” Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. “It is the largest cybercrime case in Israeli history,” Boaz Guttmann, a veteran cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, told me. “Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in Israel. It’s a culture of spying.”

In a wide-ranging four-part investigation into Israel-linked espionage that aired in December 2001, Carl Cameron, a correspondent at Fox News Channel, reported the distress among US intelligence officials warning about possible trojans cached in Verint technology. Sources told Cameron that “while various FBI inquiries into have been conducted over the years,” the inquiries had “been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks.” Cameron also cited a 1999 internal FCC document indicating that “several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system.” Much of this access was facilitated through “remote maintenance.”

The Fox News report reverberated throughout US law enforcement, particularly at the Drug Enforcement Agency, which makes extensive use of wiretaps for narcotics interdiction. Security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice Department, began examining the agency’s own relationship with Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA had transformed its wiretap infrastructure with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology called “T2S2” – “translation and transcription support services” – with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software. The company was also tasked with “support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options throughout the life of the contract,” according to the DEA’s “contracts and acquisitions” notice. In the wake of the Fox News investigation, however, the director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter, dated Dec. 18, 2001. Directly referencing Fox News, she worried that “Comverse remote maintenance” was “not addressed in the C&A process….It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on record….Bottom line we should have caught it.” It is not known what resulted from DEA’s review of the issue of remote maintenance and access by Comverse/Verint.

Bamford devotes a portion of his argument to the detailing of the operations of a third Israeli wiretap company, NICE Systems, which he describes as “a major eavesdropper in the U.S.” that “keeps its government and commercial client list very secret.” Formed in 1986 by seven veterans of Unit 8200, NICE software "captures voice, email, chat, screen activity, and essential call details,” while offering "audio compression technology that performs continuous recordings of up to thousands of analog and digital telephone lines and radio channels.” NICE Systems has on at least one occasion shown up on the radar of US counterintelligence. During 2000-2001, when agents at the FBI and the CIA began investigating allegations that Israeli nationals posing as "art students" were in fact conducting espionage on US soil, one of the Israeli "art students" was discovered to be an employee with NICE Systems. Among the targets of the art students were facilities and offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency nationwide. The same Israeli employee of NICE Systems, who was identified as a former operative in the Israeli intelligence services, was carrying a disk that contained a file labeled "DEA Groups." US counterintelligence officers concluded it was a highly suspicious nexus: An Israeli national and alleged spy was working for an Israeli wiretap company while carrying in his possession computer information regarding the Drug Enforcement Agency – at the same time this Israeli was conducting what the DEA described as "intelligence gathering" about DEA facilities.

.....

“The key to this whole thing is that Australian meeting,” Bamford told me in a recent interview. “They accused Verint of remote access and Verint said they won’t do it again – which implies they were doing it in the past. It’s a matter of a backdoor into the system, and those backdoors should not be allowed to exist. You can tell by the Australian example that it was certainly a concern of Australian lawmakers.”

Congress doesn’t seem to share the concern. “Part of the responsibility of Congress,” says Bamford, “is not just to oversee the intelligence community but to look into the companies with which the intelligence community contracts. They’re just very sloppy about this.” According to the Bush administration intelligence official who spoke with me, “Frustratingly, I did not get the sense that our government was stepping up to this and grasping the bull by the horns.” Another former high level US intelligence official told me, “The fact of the vulnerability of our telecom backbone is indisputable. How it came to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what – these are the incendiary questions.” There is also the fundamental fact that the wiretap technologies implemented by Verint, Narus and other Israeli companies are fully in place and no alternative is on the horizon. “There is a technical path dependence problem,” says the Bush administration official. “I have been told nobody else makes software like this for the big digital switches, so that is part of the problem. Other issues,” he adds, “compound the problem” – referring to the sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship.

And that, of course, is the elephant in the room. “Whether it’s a Democratic or Republican administration, you don’t bad-mouth Israel if you want to get ahead,” says former CIA counterterrorism officer Philip Giraldi. “Most of the people in the agency were very concerned about Israeli espionage and Israeli actions against U.S. interests. Everybody was aware of it. Everybody hated it. But they wouldn’t get promoted if they spoke out. Israel has a privileged position and that’s the way things are. It’s crazy. And everybody knows it’s crazy.”

Kind of sheds a whole new light on just how desperate Alberto Gonzales and Andy Card were to coerce a gravely ill John Ashcroft to sign off on these heretofore unknown warrantless wiretapping programs, doesn't it?


And the craven cowards in the US Congress happily danced along to Bush's tune.