burythehatchet (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 12:53 PM
Original message
Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/130891 Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the US government and they'll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.
This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the US. The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory – the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.
Israel's spying on the US, however, is a matter of public record, and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence. When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage,” Israel and its intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel maintains “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.” A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that “the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret US policies or decisions relating to Israel.” In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the US government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone “planted by the Israelis,” and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the US military attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: “Department must assume that all conversations my office are known to the Israelis.” The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of US missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a “standard operating procedure.”
According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devote “a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence.” These operations involved, among other machinations, “attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States.” The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using “deep cover enterprises,” which the report described as “firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective.” At the time, the CIA singled out government-subsidized companies such as El Al airlines and Zim, the Israeli shipping firm, as deep cover enterprises. Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a US company that provided weapons-grade uranium to the Department of Defense during the 1960s; Israeli agents eventually spirited home an estimated 200 pounds of uranium as the bulwark in Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. Moles have burrowed on Israel’s behalf throughout the US intelligence services. Perhaps most infamous was the case of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American employed as a civilian analyst with the US Navy who purloined an estimated 800,000 code-word protected documents from inside the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and numerous other US agencies. While Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, counterintelligence investigators at the FBI suspected he was linked to a mole far higher in the food chain, ensconced somewhere in the DIA, but this suspected Israeli operative, nicknamed “Mr. X,” was never found. Following the embarrassment of the Pollard affair – and its devastating effects on US national security, as testified by then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who allegedly stated that Pollard “should have been shot”) – the Israeli government vowed never again to pursue espionage against its ally and chief benefactor.
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shhh were only suppossed to say nice things about the zionist regime running isreal ORDagnabbit Mar-10-09 12:56 PM #1
Why do you have to tie Zionism to this? Bolo Boffin Mar-10-09 01:13 PM #2
because the zionist regime is not the same as the isreali people like the nazi regime was not the ORDagnabbit Mar-10-09 01:16 PM #3
Translation: Instead of dealing with the facts and coming up with a solution Bolo Boffin Mar-10-09 01:21 PM #4
um...I didnt ....you're propagandized response is trying to divert attention from the ruling regime ORDagnabbit Mar-10-09 01:52 PM #10
On the contrary, your kneejerk anti-Zionism is diverting attention from the real issues raised Bolo Boffin Mar-10-09 02:49 PM #13
Both sides of this issue are highly sensitized. Try not to hold one individual burythehatchet Mar-10-09 04:11 PM #17
Yes, chide me because I'm telling the anti-Zionist to concentrate on the article. Bolo Boffin Mar-10-09 05:35 PM #19
so you're pro zionism? ORDagnabbit Mar-10-09 09:41 PM #21
well known fact for years madrchsod Mar-10-09 01:30 PM #5
Can't we have an adult discussion about this? Bolo Boffin Mar-10-09 01:40 PM #6
dupe Bolo Boffin Mar-10-09 01:40 PM #7
Known this ever since Richard Perle was caught red-handedly spying for Israel back in 1970. Same Neo sinkingfeeling Mar-10-09 01:41 PM #8
They also spy on civilians who question their influence. grassfed Mar-10-09 01:50 PM #9
How long before Alternet gets labeled as anti-Semitic? n/t Idealism Mar-10-09 01:55 PM #11
Sure. So what? Is there a suggested action? FlyingSquirrel Mar-10-09 01:57 PM #12
I think the overall problem is the NSA's overarching surveillance in the first place Bolo Boffin Mar-10-09 03:01 PM #14
Yep, here isn the UK its B Whale Mar-10-09 03:43 PM #15
James Bamford sheds even more light on the extent of NSA wiretapping. seafan Mar-10-09 04:07 PM #16
All I can say is.. JohnyCanuck Mar-10-09 08:17 PM #20
This is truly the elephant in the room of America's National Security. annabanana Mar-10-09 04:19 PM #18
ORDagnabbit (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 12:56 PM
Response to Original message
1. shhh were only suppossed to say nice things about the zionist regime running isreal
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. H.L. Mencken 1917
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Bolo Boffin (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:13 PM
Response to Reply #1
2. Why do you have to tie Zionism to this?
Aren't the facts bad enough? Why do you think Zionism enters into it at all?
You might as well rant about the pro-American policies of the American government. Why would a discussion of this even be needed?
Darwin Day - February 12
Don't be stupid. Don't vote Republican.
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ORDagnabbit (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:16 PM
Response to Reply #2
3. because the zionist regime is not the same as the isreali people like the nazi regime was not the
same as the german people or the bushie regime not the same as the american people
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. H.L. Mencken 1917
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Bolo Boffin (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:21 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. Translation: Instead of dealing with the facts and coming up with a solution
you'll just use the facts to spread your own sanitized-for-the-public hate. OK, why didn't you just say so?
Darwin Day - February 12
Don't be stupid. Don't vote Republican.
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ORDagnabbit (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:52 PM
Response to Reply #4
10. um...I didnt ....you're propagandized response is trying to divert attention from the ruling regime
and its main focus
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. H.L. Mencken 1917
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Bolo Boffin (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 02:49 PM
Response to Reply #10
13. On the contrary, your kneejerk anti-Zionism is diverting attention from the real issues raised
by the article.
Darwin Day - February 12
Don't be stupid. Don't vote Republican.
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burythehatchet (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 04:11 PM
Response to Reply #13
17. Both sides of this issue are highly sensitized. Try not to hold one individual
responsible for suppressing the debate. The key to carrying it forward is to ratchet down the damnation and retributive emotion, so you can do your part as well.
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Bolo Boffin (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 05:35 PM
Response to Reply #17
19. Yes, chide me because I'm telling the anti-Zionist to concentrate on the article.
An article that I recommended. Yeah, I need to do my part.
Darwin Day - February 12
Don't be stupid. Don't vote Republican.
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ORDagnabbit (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 09:41 PM
Response to Reply #13
21. so you're pro zionism?
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. H.L. Mencken 1917
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madrchsod (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:30 PM
Response to Original message
5. well known fact for years
the myth that they are our friends ...well ask the survivors and the loved ones of the dead who served the uss liberty
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Bolo Boffin (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:40 PM
Response to Reply #5
6. Can't we have an adult discussion about this?
Edited on Tue Mar-10-09 01:40 PM by Bolo Boffin
The article was certainly adult in tone. I like the article. I recommended the article.
And yet like Israeli agents burrowing into the NSA's clandestine wiretap program, here come the USS Liberty-fixated, anti-Zionists to cloud up real issues with stupid shit.
Can we once have an adult discussion about this topic?
Darwin Day - February 12
Don't be stupid. Don't vote Republican.
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Bolo Boffin (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:40 PM
Response to Reply #5
7. dupe
Edited on Tue Mar-10-09 01:40 PM by Bolo Boffin
Darwin Day - February 12
Don't be stupid. Don't vote Republican.
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sinkingfeeling (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:41 PM
Response to Original message
8. Known this ever since Richard Perle was caught red-handedly spying for Israel back in 1970. Same Neo
con that became Asst. Secretary of Defense and architected the Iraq invasion.
THE TROUBLE WITH THE WORLD IS THAT THE STUPID ARE COCKSURE AND THE INTELLIGENT FULL OF DOUBT. - BERTRAND RUSSELL
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grassfed (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:50 PM
Response to Original message
9. They also spy on civilians who question their influence.
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Idealism (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:55 PM
Response to Original message
11. How long before Alternet gets labeled as anti-Semitic? n/t
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. -Dwight D. Eisenhower
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FlyingSquirrel (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 01:57 PM
Response to Original message
12. Sure. So what? Is there a suggested action?
Is it not likely that we are also spying on Israel? Would it not be in our best interest to trust, yet verify that our 'friend' is still our friend and see what they're up to? Especially since there are things our 'friend' clearly wants from us.
I am not understanding the point of this article - is it meant to whip up suspicion and distrust of Jews, or what?
Most of us here at DU recognize that Israel has done some pretty bad things (just as the Palestinians have) and that they have a lot of influence within our government and (probably) still depend on us for their very survival. But this article just seems to have no constructive purpose.
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Bolo Boffin (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 03:01 PM
Response to Reply #12
14. I think the overall problem is the NSA's overarching surveillance in the first place
We are doing to everyone else what Israel is doing to us. I think the article's point is to stop doing that.
Darwin Day - February 12
Don't be stupid. Don't vote Republican.
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B Whale (27 posts) Tue Mar-10-09 03:43 PM
Response to Original message
15. Yep, here isn the UK its
also a widely acknowledged fact. In fact a few years ago a warrant for the arrest of an ex-Israeli cabinet member was about to be executed by police at Heathrow when the plane mysteriously took of again. It was accepted that they'd been tipped off by Mossad.
Mossad also abducted the guy (i'm sorry i forget his name) who broke the story to the London Times about Israel's nuclear weapons, from a hotel in Rome. A direct violation of soveriegnty. (Mind you, an Italian judge also issued warrants on 4 Americans after the CIA did the same thing to suspected muslim terrorists.)
In fact we're probably all at it.
Heck, the Russians murdered Alexander Litvinyenko at a Sushi Bar in London with polonium 10 a year or two back
"Political Language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable" Orwell
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seafan (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 04:07 PM
Response to Original message
16. James Bamford sheds even more light on the extent of NSA wiretapping.
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.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." ----- Margaret Mead, US anthropologist, (1901 - 1978)
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JohnyCanuck (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 08:17 PM
Response to Reply #16
20. All I can say is..
It's no wonder Israel seems to have you by the balls, America.
Intel nominee Freeman drops out of running
RAW STORY
Retired diplomat Charles W. Freeman Jr. has put a halt to his nomination to chair the National Intelligence Council.
"Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair announced today that Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. has requested that his selection to be Chairman of the National Intelligence Council not proceed," read a statement from Blair's office. "Director Blair accepted Ambassador Freeman’s decision with regret."
"Critics have seized on retired ambassador Charles 'Chas' Freeman's ties to Saudi Arabia and views on human rights in China to argue against his appointment as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), but Freeman's defenders charge that their real aim is to impose an ideological litmus test on top government officials and ensure a continued policy of reflexive US support for Israel," reported the Asia Times.
"Freeman has been an outspoken critic both of the Bush administration's 'global war on terror' and of Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories," said the paper. "In a 2007 speech, he denounced US support for 'Israel's efforts to pacify its captive and increasingly ghettoized Arab populations seize ever more Arab land for its colonists,' and warned that Israel would soon face 'an unwelcome choice between a democratic society and a Jewish identity for their state.'"
Republicans on the Senate intelligence committee joined a chorus of pro-Israeli voices in Washington, D.C. seeking to torpedo the nomination out of concern with the former ambassador's views of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Intel_nominee_Freeman_dro... "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."
Columnist Sydney Schanberg,
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annabanana (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 04:19 PM
Response to Original message
18. This is truly the elephant in the room of America's National Security.
She who must be obeyed.
The love that dare not speak it's name.
Until we are allowed to have an open discussion, nationwide, of this and related matters, our Country will not be our own.
I pledge allegiance to the Constitution of the United States of America, and to the Republic which it describes.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x432025laststeamtrain (1000+ posts) Tue Mar-10-09 05:09 AM
Original message
Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States
Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States
By Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet
Posted on March 10, 2009, Printed on March 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/130891 /
Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the US government and they'll tell you that Israel is not a friend to the United States.
This is because Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the US. The fact of Israeli penetration into the country is not a subject oft-discussed in the media or in the circles of governance, due to the extreme sensitivity of the US-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. The void where the facts should sit is filled instead with the hallucinations of conspiracy theory – the kind in which, for example, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s top intelligence agency, engineer the 9/11 attacks, while 4,000 Israelis in the Twin Towers somehow all get word to escape before the planes hit. The effect, as disturbing as it is ironic, is that the less the truth is addressed, the more noxious the falsity that spreads.
Israel's spying on the US, however, is a matter of public record, and neither conspiracy nor theory is needed to present the evidence. When the FBI produces its annual report to Congress concerning “Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage,” Israel and its intelligence services often feature prominently as a threat second only to China. In 2005 the FBI noted, for example, that Israel maintains “an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States.” A key Israeli method, said the FBI report, is computer intrusion. In 1996, the Defense Intelligence Service, a branch of the Pentagon, issued a warning that “the collection of scientific intelligence in the United States the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret US policies or decisions relating to Israel.” In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the US government. Like any worthy spy service, Israeli intelligence early on employed wiretaps as an effective tool, according to the CIA report. In 1954, the US Ambassador in Tel Aviv discovered in his office a hidden microphone “planted by the Israelis,” and two years later telephone taps were found in the residence of the US military attaché. In a telegram to Washington, the ambassador at the time cabled a warning: “Department must assume that all conversations my office are known to the Israelis.” The former ambassador to Qatar, Andrew Killgore, who also served as a foreign officer in Jerusalem and Beirut, told me Israeli taps of US missions and embassies in the Middle East were part of a “standard operating procedure.”
According to the 1979 CIA report, the Israelis, while targeting political secrets, also devote “a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence.” These operations involved, among other machinations, “attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States.” The penetrations, according to the CIA report, were effected using “deep cover enterprises,” which the report described as “firms and organizations, some specifically created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective.” At the time, the CIA singled out government-subsidized companies such as El Al airlines and Zim, the Israeli shipping firm, as deep cover enterprises. Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a US company that provided weapons-grade uranium to the Department of Defense during the 1960s; Israeli agents eventually spirited home an estimated 200 pounds of uranium as the bulwark in Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. Moles have burrowed on Israel’s behalf throughout the US intelligence services. Perhaps most infamous was the case of Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American employed as a civilian analyst with the US Navy who purloined an estimated 800,000 code-word protected documents from inside the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and numerous other US agencies. While Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, counterintelligence investigators at the FBI suspected he was linked to a mole far higher in the food chain, ensconced somewhere in the DIA, but this suspected Israeli operative, nicknamed “Mr. X,” was never found. Following the embarrassment of the Pollard affair – and its devastating effects on US national security, as testified by then Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (who allegedly stated that Pollard “should have been shot”) – the Israeli government vowed never again to pursue espionage against its ally and chief benefactor.
Fast-forward a quarter century, and the vow has proven empty. In 2004, the authoritative Jane's Intelligence Group noted that Israel's intelligence organizations “have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since Israel was established.” The former deputy director of counterintelligence at FBI, Harry B. Brandon, last year told Congressional Quarterly magazine that “the Israelis are interested in commercial as much as military secrets. They have a muscular technology sector themselves.” According to CQ, “One effective espionage tool is forming joint partnerships with U.S. companies to supply software and other technology products to U.S. government agencies.”
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.”
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Why do we continue to pump money into Israel? mulsh Mar-10-09 10:25 AM #1
Israel should be bailing us out.... vinylsolution Mar-10-09 11:08 AM #2
mulsh (859 posts) Tue Mar-10-09 10:25 AM
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1. Why do we continue to pump money into Israel?
Can't their economy subsidize their defense efforts? Their tech companies seem to have cornered a couple of lucrative markets. Oh, and why are we making so easy for any other sovereign nation to control a vast area of our tech world?
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vinylsolution (395 posts) Tue Mar-10-09 11:08 AM
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2. Israel should be bailing us out....
... not the other way round.
After the billions it has received out of our pockets over the last 50 years, where is our payback?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x431935The poor, poor posters who can't speak out against Israel at DU, lest it be sent to the dungeon.
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