Viewpoint

Editor’s Note:

Just the article today…

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How Israel helps eavesdrop on US citizens- Ali Abunimah

After the 11 September 2001 attacks, the United States
government launched a massive program to spy on millions
of its own citizens. Through the top secret National
Security Agency (NSA), it has pursued “access to billions
of private hard-line, cell, and wireless telephone
conversations; text, e-mail and instant Internet messages;
Web-page histories, faxes, and computer hard drives.” In
his new book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA
from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America author James
Bamford casts light on this effort, including a detailed
account of how spying on American citizens has been
outsourced to several companies closely linked to Israel’s
intelligence services.

It is well-known that the two largest American telecom
companies AT&T and Verizon collaborated with the US
government to allow illegal eavesdropping on their
customers. The known uses to which information obtained
this way has been put include building the government’s
massive secret “watch lists,” and “no-fly lists” and even,
Bamford suggests, to deny Small Business Administration
loans to citizens or reject their children’s applications
to military colleges.

What is less well-known is that AT&T and Verizon handed
“the bugging of their entire networks — carrying billions
of American communications every day” to two companies
founded in Israel. Verint and Narus, as they are called,
are “superintrusive — conducting mass surveillance on
both international and domestic communications 24/7,” and
sifting traffic at “key Internet gateways” around the US.

Virtually all US voice and data communications and much
from the rest of the world can be remotely accessed by
these companies in Israel, which Bamford describes as “the
eavesdropping capital of the world.” Although there is no
way to prove cooperation, Bamford writes that “the
greatest potential beneficiaries of this marriage between
the Israeli eavesdroppers and America’s increasingly
centralized telecom grid are Israel’s intelligence
agencies.”

Israel’s spy agencies have long had a revolving-door
relationship with Verint and Narus and other Israeli
military-security firms. The relationship is particularly
close between the firms and Israel’s own version of the
NSA, called “Unit 8200.” After the 11 September attacks,
Israeli companies seeking a share of massively expanded US
intelligence budgets formed similarly incestuous
relationships with some in the American intelligence
establishment: Ken Minihan, a former director of the NSA,
served on Verint’s “security committee” and the former
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official responsible
for liaison with the telecom industry became head of the
Verint unit that sold eavesdropping equipment to the FBI
and NSA.

Bamford writes that “concern over the cozy relationship
between the [FBI] and Verint greatly increased following
disclosure of the Bush administration’s warrantless
eavesdropping operations. At the same time that the
tappers and the agents have grown uncomfortably close, the
previous checks and balances, such as the need for a FISA
warrant, have been eliminated.”

FISA — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978
– required the government to seek court warrants for
wiretaps where at least one target was in the US. In 2005,
it was revealed that the Bush administration had been
flagrantly violating this law. Last July, Congress passed
a bill legalizing this activity and giving retroactive
immunity to the telecom companies that had assisted.

Although there has never been any congressional oversight
of the Israeli intelligence-linked firms operating in the
heart of the US security establishment, American lawmakers
and officials are not always so relaxed when it comes to
foreign intrusion in the “national security” sphere. In
early 2006, there was a national uproar when Dubai Ports
World, a global company based in the United Arab Emirates
(UAE), attempted to buy the business that manages six
major American seaports.

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Democratic and Republican lawmakers united against the
Bush administration’s approval of the sale, claiming it
would harm national security. Senator Barack Obama echoed
many in both parties when he said at the time, “Over four
years after the worst terrorist attack in our history, not
only are we failing to inspect 95 percent of the cargo
that arrives at US ports, but now we’re allowing our port
security to be outsourced to foreign governments.”

A New York Times editorial justified such alarmism on
grounds that “money to finance the 9/11 attacks flowed
through” the UAE, although there was never an allegation
that the country’s government or Dubai Ports World were
involved in that. The newspaper also cited claims that
“Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist,
sent equipment to Libya and Iran through Dubai,” even
though it also acknowledged that “port managers have
little if anything to do with inspecting cargo or checking
manifests” (”Reaping What You Sow,” Editorial, 24 February
2006).

Unlike the UAE, however, Israel has a well-established
record of compromising American national security. The
most notorious case was that of convicted spy Jonathan
Pollard. Although the full details of his crimes are still
secret, he is thought to have passed critical information
about US intelligence-gathering methods to Israel, which
then traded those secrets to US adversaries. In 2005,
Larry Franklin, a Defense Department analyst, pleaded
guilty to spying for Israel. Most recently, Ben-Ami
Kadish, a retired US army engineer, was indicted in April
for allegedly passing classified documents about US
nuclear weapons to Israel from 1979 to 1985. Two former
officials of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, are
still awaiting trial on charges that they passed
classified information between Franklin and the Israeli
government.

Nor have particular Israeli firms established a record of
trustworthiness that would justify such complacency. Jacob
“Kobi” Alexander, the former Israeli intelligence officer
who founded Verint, fled the US to Israel in 2006 just
before he and other top executives of a subsidiary were
indicted for fraud that allegedly cost US taxpayers and
company shareholders $138 million. Alexander eventually
adopted a fake identity and hid in the southern African
country of Namibia where he is now fighting extradition.
In only once case did US officials block an Israeli
high-tech firm from taking over an American company for
security concerns.

Israeli companies do not assist the US only to spy on its
own citizens, of course. Another Israeli firm, Natural
Speech Communication (NSC), among whose directors is
former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit, makes software that
the US uses to electronically analyze and key-word search
recorded conversations in “Levantine Arabic,” the dialects
“spoken by Israeli Arabs, Jordanians, Lebanese and
Palestinians.” Mexico and Australia are among other
countries known to use Israeli technologies and firms to
eavesdrop on their citizens.

Not surprisingly, some of Bamford’s claims have been
criticized by pro-Israel activists for lacking evidence.
Writing about a subject shrouded in secrecy is inherently
difficult. But even what is solidly known ought to make
Americans demand that Israeli intelligence activities (not
less than their own government’s) be sharply curtailed. In
his 2001 book Body of Secrets, Bamford contended that
Israel’s attack on the US Navy signals ship USS Liberty
during the June 1967 war was deliberately intended to
prevent the Americans from learning about Israeli
massacres of Egyptian prisoners of war. Thirty-four
sailors were killed in the attack on the ship off the
Sinai coast. Despite decades of demands by USS Liberty
survivors, the US has never reopened the investigation.

So far Bamford’s latest revelations involving Israel have
had scarcely more impact. Former Democratic Senator Bob
Kerrey gave The Shadow Factory a mostly glowing review in
The Washington Post. But Kerrey, who was a member of the
9/11 Commission and is president of The New School
University in New York, anxiously discounts Bamford’s
contentions that the 11 September hijackers in any way
“were motivated by anger over an Israeli bombing of
Lebanese civilians in 1996″ and reassures us their only
motive was “radical Islamic fervor.” Kerrey concludes that
Bamford’s “apparent negativity toward Israel is a
significant distraction from the content of his book” (Bob
Kerrey, “Big Brother’s Big Failure,” 12 October 2008).

When any material that raises legitimate questions about
Israeli actions is automatically discounted by US elites,
and the motives of critics immediately cast under
suspicion, it is no wonder Israel gets away with so much.

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Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-
Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006)
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