The surveillance industry in America got its start in 1994 with passage of CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act). The law mandated that telecom companies configure their networks to supply the government with intercepts authorized by a court-issued warrant. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush enacted a secret executive order for massive, warrantless wiretapping. Only eight members of Congress and one FISA judge were privy to this information. Today, the FBI is also authorized to eavesdrop and a warrant is no longer needed to tap telecommunications of United States’ citizens.
It’s bad enough that the government can listen to you whenever they want. There is an even more troubling side to this Orwellian reality. Israeli companies are wiretapping America. Authorized by our government, they are doing the actual work of listening to and recording the phone, email, and internet communications of at least 100 nations, including America.
Mass surveillance business and competition grew exponentially after 9/11. Each company wanted to build bigger and better mass surveillance systems which were then sold to whomever would pay the price, “including some of the most repressive and authoritarian governments on the planet,” says journalist James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.
Bamford reveals that America’s largest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon, have outsourced the job of eavesdropping through their networks, which carry billions of American communications daily, in cooperation with the National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance program. The spy job for these major companies was outsourced “to two mysterious companies with very troubling foreign connections.”
AT&T uses a company called Narus to keep records of everything said on their systems. Narus was founded by an Israeli entrepreneur in Israel with ties to Unit 800 (the NSA of Israel). Verizon’s spy system also relies on an Israeli company named Verint. The founder of Verint is an FBI fugitive who remains so. Congress granted retroactive immunity to these companies (AT&T and Verizon) for allowing their systems to be used to spy on American citizens. Stated plainly, American consumers are subject to warrantless surveillance by Israeli-founded companies without Congressional oversight or public knowledge!
Bamford details how an “Israeli spin-off” of Verint is able to do “advanced voice-mining” that finds one person’s voice in a mountain of intercepted calls.
'With remote access to the internal and international voice and data communications of over one hundred countries around the world, including the United States, Verint’s headquarters in Tel Aviv has a capacity rivaled only by NSA’s, if not greater, especially when coupled with PerSay’s voice-mining capability.
'PerSay is an example of how close and interconnected these companies are with Israel’s intelligence community—a factor of great concern considering how much of their bugging equipment is now secretly hardwired into the American telecommunications system.'A former senior official in Shin Bet— Israel’s secret intelligence—is on PerSay’s board of directors. The advisory board for the company that backs PerSay includes a former chief of Israeli Mossad! Bamford says the “greatest potential beneficiaries of this marriage between the Israeli eavesdroppers and America’s increasingly centralized telecom grid are Israel’s intelligence agencies.”
In 2004, a former intelligence official told LA Times reporters,
'There is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli [intelligence] activities directed against the United States. Anybody who worked in counterintelligence in a professional capacity will tell you the Israelis are among the most aggressive and active countries targeting the United States. They undertake a wide range of technical operations and human operations. The denials are laughable.'Last year, a judge dismissed charges against two top AIPAC lobbyists accused of leaking classified information to Israel. US Justice Dept. prosecutors said the case should be dropped because it would require exposing sensitive military intelligence—obvious evidence the lobbyists had been spying!
Most Americans might not even be startled to learn about Israeli espionage because they are so firmly convinced that Israel is our ally and has American interests at heart. This is not true. In their now famous paper, The Israel Lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt write bluntly that Israel
'does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.'
Israel : Part of Every Phone Call?
It is naïve to expect Narus and Verint to remain independent of control by the government of Israel. Which Americans might be most threatened by telephone, email, and internet spying from Israel? Answer: critics of Israel and Israel's PR representative, the Anti-Defamation League. In every way that matters, ADL is Israel. Israel/ADL is particularly troubled by widespread criticism of Israel and matters Jewish from both the intellectual left and the populist right. Their “conspiracy theories” have a way of always leading back to the Jews. ADL and Jewish-dominated media in America are very apprehensive of Tea Party and right-wing efforts to overthrow liberal Democrat power in Congress (See, “Jews Confirm Big Media is Jewish”). Victory for the right would, among other things, curb ADL's ability to pass more of its anti-Christian hate crime legislation.
Can these movements of the left or right, potentially threatening Zionist interests, create lasting—even revolutionary—change if Israel/ADL can listen to their every conversation? Of course not.
Already, ADL boasts of monitoring all Christian/conservative media to discover any hint of criticism of Israel or Jewish control. Are they also listening as you plan your next Tea Party rally, militia training exercise or protest of Israeli oppression in Gaza? No one can answer that outside the US Government, AT&T and Verizon, Israel – and probably ADL. One thing we know: There may be little to prevent them.
What can be done? Until there is widespread awareness of Israel's fundamental disloyalty to America and continuing spy operations against us, Americans can do little to protect our most intimate phone and internet communications. Full story
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