great article on Alternet today about the history of Israel spying in the US.
but first, some comments.
in 1993 i put an ad in the computer section of the SF phone book, which kind of made it look like i had an entire GE engineering lab in my apartment-full-of-tech.
this resulted in 2 very interesting job interviews - the second of which took place at 150 Montgomery Street in October 1994 - Pacific Bell corporate headquarters.
and a few blocks from the closet-full of NSA spy-tech referred to in this article @ Alternet.
during the first interview, my interviewees put me through the paces on some CG stuff, "draw this, draw that". for me it was fun; i later realized that they were trying to see how i responded to pressure.
towards the end of the interview, the older of the 2 interviewers pretended to get a phone call and stood in my foyer, which gave him a chance to look at all the books in my library at the time. the other interviewer was a young woman.
the older guy then came back in and we had the "tell me about yourself" part of the interview. he told me that he had spent his career fighting communism "from the Baltic to the Aegean", and said he noticed my book about the JFK assassination (written by district attorney James Garrison). i said, "you guys did it, didn't you ?"
he didn't exactly smile, and they left my apartment pretty quickly.
then invited me back for a second interview.
at the second interview, there were more references to government intelligence agencies, and a top to bottom tour of the network at Pac Bell corporate headquarters. it was an interview that most hard-core AT'ers would have flipped over. in 1994, Pac Bell HQ was all managers, IT equipment, and contractors - no employees.
part of that interview involved a live video teleconference with their facility in SoCal. which, i subsequently realized, gave them a chance to video-tape me for subsequent review.
in other words, they had a Skype-video-like set-up - in 1994.
the rest, as they say, is history. i have no doubt that i was interviewing with the crew that was involved with the larger operation unveiled in Mark Klein's subsequent lawsuit - also referred to in the article below.
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article, Israel's Spying Activities in the United States
"Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States
By Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet. Posted March 10, 2009.
Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S., yet public discussion about it is almost nil. "
"Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. 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 U.S.. 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 U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. "
"Israel's spying on the U.S., 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 [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret U.S. policies or decisions relating to Israel." In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the U.S. government."
"Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a U.S. 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."
"By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the U.S. 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. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated that telephonic surveillance operate through computers linked directly into the routers and hubs of telecom companies -- a spyware apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA effectively made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in telephonic life. 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."
but first, some comments.
in 1993 i put an ad in the computer section of the SF phone book, which kind of made it look like i had an entire GE engineering lab in my apartment-full-of-tech.
this resulted in 2 very interesting job interviews - the second of which took place at 150 Montgomery Street in October 1994 - Pacific Bell corporate headquarters.
and a few blocks from the closet-full of NSA spy-tech referred to in this article @ Alternet.
during the first interview, my interviewees put me through the paces on some CG stuff, "draw this, draw that". for me it was fun; i later realized that they were trying to see how i responded to pressure.
towards the end of the interview, the older of the 2 interviewers pretended to get a phone call and stood in my foyer, which gave him a chance to look at all the books in my library at the time. the other interviewer was a young woman.
the older guy then came back in and we had the "tell me about yourself" part of the interview. he told me that he had spent his career fighting communism "from the Baltic to the Aegean", and said he noticed my book about the JFK assassination (written by district attorney James Garrison). i said, "you guys did it, didn't you ?"
he didn't exactly smile, and they left my apartment pretty quickly.
then invited me back for a second interview.
at the second interview, there were more references to government intelligence agencies, and a top to bottom tour of the network at Pac Bell corporate headquarters. it was an interview that most hard-core AT'ers would have flipped over. in 1994, Pac Bell HQ was all managers, IT equipment, and contractors - no employees.
part of that interview involved a live video teleconference with their facility in SoCal. which, i subsequently realized, gave them a chance to video-tape me for subsequent review.
in other words, they had a Skype-video-like set-up - in 1994.
the rest, as they say, is history. i have no doubt that i was interviewing with the crew that was involved with the larger operation unveiled in Mark Klein's subsequent lawsuit - also referred to in the article below.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
article, Israel's Spying Activities in the United States
"Breaking the Taboo on Israel's Spying Efforts on the United States
By Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet. Posted March 10, 2009.
Israel runs one of the most aggressive and damaging espionage networks targeting the U.S., yet public discussion about it is almost nil. "
"Scratch a counterintelligence officer in the U.S. 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 U.S.. 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 U.S.-Israel relationship coupled with the burden of the Israel lobby, which punishes legislators who dare to criticize the Jewish state. "
"Israel's spying on the U.S., 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 [is] the third highest priority of Israeli Intelligence after information on its Arab neighbors and information on secret U.S. policies or decisions relating to Israel." In 1979, the Central Intelligence Agency produced a scathing survey of Israeli intelligence activities that targeted the U.S. government."
"Other deep cover operations included the penetration of a U.S. 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."
"By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the U.S. 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. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated that telephonic surveillance operate through computers linked directly into the routers and hubs of telecom companies -- a spyware apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA effectively made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in telephonic life. 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."
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