Sunday, June 9, 2013
Israeli Involvement in NSA Spying
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Stephen Lendman
Activist Post
It doesn't surprise. On June 8, Haaretz headlined "What was the Israeli involvement in collecting US communications intel for NSA?" More on that below.
On April 3, 2012, James Bamford headlined "Shady Companies with Ties to Israel Wiretap for US for the NSA."
He said NSA chief General Keith Alexander's "having a busy year." He's "cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network."
In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.
It's for around "4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors."
Spies "R" Us defines US policy. NSA's "mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center is far more sweeping."
It's located at Camp Williams. It's a Utah National Guard training facility. Once fully operational, says Bamford, it'll "become, in effect, the NSA Cloud."
It'll receive data from NSA satellites, overseas listening posts, and nationwide multiple telecom facility monitoring rooms. What's planned is an unprecedented global spy network.
NSA operatives and hackers will harvest around 2.1 million gigabytes of data per hour. It'll do so on the world's most powerful computer.
It's called Titan Supercomputer. It can handle over 20,000 trillion calculations per second or 20 petaflops. One petaflop = one quadrillion instructions per second.
Supercomputer power will be used to collect and analyze foreign and domestic communications from all possible sources.
Two Israeli companies are involved. High-tech firms Verint and Narus have longstanding US/Israeli intelligence connections. For many years, Verint was a majority-owned Comverse Technology subsidiary.
Both companies have about half their employees in Israel. In August 2012, Verint acquired Comverse. It now operates independently.
It makes security software. It calls itself "a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions."
Narus calls itself a cybersecurity company. It's an independent Boeing subsidiary. It provides real-time network traffic and analytics software. It does so with enterprise class spyware capabilities.
In 1997, it was founded in Israel. It created NarusInsight. It's a supercomputer system. A previous article said AT&T uses it at their secret San Francisco facility. It lets NSA spy on its customers.
Verint's software also is used to do it. Bamford called it "especially troubling that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to (its) intelligence service."
A previous article discussed Israeli spying on America. The CIA calls Israel America's main regional spy threat. An Israeli-based CIA operative once found food in his refrigerator rearranged. Read more>>
