James Bamford writes April 4, 2012 for Wired.com:
Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA
At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.
What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.
In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the Israelis.”
Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.
“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said. “For access.”
But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later, four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”
Narus was formed in Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.
A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.” The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet Protocol] calls.”
Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800 employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel, primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature, lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications.”
In a rare and candid admission to Forbes, Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE, Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product, the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”
According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”
Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin, were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and penalties.
When asked about these contractors, the NSA declined to “verify the allegations made.”
But the NSA did “eagerly offer” that it “ensures deliberate and appropriate measures are taken to thoroughly investigate and resolve any legitimate complaints or allegations of misconduct or illegal activity” and “takes seriously its obligation to adhere to the U.S. Constitution and comply with the U.S. laws and regulations that govern our activities.”
The NSA also added that “we are proud of the work we do to protect the nation, and allegations implying that there is inappropriate monitoring of American communications are a disservice to the American public and to the NSA civilian and military personnel who are dedicated to serving their country.”
However, that statement elides the voluminous reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wired on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Also not reflected is that in the only anti-warrantless wiretapping lawsuit to survive the government’s use of the “state secrets” privilege to throw them out, a federal judge ruled that two American lawyers had been spied on illegally by the government and were entitled to compensation.
Jacob “Kobi” Alexander (born May 4, 1952) is an Israeli-American businessman. He is the founder and the former CEO of New York-based Comverse Technology. In 2006, he was charged with multiple counts of fraud and related offenses pertaining to irregularities in trading of Comverse stock; he subsequently fled to Namibia, a nation which has no extradition treaty with the US.
Alexander founded Comverse Technology (NASDAQ: CMVT) in 1982 and built it up from a 3-person Israeli startup to employing over 5,000, becoming the leading provider of software and systems for telecommunication companies worldwide…
Comverse Technology, Inc., which owns 100% of Comverse, also owns majority equity in several other companies, including Verint and Ulticom.
From The Electronic Intifada, Nov. 2, 2008:
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.
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.
From The Intercept, Nov. 20, 2014:
U.S. FIRMS ACCUSED OF ENABLING SURVEILLANCE IN DESPOTIC CENTRAL ASIAN REGIMES
U.S. and Israeli companies have been selling surveillance systems to Central Asian countries with records of political repression and human rights abuse, according to a new report by Privacy International. The U.K.-based watchdog charges that the American firms Verint and Netronome enable surveillance in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Verint’s Israeli arm provides those countries with monitoring centers “capable of mass interception of telephone, mobile, and IP networks,” the report says, as does the Israeli company NICE systems. Verint also enlisted California-based Netronome to give Uzbek agents the ability to intercept encrypted communications, Privacy International says, though it’s not clear whether the program was carried out successfully.
The report provides a broad picture of surveillance in a region that is marked by repression. Kazakhstan has been condemned for laws restricting free speech and assembly, flawed trials, and torture. As for Uzbekistan, Human Rights Watch bluntly characterizes the country’s human rights record as “atrocious.” Privacy International includes testimony from lawyers, journalists, and bloggers in Uzbekistan who had transcripts of private Skype calls used against them in trial, or had interactions with intelligence officers that made it clear the authorities had access to their private communications.
Privacy International relies on contract documents and confidential sources to finger the companies involved. Verint’s website claims that its monitoring centers are used in 75 countries (journalist James Bamford has reported that Verint tapped lines at Verizon for the NSA.) In a written statement, Netronome said it had “no information” on the Privacy International report, but that the company complies with the laws in the countries in which it operates and that “Netronome does not condone any violation of human rights or personal privacy.” Verint did not respond to a request for comment. NICE told the Washington Post that it would not “comment on its relationships with actual or possible customers.” Privacy International also singled out the German firm Trovicor for dealings with Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and noted that Russian companies likely also have a foothold in the region.
As The Intercept has reported, the sophistication of computer-monitoring software has increased just as its cost has decreased; commercial products made by companies like Hacking Team or FinFisher give smaller and mid-size police and intelligence services spying capabilities they would likely never develop themselves. There is evidence that Hacking Team is used in Uzbekistan, and FinFisher in Turkmenistan. Privacy International says that documents it reviewed show Trovicor marketing FinFisher products in Tajikistan.
Despite the spread of these products, there are only limited proscriptions on their sale, multiplying the threats faced by journalists, activists, and opposition political figures around the world.
From The Guardian:
NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans’ data with Israel
• Secret deal places no legal limits on use of data by Israelis
• Only official US government communications protected
• Agency insists it complies with rules governing privacyOne of the smart things Glenn Greenwald did in managing the drip-drip-drip of Edward Snowden revelations was to push revelations about Israel way back in his queue. I pointed out 3 months ago that reporters like Carl Cameron and James Bamford had long ago revealed some of how Israel spies on Americans, but that’s not what Americans, especially the American press, are interested in hearing. For example, Cameron’s multipart 2001 series on Israeli spying on Americans was deleted from Fox’s website almost immediately.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* Now, Steve, don’t be a conspiracy theorist. What possible bad thing could come of giving a foreign country complete access to every American’s personal communications, including whom they talk with and when and what they say? What possible downside could there be to this?
* Isn’t the subtext Syria? The Israel lobby is pushing for war with Syria. Now they have to do damage control about Israeli spying, thus complicating their lobbying for war.
* So, someone somewhere authorized it. Which is a basically a treason. Will there be investigation with names named and someone going to prison? Rhetorical question, of course.
* Anytime the goyim are talking among themselves, grave danger is afoot. We must know every word that every one of them is saying, and everything that every one of them is doing, without restriction or limit.
* Cass Sunstein —- a Jewish-American who held a senior regulatory position in the Obama administration, who has advocated coercive measures against and “cognitive infiltration” of “conspiracy theories,” and who is the husband of prominent US diplomat Samantha Powers – has made a similar argument.
In an article entitled “Could Bowling Leagues and the PTA Breed Nazis?,” he argues that civil society organizations such as “sports clubs, religious groups and parent-teacher associations” allowed Nazi and antisemitic ideology to quickly spread throughout Germany without attracting official scrutiny.
Sunstein goes on to warn that these activities and “dense social networks also increase people’s vulnerability to extremism. A great deal of work suggests that terrorism itself can arise not because people are isolated, poor or badly educated, but because they are part of tightly knit networks in which hateful ideas travel quickly.” Because any social network or civil society organization is a potential source of “extremism,” or “terrorism,” all such groups are potentially suspect.
Purportedly “liberal” publications such as Slate soon began touting this argument.
It is only a matter of time until the American ruling class begins to argue that any insufficiently-diverse gathering of three or more Whites (or White males) needs an official “minder” to prevent “hate” and “non-inclusion.”
* I went to Bloomberg to read the Sunstein article, and I noticed the authors of the other Bloomberg stories being flogged there: Matloff, Kopel, Abramowitz, Levine, Pesek, and Weil. Even the only one listed that could be construed as goyim, Megan McArdle, is married to a guy named Suderman!
* Weeks ago I reminded colleagues that the NSA has long evaded domestic spying restrictions by simply trading intercepts and analyses with foreign spy agencies, allowing politicians on both sides to deny spying on their citizens. They just don’t explain that they’ve outsourced such work.
* 1/ Greenwald (and Steve?) is showing his age.
People who have had their entire lives recorded, literally from birth, are not going to react much to ‘news’ that, well, they’re being spied on.
You’ll notice the lack of big demos against NSA spying since the initial non-revelations came out.
2/ So let’s say the Mossad knows all about Steve Sailer. Can Steve Sailer point to a single way this has affected his life?
* Steve, asking the wrong question. WHY Israel not the other four five eyes?
Aka Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK?
Answer: this is aimed at Arabic speaking jihadis inside the US, a way to spy but not spy on jihadi threats internally with a legal cut out. US lacks enough Arabic speakers of loyalty which Israel has.
Probably similar deal with India re Pakistanis here and Turkey re Iranians.
Typical modern world pc garbage. Outsource spying to third countries bc third worlders a massive threat.
* The Jerusalem Post ran an article worrying that the NSA’s spying on American citizens at the direction and for the benefit of Israel endangers the privacy rights of American Jews living in Israel. The author goes on to predict that the privacy rights of Jewish-Americans living in Israel will be scrupulously protected during surveillance operations that pass other Americans’ data to Israel. Jewish-Americans living abroad, in other words, will not be monitored and have their information shared to the same extent as that of goyim-Americans living abroad. The idea that the goyim might not want their personal lives perused by Israelis never seems to occur to the author.
* “US sees Israel, tight Mideast ally, as spy threat”
“Such meddling underscores what is widely known but rarely discussed outside intelligence circles: Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.
In addition to what the former U.S. officials described as intrusions in homes in the past decade, Israel has been implicated in U.S. criminal espionage cases and disciplinary proceedings against CIA officers and blamed in the presumed death of an important spy in Syria for the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush.
The CIA considers Israel its No. 1 counterintelligence threat in the agency’s Near East Division, the group that oversees spying across the Middle East, according to current and former officials. Counterintelligence is the art of protecting national secrets from spies. This means the CIA believes that U.S. national secrets are safer from other Middle Eastern governments than from Israel.”
* “America’s national interests suffered grievous damage when Snowdon gave the Russians these secrets.”
No, it is in the “national interest”, i.e. the interest of actual US citizens living in America, to NOT be spied upon by their own government. What the government and its various organs means by the term “national interest” is “in the interest of a permanent hostile elite”. Snowden did me a great service.
* Leaked documents show the existence of a program of handing over massive amounts of information from spying on our own citizens to a foreign intelligence service, alongside a set of promises we asked them to make about only use it in ways we approve of. It may be that you could find some child of eight years old somewhere who would believe that a foreign intelligence service would keep such promises, but you’d want to look for a really sheltered eight year old child.
This is a demonstration of a broad pattern, in which sigint agencies in particular and folks at the top of governments in general conspire with one another against the interests and well-being of the people they allegedly work for. If we reward this by continuing to support politicians too cowardly or beholden to the spies to push back on it, we will get more of it.
* EU countries regularly share data regarding their own citizens, who are members of Islamic radical organizations, with the US. So what? Is anyone here surprised or offended by that? The CIA kidnapped an Italian off the streets of Italy – do you not think the Italian secret services gave us any information about this “Italian”? The Brits regularly give us information about “British” citizens who are prone to set off bombs in our aircraft. Are you really shocked the British would give us information about their “citizens”? I am sure we do the same with Israel. And I am glad of it. Do you think a nation of 7 million is really interested in anything but the Arabs or muslims or that they would even have the power to process any other information? They are interested in Islamic terrorists who may be “American” citizens and I have no doubt we share this information — as it is shared with us. GOOD! The left wing Greenwald is an idiot.
Edward Snowden’s leaks about the spying capabilities of the US government and Silicon Valley have ignited speculation about what the emerging “surveillance society” portends. Still, we’ve long endured many varieties of spying and tracking, and some lessons can be learned from the past.
The news last week that the US government had collected Verizon’s “metadata” on who had called whom when and from where was widely seen as a stunning revelation. Timothy B. Lee of the Washington Post warned:
For example, having the calling records of every member of Congress would likely reveal which members kept mistresses, which could be used to blackmail members of Congress into supporting a future president’s agenda. Calling records could also provide valuable political intelligence, such as how frequently members of Congress were talking to various interest groups.
Likewise, Jane Mayer reported for The New Yorker:
…in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers.
And yet informed observers have assumed for most of this century that American telephone metadata may well already be available to a foreign military-intelligence complex via hypothesized “backdoors” coded into complex commercial software.
In December 2001, Fox News’ chief political correspondent Carl Cameron delivered a four-part series on Israel’s surveillance of American targets. For unexplained reasons, Fox disappeared Cameron’s series down the memory hole later that month, although copies of the episodes survive on the Internet.
“It apparently hasn’t hurt Israel that so many Washington and Wall Street insiders assume that Israel knows their secrets.”
Cameron drew attention to Israel’s strategic initiative to dominate communications software. For example, Amdocs is “the market leader in Telecommunication Billing Services.” This firm is publicly traded and registered in the tax haven of Guernsey.
It sounds dull, yet the CEO from 2002 to 2010 was Dov Baharav. In 2011, Israel’s formidable defense minister Ehud Barak appointed Baharav the new chairman of Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., the government-owned arsenal that builds fighter jets. In other words, the boring-sounding billing guy may be connected.
Cameron reported for Fox back in 2001:
Amdocs has contracts with the 25 biggest phone companies in America, and more worldwide. The White House and other secure government phone lines are protected, but it is virtually impossible to make a call on normal phones without generating an Amdocs record of it.…But sources tell Fox News that in 1999, the super secret National Security Agency, headquartered in northern Maryland, issued what’s called a Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmentalized Information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands – in Israel, in particular. Investigators don’t believe calls are being listened to, but the data about who is calling whom and when is plenty valuable in itself.
Cameron assured viewers:
US intelligence does not believe the Israeli government is involved in a misuse of information, and Amdocs insists that its data is secure.
But that was false for American tech companies. Why should we assume that Israeli-run firms would be less cooperative with their own nation’s intelligence community? Indeed, Israel’s booming high-tech sector appears to be intimately related to its spy works, just as Silicon Valley emerged out of America’s Cold War efforts.
In 2012, James Bamford reported in Wired:
According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008.…At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by A&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004.
What is especially troubling is that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of spying on the U.S.
Forbes reported in 2007 that many Israeli high-tech firms are founded by alumni of Unit 8200:
Unit 8200 is the technology intel unit of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Intelligence Corps. And one thing about it is clear to all—Israel’s high-tech world is “flooded” with Unit alumni, as entrepreneurs and company founders or junior and senior executives.
American whistle-blower William Binney, who resigned from the National Security Administration to protest its Orwellian trajectory, told Bamford:
In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level employee, apparently with close connections to the country….
But what goes around comes around:
But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic and diplomatic information back to them.
What could you do if you knew who was calling whom?
The Efficient-Market Hypothesis taught at every MBA program says that you can’t beat the market consistently without trading on inside information, which is illegal. Economic theory thus implies that Wall Street should have become a low-margin commodity business, much like being a wheat farmer in South Dakota. A glance at the Forbes 400, though, suggests this hasn’t quite happened yet.
