My guess would be that Bibi would be among the 10 hardest targets on earth, along with Obama, the old spy Putin, the president of France (a country that hates being spied upon by the Anglo-Saxon powers), and maybe a few network billionaires like Carlos Slim and Michael Bloomberg.
Bibi would be in the first tier above even Merkel and Erdogan. We apparently know that the U.S. tapped Angela Merkel’s phone and that Turkish boss Erdogan’s phone conversation with his son about how much crooked money they have secreted in their house was wiretapped by the Gulen cult.
It could be that I’m wrong about Bibi being a hard target. Maybe Bibi is too impatient to follow the protocols his counterintelligence service has worked out for him. But you at least have to imagine that Bibi has first rate counterintelligence advice.
On the other hand, spying on U.S. Congresspeople doesn’t sound all that technically impossible. A lot of spying involves exploiting carelessness, and Congresspeople, generally, don’t seem like the kind of people who would be bulletproof about dealing with their communications technology.
Comments:
* I have read that Israel has more spies in the USA than any other nation including Russia and China.
In the book By Way Of Deception a former Mossad agent reveals that he has been taught that America is Israel’s friend but Israel is not America’s friend. I only read the book I didn’t write it.
I do find myself wondering why the US people keep on voting for representatives in Washington who keep sending billions of dollars to Israel and who donate “scrap” F16s and suchlike while Americans increasingly are sleeping in their cars, going without dental care and have to service ballooning debts. Any answers?
* I think you’re on the right track. I believe it’s admitted fact every call into or out of the US is tapped, or at least legal to be tapped. A distinction w/o a difference, if there ever was one.
So, if Bibi wants a secure connection to a party here in the US, he’ll have to employ his own encryption on top of whatever “in the clear” phone call he was making. To accomplish that you’re talking about sending a specialized device (or software, Spook-Skype is an obvious and conspicuously absent product in the marketplace) in advance to every counter party you may wish to talk to.
Good luck with either of those for dealing with Congress. Producing 535 headsets plus another several dozen for various members of the executive branch is a technically trivial undertaking, but it’s laughable to consider any of the brainiacs in Congress or DoD that freely admit (nay, brag about) having to rely on staff to manage the fax machine on their behalf, or using AOL email accounts (ahem) for official state business being able to manage plugging in and using the secure headset whenever they need to take or place a call to Israel. Or each other. Heh — think about that one.
* It’s as well possible that a discontent group within the Israeli Secret Service spies on Bibi and leaks his talks to American institutions. They would know how to do it. And the Secret Service is pragmatical – they mostly don’t like Greater Israel fanatics nor uber-cocky politicians.
* Steve – You observe correctly that a telephone network is only as secure as its weakest link. Even if Bibi has top level phone security in place to link him with Tel Aviv and his top associates his other staff, who were calling congressmen and media, would be using open lines and presumably communicating back to him in like fashion. Once you’re into the system, you’re in. The NSA would have been monitoring the staffers but would also wind up recording the congressmen.
There is no evidence that they were targeting the congressmen but they might have expected that the Israeli Embassy was into all levels of the USGOV. It would be very interesting to know who the congressmen were and what they said but we will probably never learn that. Likewise the Jewish organizations who were acting on behalf of the Israeli government.
