Steve Sailer: Anybody ever notice that Israel’s economy seems to have a comparative advantage at snooping on other country’s phone calls?
* Decrypting data stored locally on a telephone flash memory drive and intercepting phone calls are different technologies without much overlap.
Israel does have a comparative advantage in a few areas, especially drones. The Uzi submachine gun was also a big hit and dominated the category for decades.
* I hope you are right and it was Apple. Otherwise it means that a country of 300 million with the largest defense, intelligence and police budgets in the world, with the best universities in the world, had to ask help from a country of 8 million? That seems unlikely, but worse, it seems pathetic.
* The fact that we supply Israel with all of our raw data collected on Americans seems to be slowly disappearing from search results. The rest of what Snowden laid out is still acceptable for discussion but not that little tidbit.
* It may be because they are not bound by US constitution and hence can work freely on US citizen communications. Similar to how NSA can be more adventurous with foreign communications compared to those of US citizens. So there may be a beneficial symbiosis to achieve global coverage. I know something like that exists with MI-6 of U.K. (i.e. MI-6 has freer access to US persons and NSA has with UK persons, but they share what they find)
https://www.nsa.gov/ “The NSA/CSS core missions are to protect U.S. national security systems and to produce foreign signals intelligence information.”
https://www.sis.gov.uk/ “We work overseas to help make the uk a safer and more prosperous place”
* Drudge reports that Hamas has hacked Israeli drones for years and used the eye in the sky for among other things, targeting of rockets. So Israeli technical prowess is a bit over-done and over-hyped. What does make Israel different is that they do a good job of commercializing the ideas that smart tech people attacking the enemy come up with in conjunction with the military and tech industry. As various writers covering American intelligence noted, that simply does not happen very much in the US intelligence community, where such efforts are more one-off types rather than rapidly commercialized. Of course the US is a much bigger country than edge-of-the-seat Israel, which has a thin margin of survival.
I tend to think that the FBI is *VERY* interested in the contents of the cell phone, particularly text messages and instagram images and what have you. Why?
TATP.
ISIS has been very successful in the European bombing attacks, and that involved TATP, made from acetone and hydrogen pyroxide. It is not nitrogen based so it is hard to detect, and does tend to explode in “work accidents” hence its jihadi name of “Mother of Satan.” None of the Belgium/Paris bombers had the know-how to cook it up with blowing themselves up. TATP is essentially a crystallized gas — it “explodes” by instantly converting to gas form i.e. 500% of former volume, hence the pressure wave. It is assumed that ISIS had an expert who helped both sets of jihadis cook up and deliver their TATP, without blowing themselves up in cooking it up or in transit.
My guess is that the FBI strongly suspects that the SB people had someone who helped them cook up TATP, for some reason did not deliver it — hence the unexplained two hour disappearance where apparently the couple drove around vainly seeking IMHO a meet-up with the bomb expert. This is someone the FBI **strongly** wants to find hence the court case. Most likely some White Hat hacker found a vulnerability and assisted the FBI for various reasons.
Note that Apple is a major backer of both Obama and Hillary! and you’d expect the Big Foot of Attorney General Lynch to come crashing down on anything impacting the beloved Apple; that this did not happen suggests a real strong possibility that the FBI for once was semi-straight up; after a key ISIS bomb supplier and no one wanted to get the blame if some other attack led to a horrific bomb aftermath. CYA being strong in DC.
And indeed I’d suggest that the key to the whole thing is Lynch NOT deep sixing the FBI request which since Apple is so tied into Obama-land and Hillary-land is weird in and of itself.
