Do you remember this past Friday’s news about 40 former soldiers and reservists from the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) signals intelligence (SIGINT) wing, known as “Unit 8200,” who signed a letter refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories because Israeli intelligence was/is engaging in blackmail and extortion of local Palestinians? (Note the list, farther down in this post, of five diaries on this story that have been published at Daily Kos over the past five days.) Well, guess who was supplying Unit 8200 with a large portion of their “unminimized,” blackmail and extortion intel; and, at U.S. taxpayers’ expense, no less?
According to James Bamford (as he reported it just a few months ago, directly from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden), America’s most prominent author, journalist and general chronicler when it comes to just about everything concerning our country’s surveillance state, in an OpEd in Wednesday’s NY Times, it was none other than the National Security Agency…
Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal
By JAMES BAMFORD
Op-Ed
NY Times
SEPT. 16, 2014
WASHINGTON — IN Moscow this summer, while reporting a story for Wired magazine, I had the rare opportunity to hang out for three days with Edward J. Snowden. It gave me a chance to get a deeper understanding of who he is and why, as a National Security Agency contractor, he took the momentous step of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.
Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another country, it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing with Israel, the N.S.A. evidently did not ensure that the data was modified in this way.
Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to Israel contained the communications — email as well as phone calls — of countless Arab- and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” he told me. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.”
It appears that Mr. Snowden’s fears were warranted. Last week, 43 veterans of Unit 8200 — many still serving in the reserves — accused the organization of startling abuses. In a letter to their commanders, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the head of the Israeli army, they charged that Israel used information collected against innocent Palestinians for “political persecution.” In testimonies and interviews given to the media, they specified that data were gathered on Palestinians’ sexual orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions and other private matters that could be used to coerce Palestinians into becoming collaborators or create divisions in their society…
Bamford continues on to note that Americans should be troubled "...that some or much of the information in question — intended not for national security purposes but simply to pursue political agendas — may have come directly from the N.S.A.’s domestic dragnet."
He reminds us that among Snowden's leaked NSA documents, according to a report from almost exactly a year ago by The Guardian, Unit 8200 has been receiving large quantities of unminimized Palestinian wiretaps from the NSA "since at least March 2009." (And, a substantial portion--if not most/all--of those wiretaps included a U.S.-based person on one end of the communication.)
In that year, the U.S. and Israel signed an intelligence-sharing Memorandum of Understanding ("MOU"). Bamford notes that the MOU "also indicates that the N.S.A. does not filter out American communications before delivery to Israel; indeed, the agency 'routinely sends' unminimized data."
There's plenty more to Bamford's op-ed than what I've reported here. So, I urge all readers to click upon the link, above, and check it out directly from the source.
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Here are links to the five diaries, referenced near the top of this post, which provide a much deeper dive on last Friday’s story about the IDF’s “Unit 8200”…
Israeli Intelligence Officers Refuse To Serve In The Occupied Territories, by Retroactive Genius, Daily Kos, 9/12/14
The Evening Blues–9-12-14, by Joe Shikspack, Daily Kos, 9/12/14
40 Israeli soldiers sign letter refusing to continue to use extortion and blackmail on Palestinians, by HoundDog, Daily Kos, 9/13/14
Meanwhile, Good I/P News? Israeli reservists refuse to serve, by Eric Nelson, Daily Kos, 9/13/14
Israeli 'Refuseniks' Attacked As 'Criminals' By Israeli Leadership, by Retroactive Genius, Daily Kos, 9/15/14
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