Is the NSA outsourcing its domestic spying to Israel?

http://geektime.com/2013/06/09/is-the-nsa-outsourcing-its-domestic-spying-to-israel/

by yanivf • 13 years ago

73 25 13 years ago

geektime.com

AviSchneider• 13 years ago

They could be watching us read this right now!

moranit2• 13 years ago

this is not a very good news for our future

moranit2• 13 years ago

Israel is the best!

Ihmahr• 13 years ago

At oppression!

myth_drannon• 13 years ago

Narus is an Israeli company ? Headquarters in California but also offices in India. Half of the management is Indian the other half American. I would say if an NSA really outsources to Narus it would be to India not Israel.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Carry on citizen. You have nothing to worry about. Yes, the government is collecting all the possible data they can on you, but it's okay. You can trust them to never use it against you if you ever speak against or embarrass the government, or any other future governments.

ethanazir3• 13 years ago

All your government are belong to us. (HN gave me -7 for this statement. But some pts just come back.)

ikonst• 13 years ago

It is outsourcing domestic spying to an Israeli company (yes, a private enterprise) that produces "lawful interception" software (which it undoubtfuly sells to other customers too). Saying "Israel" is helping NSA spy on its citizens is akin to saying "the United States" gets people hooked on Farmville.

superuser2• 13 years ago

Or that "China" hacks American businesses.

Tangaroa2• 13 years ago

So you are taking the position that Unit 61398 of the 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department’s (GSD) 3rd Department has no relation to the state of China. Please elucidate.

http://intelreport.mandiant.com/

b0rsuk• 13 years ago

When they say "Israel", they actually mean "Jews". Exploit the prejudice without appearing antisemitic.

Vivtek3• 13 years ago

That's stupid. When they say "Israel", they mean "that nominally democratic ally of ours who survives on our military aid and who is well-known for technical savvy and outsourcing to whom would neatly circumvent our inconvenient laws forbidding the wholesale surveillance of our citizens." Not "Jews". We have more Jews than they do anyway.

Tangaroa2• 13 years ago

The alleged spying project is led by a Scottish American and organized by guys named Randall and Paul Jacobson, using software from an Indian company owned by Boeing and an Israeli company headquartered in Massachussetts. Of all the different people involved in this, we are only supposed to care about the Jews. Singling out the Jews for hate is racism, especially given how minimal their alleged involvement is.

The evidence for this alleged act of Israel spying on the US is that an Israeli company developed software that was purchased and used by the government and phone companies. That's all. We don't even know what the software is named or what it does other than a vague description of it logging and copying network data; it could be a frontend to wireshark or netcat. Consider, how does Hacker News react when any other startup develops useful cutting-edge network management software and gets a big government deal? Now see how we react when an Israeli company does the exact same thing? This is a hate-the-Jews thread.

nir4• 13 years ago

US military aid is about %1 of Israel's budget, so factually it can't be said to "survive" on it (BTW it's required to spend nearly all of it buying from US suppliers).

As for "nominally democratic" I'll ignore it in order to not bring the already devastated level of discourse here yet lower.

But, back the point, do you seriously believe the NSA will outsource its most sensitive operations to another country? HN is now moving from r/politics to r/conspiracy.

recuter• 13 years ago

I'm going to invoke Betteridge's law of headlines here.

"One theory that’s been gaining traction as of late, on how the NSA got around those pesky little things called laws, is that they outsourced the project to Israel."

So basically a random conspiracy theory clickbait. Also the reference to 8200 here really shows the author has no fogey idea.

In short, Israeli intelligence out of necessity doesn't focus on PRISM like data-mining approaches.

nir4• 13 years ago

Well said. Also, tip to US journos (and Israeli Business-Insider-wannabe bloggers): 8200 used to be a small and highly selective unit. These days it's the biggest unit of any kind in the IDF.

The fact an Israeli company has people who served there is meaningless, it reflects nothing on what the company does nor the quality of its people.

ethanazir3• 13 years ago

Conspiracy theory presumes a secret: not a fog of misinformation to counter the known and open facts.

ethanazir3• 13 years ago

The Mormons don't go on missions to Arab countries, so the Utah spy site is of limited use. But many Israelis on the other hand do speak Arabic; its a secondary language there; so they are naturally a place to outsource electronic surveillance of Arab speaking countries.

snotrockets• 13 years ago

Not so many: there are indeed ~1.4*10^6 arabic speakers in Israel, but most are Palestinian-Israeli, barred from getting any security clearence by the Israeli military.

contingencies• 13 years ago

Hate to repeat myself here, but they forgot to mention AMDOCS, another Israeli firm who run 'outsourced billing' for loads of major telecommunications companies globally. What do you need for billing? Metadata on everything.

bjourne• 13 years ago

Back in the day, many European countries had registers of known communist and socialist sympathizers. They where used to keep communists out of government and union jobs. Those in the registers had a harder time getting promoted, was fired for spurious reasons and so on. The other effect it had is that people became frightened to voice their support of communists lest they also be placed in the register and having their careers ruined.

It is not far-fetched to think that broad intelligence gathering will be used in the exact same way today. Communism may not be the big boogieman it once way, but there are still ideologies and causes that can get you branded as undesirable. For example, by being drug liberal.

I think it's naive to think that the information they are collecting will go unused. There aren't enough terrorist threats in there to act upon, so they will focus on the secondary threats which is people with the wrong opinions.

Is the NSA outsourcing its domestic spying to Israel?

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