Super Secrets! NSA, the secret AT&T spy room, 2 Israeli companies, and loss of American privacy
Sunday, June 9, 2013 7:59
Posted with Permission
NSA, the secret AT&T spy room, 2 Israeli companies,
and loss of American privacy
by Jon Rappoport
June 9, 2013
Boom. Explosive revelations. The NSA is using telecom giants to spy on anybody and everybody, in a program called PRISM.
But the information is not new.
Three books have been written about the super-secret NSA, and James Bamford has written them all .
In 2008, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed Bamford as his latest book, The Shadow Factory, was being released.
Bamford explained that, in the 1990s, everything changed for NSA.
Previously, they’d been able to intercept electronic communications by
using big dishes to capture what was coming down to Earth from telecom
satellites.
But with the shift to fiber-optic cables, NSA was shut out. So they devised new methods.
For example, they set up a secret spy room at an AT&T office
in San Francisco. NSA installed new equipment that enabled them to tap
into the fiber-optic cables and suck up all traffic.
How Bamford describes this, in 2008, tells you exactly where the PRISM program came from:
“NSA began making these agreements with AT&T and other
companies, and that in order to get access to the actual cables, they
had to build these secret rooms in these buildings.
“So what would happen would be the communications on the cables
would come into the building, and then the cable would go to this thing
called a splitter box, which was a box that had something that was
similar to a prism, a glass prism.
“And the prism was shaped like a prism, and the light signals
would come in, and they’d be split by the prism. And one copy of the
light signal would go off to where it was supposed to be going in the
telecom system, and the other half, this new cloned copy of the cables,
would actually go one floor below to NSA’s secret room.
“… And in the secret room was equipment by a private company
called Narus, the very small company hardly anybody has ever heard of
that created the hardware and the software to analyze these cables and
then pick out the targets NSA is looking for and then forward the
targeted communications onto NSA headquarters.”
In James Bamford’s 2008 interview, he mentions two Israeli
companies, Narus and Verint, that almost nobody knew about. They played a
key role in developing and selling the technology that allowed NSA to
deploy its PRISM spying program:
Bamford: “Yeah. There’s two major – or not major, they’re small
companies, but they service the two major telecom companies. This
company, Narus, which was founded in Israel and has large Israel
connections, does the – basically the tapping of the communications on
AT&T. And Verizon chose another company, ironically also founded in
Israel and largely controlled by and developed by people in Israel
called Verint.
“So these two companies specialize in what’s known as mass
surveillance. Their literature – I read this literature from Verint, for
example – is supposed to only go to intelligence agencies and so forth,
and it says, ‘We specialize in mass surveillance,’ and that’s what they
do.
“They put [this] mass surveillance equipment in these facilities.
So you have AT&T, for example, that, you know, considers it’s their
job to get messages from one person to another, not tapping into
messages, and you get the NSA that says, we want, you know, copies of
all this. So that’s where these [two Israeli] companies come in. These
companies act as the intermediary basically between the telecom
companies and the NSA.”
AMY GOODMAN: “Now, Jim Bamford, take this a step further, because
you say the founder and former CEO of one of these companies [Verint]
is now a fugitive from the United States somewhere in Africa?”
JAMES BAMFORD: “…the company that Verizon uses, Verint, the
founder of the company, the former head of the company, is now a
fugitive in – hiding out in Africa in the country of Namibia, because
he’s wanted on a number of felony warrants for fraud and other charges.
And then, two other top executives of the company, the general counsel
and another top official of the parent company, have also pled guilty to
these charges.
“So, you know, you’ve got companies – these [two] companies have
foreign connections with potential ties to foreign intelligence
agencies, and you have problems of credibility, problems of honesty and
all that. And these companies – through these two companies pass
probably 80 percent or more of all US communications at one point or
another.
“And it’s even – gets even worse in the fact that these companies
also supply their equipment all around the world to other countries, to
countries that don’t have a lot of respect for individual rights —
Vietnam, China, Libya, other countries like that. And so, these
countries use this equipment to filter out dissident communications and
people trying to protest the government. It gives them the ability to
eavesdrop on communications and monitor dissident email communications.
And as a result of that, people are put in jail, and so forth…”
AMY GOODMAN: “And despite all of this…these telecom companies
still have access to the most private communications of people all over
America and actually, it ends up, around the world. And at the beginning
of the summer [2008], the Democrats and Republicans joined together in
granting retroactive immunity to these companies for spying on American
citizens.”
The fugitive CEO of Verint, whom Bamford mentions, is Jacob
“Kobi” Alexander. In 2006, the US Dept. of Justice charged him with
conspiring to commit securities and wire and mail fraud. The SEC weighed
in and filed similar civil charges.
Alexander fled to Namibia, where he finally settled with the SEC
for $46 million. The DOJ criminal complaint, as far as I can tell, still
stands. Alexander continues to fight against extradition to the US.
He is no longer the CEO of Verint.
It’s obvious that these two Israeli companies, Narus and Verint,
working for NSA, have been able to divert duplicate mega-tons of data to
Israeli intelligence.
The recent media stories on this NSA PRISM spying system indicate
that NSA is tapping into the servers of huge tech companies; Google,
AOL, Microsoft, Skype, Apple, Yahoo. The methods of data theft may have
expanded, but the result and intent remain the same.
The government-corporate juggernaut moves ahead. Their
rationale—catching terrorists—is, in great part, a cover story to
obscure the fact that the State wants control over the lives of all
citizens, as it ratchets up the very conditions that provoke rebellion.
It’s a classic pincer movement.
As far as the current NSA PRISM spying is concerned, look for
limited hangouts. These are partial admissions and excuses, offered to
conceal greater crimes and stop investigations.
The giant tech companies already have their limited hangout in
place: “We didn’t know it was happening, we would never have allowed it
to happen, and we’ll be much more careful in the future.”
Obama is saying: Yes, let’s have dialogue on this matter…there’s a
fine line between national security needs and overweening intrusion
into citizens’ privacy.
The NSA is saying: We do spy, but we don’t read content of emails and phone calls. We just keep ‘records’ of the communications.
The lies lying liars tell. The NSA has multiple and redundant
methods of spying. If they have to cut back, for a while, on directly
accessing the servers of the giant tech firms, they can do it without
losing a step.
After all, as James Bamford revealed five years ago, NSA cuts
directly into fiber-optic cables and splits the data into two copies,
one of which it keeps for itself. They can access Google and Yahoo in
other ways.
Most easily, they can say to these willing tech partners, “Give us all your data.” And it will be done.
Firms like Google are already spying on their customers, putting
together extensive profiles to craft better targeted ads. Google knows
spying. Doing it for commercial purposes, or for “national security”
purposes? They don’t make those distinctions.
Jon Rappoport
The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and
EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in
the 29th District of California. Nominated
for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30
years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS
Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and
magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars
on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences
around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com
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