Sent to you by Sean McBride via Google Reader: Israeli Wiretappers, the NSA, and 9/11 via 911Blogger.com - Paying Attention to 9/11 Related Alternative News by Reprehensor on 1/4/09 (James Bamford has done another great deed for the public by revealing the extent of the NSA's wiretapping on U.S. soil, and how the NSA sub-contracts the vast majority of its work to Israeli high-tech firms bristling with "former" Israeli military intelligence agents, and in the case of Verint, a company with serious corruption issues. It was Bamford who popularized the existence of Operation Northwoods in his 2001 book, Body of Secrets. In The Shadow Factory, he sheds light in the secret rooms of Verizon and AT&T, and shows the NSA to be a very poor custodian of the nation's security.)
Bamford Brings the Goods On October 14, 2008, James Bamford talked about some of the shocking research in his new book on Democracy Now!, with Amy Goodman; Along with the mass surveillance being conducted on all U.S. users of AT&T and Verizon by Narus and Verint, (according to Bamford), two other Israeli-owned companies, Amdocs and NICE Systems, have their fingers in the wiretapping pie as well. Christopher Ketcham preceded Bamford in September, with with the article "Trojan Horse", that focuses on Verint, Amdocs, and CALEA (the legislation which brought all of these problems into existence); "Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government's domestic intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in Israel – having arisen to prominence from that country's cornering of the information technology market – and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers). Verint is considered the world leader in "electronic interception" and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world's largest billing service for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007, offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call traffic among US residents. The companies' operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime)... None of US law enforcement's problems with Amdocs and Verint could have come to pass without the changes mandated by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which, as noted, sought to lock spyware into telecom networks. CALEA, to cite the literature, requires that terrestrial carriers, cellular phone services and other telecom entities enable the government to intercept "all wire and oral communications carried by the carrier concurrently with their transmission." If Ketcham and Bamford are correct, (so far, no lawsuits), then the National "Security" Agency has thrown the "National Security" of the United States under the bus. read more Things you can do from here: - Subscribe to 911Blogger.com - Paying Attention to 9/11 Related Alternative News using Google Reader - Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all your favorite sites
