Spying on Americans farmed out to two Israeli companies

[Nordic]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI_k9Xt00YE&e

James Bamford, author and renowned expert on the NSA, has a lot of surprising information for us regarding our dear Homeland's spying upon us -- the job is being outsources to foreign countries, including two with strong Israeli ties.

Much more at this link:

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/14/ ... actory_the

JAMES 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 these 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 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 is now a fugitive from the United States somewhere in Africa?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, you know, this is a company that the US government is getting all its tapped information from. It’s a company that Verizon uses as its tapping company, its eavesdropping company. And very little is known about these companies. Congress has never looked into any of this. I don’t know—I don’t think they even know that there is—that these companies exist. But 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 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. So—

AMY GOODMAN: And despite all of this—

JAMES BAMFORD: —this is a whole area—I’m sorry?

AMY GOODMAN: 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, the Democrats and Republicans joined together in granting retroactive immunity to these companies for spying on American citizens.

JAMES BAMFORD: Yes. It looked like they were going to have a fight earlier in February, when the temporary law ran out and came time to either pass a new law or keep the old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the way it used to be, with all the protections. And they did resist for a number of months. They resisted from February until August. But in August, the Congress, seeing the election is coming, most of them caved in and decided to just join in the administration’s bill. And as a result, you have this fairly open-ended bill that came out that gives a lot of permissions to the NSA to do a lot of this eavesdropping without much accountability. I mean, it basically neutered the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took a lot of powers away from them, and put the powers back at NSA. So the ultimate problem is when you have NSA as both—as judge, jury and executioner on the eavesdropping.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, we only have a few minutes, and I want to get to-–

JAMES BAMFORD: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: —Bridgetown, Missouri, the AT&T hub there. What is the NSA’s role in spying there?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, Bridgetown, New Jersey—I’m sorry, Bridgetown, Missouri is one of the centers for AT&T, because it’s the—it’s sort of central in the country, and they could control much of the network of AT&T from there. And it was there that AT&T actually developed a system by which they could get into fiber-optic communications. And just like they built this secret—the NSA built this secret room in San Francisco, and Mark Klein said that he had heard that they had built these secret rooms in other places around the country, there was also a secret room built in Bridgetown. And the worrisome part of that is Bridgeton controls the whole network.

So you have the problem of these secret rooms not just being in San Francisco, they’re throughout the network, and they’re in other parts of the country. And the American public really has no idea what’s going on, in terms of who has access to their communications, what’s being done with it. And is there somebody sitting there—as David Murfee Faulk talked about, in the NSA listening post in Georgia, are there people just sitting there listening to people’s private conversations and laughing about them?

AMY GOODMAN: And the building in—

JAMES BAMFORD: One final thing—

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, go ahead, Jim.

JAMES BAMFORD: Yeah, I was just going to mention that it isn’t just the picking up of these conversations and listening to them and laughing about them. These conversations are transcribed. They’re—and then they’re recorded, and they’re kept forever. There’s a big building in Texas that’s being built in San Antonio that’s going to be used to house a lot of these conversations. NSA is running out of space at Fort Meade, their headquarters, so they had to expand, and they’re building this very big building. It’s reportedly going to be about the size of the Alamodome down there, to store all these—this huge amount of data communications. And when you think how much information two gigabytes could be put on a small thumb drive, you can imagine how much of information could be stored in a data warehouse the size of—almost the size of the Alamodome.

AMY GOODMAN: We only have a minute, less than a minute, but—

JAMES BAMFORD: Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: —the building in Miami where all communications from Latin America are stored and then a single switch for communications, much of Africa’s communications? And finally, where they can’t get cooperation of companies, a specially built submarine designed to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor to tap foreign cables?

JAMES BAMFORD: A lot of communications are consolidated. A lot of the international communications in South America all pass through one obscure building in Miami. And according to the landing rights that the company had to sign, which I read, they basically have to turn over everything that they get to the NSA if the NSA asks for it. So, you have a problem here today. I mean, the overall big problem is that there is a tremendous amount of eavesdropping going on. It’s all being stored, it’s all being analyzed, either electronically or by a human. And the public really doesn’t have much of—knowledge of all this that’s going on right now.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, I want to thank you very much for being with us, investigative journalist, author of three books, his latest on the National Security Agency out today, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.

[BenDhyan]

Revealed: leak uncovers global abuse of cyber-surveillance weapon

Spyware sold to authoritarian regimes used to target activists, politicians and journalists, data suggests

Human rights activists, journalists and lawyers across the world have been targeted by authoritarian governments using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak.

The investigation by the Guardian and 16 other media organisations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists.

Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones.

The leak contains a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, it is believed, have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016.

Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit media organisation, and Amnesty International initially had access to the leaked list and shared access with media partners as part of the Pegasus project, a reporting consortium.

The presence of a phone number in the data does not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack. However, the consortium believes the data is indicative of the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts.

Forensics analysis of a small number of phones whose numbers appeared on the leaked list also showed more than half had traces of the Pegasus spyware.

The Guardian and its media partners will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days. They include hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers.

The list also contains the numbers of close family members of one country’s ruler, suggesting the ruler may have instructed their intelligence agencies to explore the possibility of monitoring their own relatives.

The disclosures begin on Sunday, with the revelation that the numbers of more than 180 journalists are listed in the data, including reporters, editors and executives at the Financial Times, CNN, the New York Times, France 24, the Economist, Associated Press and Reuters.

The phone number of a freelance Mexican reporter, Cecilio Pineda Birto, was found in the list, apparently of interest to a Mexican client in the weeks leading up to his murder, when his killers were able to locate him at a carwash. His phone has never been found so no forensic analysis has been possible to establish whether it was infected.

NSO said that even if Pineda’s phone had been targeted, it did not mean data collected from his phone contributed in any way to his death, stressing governments could have discovered his location by other means. He was among at least 25 Mexican journalists apparently selected as candidates for surveillance over a two-year period.

Without forensic examination of mobile devices, it is impossible to say whether phones were subjected to an attempted or successful hack using Pegasus.

NSO has always maintained it “does not operate the systems that it sells to vetted government customers, and does not have access to the data of its customers’ targets”.

In statements issued through its lawyers, NSO denied “false claims” made about the activities of its clients, but said it would “continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action”. It said the list could not be a list of numbers “targeted by governments using Pegasus”, and described the 50,000 figure as “exaggerated”.

The company sells only to military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in 40 unnamed countries, and says it rigorously vets its customers’ human rights records before allowing them to use its spy tools.

The Israeli minister of defence closely regulates NSO, granting individual export licences before its surveillance technology can be sold to a new country.

Last month, NSO released a transparency report in which it claimed to have an industry-leading approach to human rights and published excerpts from contracts with customers stipulating they must only use its products for criminal and national security investigations.

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There is nothing to suggest NSO’s customers did not also use Pegasus in terrorism and crime investigations, and the consortium also found numbers in the data belonging to suspected criminals.

However, the broad array of numbers in the list belonging to people who seemingly have no connection to criminality suggests some NSO clients are breaching their contracts with the company, spying on pro-democracy activists and journalists investigating corruption, as well as political opponents and government critics.

That thesis is supported by forensic analysis on the phones of a small sample of journalists, human rights activists and lawyers whose numbers appeared on the leaked list. The research, conducted by Amnesty’s Security Lab, a technical partner on the Pegasus project, found traces of Pegasus activity on 37 out of the 67 phones examined.

Cont...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-group-pegasus

[BenDhyan]

While the NSA tap all telecoms, to have access to domestic telecom conversations requires stringent oversight that includes that there be some foreign government threat involved.. I suspect that Snowden is correct in that this set up allows TPTB to get around the constitutional rights of citizens to privacy, including up to the President . It is an evolutionary step beyond that discussed in the OP..

Snowden grills WaPo for ‘embarrassingly weak’ reaction to NSO spyware scandal, says it’s untrue Pegasus can’t target US phones
21 Jul, 2021

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has berated the Washington Post for not taking a more forceful stance on the Pegasus spyware scandal, and said it was untrue to claim the now-infamous malware can’t infect US phones.

The former US intelligence contractor expressed dismay over a WaPo editorial in response to reports that NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm, sold its Pegasus spyware to government clients who then used the powerful hacking tool to spy on journalists, NGOs workers and even heads of state. The explosive allegations, based on a leaked list of purported Pegasus targets and subsequent forensic analyses, have personal significance for the Post’s staff: A phone belonging to the fiancee of Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist at the paper, was reportedly hacked by Saudi authorities using Pegasus. Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018. His killing was carried out by Saudi agents, purportedly on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The Washington Post noted Riyadh was still granted access to Pegasus even after Khashoggi’s grisly assassination, despite NSO’s insistence that its clients undergo a thorough vetting process.

The paper’s editorial board called for greater assurances that Pegasus and similar spyware is used responsibly, adding that countries with histories of human-rights abuses should be prohibited from utilizing such tools. For Snowden, these demands sounded like toothless recommendations.

“WaPo’s editorial solution to the NSO scandal is so embarrassingly weak that it is itself a scandal. These companies (and their hosts) claim ‘transparency, accountability, and licensing requirements’ are already in place! You ask for less than nothing,” he tweeted, linking to the op-ed.

Cont...

https://www.rt.com/news/529793-snowden-wapo-nso-pegasus-spying/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS

[Harvey]

Lowkey is joined by Whitney Webb to examine the IDF’s military intelligence Unit 8200, which gave birth to the NSO group responsible for Pegasus Spyware, and how Israel’s national security state is merging with that of the United States to target free speech and dissent.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/lowkey-is ... 00/278004/



At 38 minutes Webb says that Microsoft's Cloud system was "essentially developed by (unit) 8200 graduates."