NSA Shares Intel On Americans With Israel 328
An anonymous reader writes "The U.K.'s Guardian newspaper is reporting that the NSA shares the raw intel collected on Americans with Israel. From the article: 'Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the U.S. government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis. ... The deal was reached in principle in March 2009, according to the undated memorandum, which lays out the ground rules for the intelligence sharing. The five-page memorandum, termed an agreement between the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies "pertaining to the protection of U.S. persons," repeatedly stresses the constitutional rights of Americans to privacy and the need for Israeli intelligence staff to respect these rights. But this is undermined by the disclosure that Israel is allowed to receive "raw Sigint" – signal intelligence. The memorandum says: "Raw Sigint includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content."'
Legal and NSA (Score:5, Informative)
are mutually exclusive
Re:How close is this to treason? (Score:5, Informative)
Jonathan Pollard got life in prison for passing classified data to Israel.
Re:In other words... (Score:3, Informative)
This is no different than our methods for torturing suspected terrorists by routing them to nations which are willing to do the dirty work for us. The NSA has determined they can tap all the calls and gather all the data but not search it without a warrant from the secret rubber stamp court. But all the data can (is?) passed to the Isreali's who can query it without even that oversight. Naturally, the NSA can ask them to do it a favor and query said data on their behalf without any warrant.
I thought we only did this information sharing (ie, cross-spying) with the UK. Israel makes a lot of sense given the close ties (most of US congress is under the thumb of one of the various lobbying groups and think-tanks that are influential in the Israeli security state as well - e.g.; AEI, AIPAC, Brookings institute, etc) [1].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_lobby_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]
Re:How close is this to treason? (Score:5, Informative)
Jonathan Pollard [wikipedia.org] says hello.
Re:Legal and NSA (Score:5, Informative)
Or bad things might happen. Suddenly a shared gmail account is made public, tax records come to light, etc. Everyone has something to hide.
Re:Once again we see who actually runs our country (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, I see what you mean: the old "communists and jews eating our babies" conspiracy again - aka the Blood libel. It's not an explanation, it's a rambling collection of bullshit that traces right back to the Tsarist Ochrana and even darker times before that.
Oh god no.... (Score:0, Informative)
The reason why Israel is supported is pretty obvious: it's a stable and well guarded military base in a globally sensitive region. It's also a testbed for new tactics to use against unruly populations (handy if the Occupy movement ever gets out of hand) and for new military hardware - no(t many) questions asked.
All in all the military/industrial complex is getting your money's worth out of supporting Israel.
I am so sad.
I don't know what to say anymore.
Rational discourse regarding Israel is not possible.
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Informative)
It kinda figures... but why pick Israel of all allies? Israel should have plenty of work to do themselves before bothering with NSA lists, and if the story breaks out like it just did, those theorizing that the USA is Israel's pet would have a field day. I'd have asked some Commonwealth country instead.
We're already working with all the other major English-speaking countries in the Five Eyes program. Also Germany.
Re:In other words... (Score:2, Informative)
You don't need to draw on any racist conspiracy theory ...
Yes, you do.
Here's another racist theory: It's not Jews or Christians or Muslims that are the problem, it's racists and bigots. Get rid of the latter, of every ethnicity, and many of our problems would go away.