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."'
In other words... (Score:5, Interesting)
Another submission. (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is my submission:
NSA is sharing personal data of americans and corporations with Israel [theguardian.com]. The secret deal places no legal limits on the use of data [theguardian.com] and only official US government communications are protected by the expectation of israeli agents removing such data as soon as it's identified. NSA insists that it complies with the rules governing privacy. There is now maybe less wonder that UNIT 8200 is driving the tech boom [theguardian.com] in Israel as they get to handle all the raw intelligence and insider information.
General Petraeus (Score:5, Interesting)
Made comments critical of Israel, next thing you know his Gmail documenting a fling with what's-her-name is brought out. Coincidence? I think not!
Let's pick on Israel (Score:1, Interesting)
Israel is only one of a handful of countries (australia, new zealand, canada, and the uk) that receive this information. Makes you wonder why the article chooses to focus on Israel and ignore those other countries...
Read the MOA, it's about protecting U.S. Persons (Score:4, Interesting)
My reading of this MOA is very different... The MOA is repeatedly clarifying that U.S. Person information is not to be SENT by the NSA (The NSA's Responsibility to ensure it is not in the data is clearly spelled out in the MOA, if it wasn't already explicit elsewhere). It ALSO indicates that IF Israel's ISNU find's U.S. Person data they must report the finding to the NSA and destroy the information.
The MOA does not give any indication when or why raw SIGINT data would be sent to ISNU, and while it is clear that the NSA does share raw intel, it is also clear that there are cases where the raw data is "Minimized" by the NSA to remove U.S. Person information. The MOA does not guarantee ISNU any access to NSA data -- which data we share is obviously going to be controlled by other agreements and laws.
So a) we share intel with Israel ... I'm pretty sure everyone should have assumed this, and b) we have documented safeguards to restrict that data to intel on NON-U.S. Persons. Really, read the memorandum, that's all it does... every page is devoted to protecting data on U.S. Citizens.
How is this a bad thing? This document is obviously showing intent to avoid domestic spying. Good! If you want to argue that the NSA is not following its own guidelines, or failing to protect U.S. data, this is not good evidence of that.
Re:Legal and NSA (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't vote out bureaucrats. They stay in place from administration to administration and really run things.
You can't vote them out because they and their partners have acccess to all this sigint on their competitors. I imagine any politician who did vote to defund such agencies would be quickly be labeled as a threat to national security and re-educated.
Still waiting for US Govt to clarify 'acts of war' (Score:5, Interesting)
US said they consider cyber-attacks to be an act of war, so I am wondering when will US Government clarify who gave them authorization to declare war on so many countries, including 'allies'.
Because what NSA has been doing for years were acts of war, according to US Government.