[Peace-discuss] US/Israel spying on us

[C. G. Estabrook]

Will the US Share Intelligence with Israel's New Left Wing Intelligence Initiative?
By: emptywheel Tuesday March 22, 2011 8:00 am

Ha'aretz reports that Israel's Military Intelligence set up a group several 
months ago dedicated to collecting intelligence on non-Israeli leftist 
organizations that criticize Israel.

/Military Intelligence is collecting information about left-wing organizations 
abroad that the army sees as aiming to delegitimize Israel, according to senior 
Israeli officials and Israel Defense Forces officers.

The sources said MI's research division created a department several months ago 
that is dedicated to monitoring left-wing groups and will work closely with 
government ministries.

[snip]

Military Intelligence officials said the initiative reflects an upsurge in 
worldwide efforts to delegitimize Israel and question its right to exist.

"The enemy changes, as does the nature of the struggle, and we have to boost 
activity in this sphere," an MI official said. "Work on this topic proceeds on 
the basis of a clear distinction between legitimate criticism of the State of 
Israel on the one hand, and efforts to harm it and undermine its right to exist 
on the other."

The new MI unit will monitor Western groups involved in boycotting Israel, 
divesting from it or imposing sanctions on it. The unit will also collect 
information about groups that attempt to bring war crime or other charges 
against high-ranking Israeli officials, and examine possible links between such 
organizations and terror groups.
/
Now aside from thinking generally that this is a bad idea, I'm particularly 
concerned about whether or not the US will share intelligence with Israel on 
such issues.

For example, the initiative says it will look for ties between groups critical 
of Israel and terrorist groups. How is that different from the investigation of 
a bunch of peace activists' ties with humanitarian organizations which has 
suggested the peace activists have ties to Hezbollah? And since we know OLC gave 
the President and certain Federal Officials the green light to ignore privacy 
protections on the sharing of grand jury information in the PATRIOT Act, does 
that mean our government will readily share the information they're collecting 
in that grand jury with the Israelis?

And to some degree, the Israelis wouldn't even have to rely on intelligence 
sharing, per se. In his book The Shadow Factory, James Bamford spent some time 
detailing the Israeli ties to key companies in our electronic surveillance, 
companies like Verint, which intercepts and stores communication, PerSay, which 
does voice mining, NICE, which does voice content analysis, and Narus, which 
enables real-time surveillance on telecom lines. Between Verint and Narus, 
Bamford writes,
/
Thus, virtually the entire American telecommunications system is bugged by two 
Israeli-formed companies with possible ties to Israel's eavesdropping 
agency--with no oversight by Congress./

And we can find such ties closer to home, too. The company that had been paid by 
Pennsylvania to track potential threats to critical infrastructure which ended 
up tracking First Amendment protected speech, the Institute of Terrorism 
Research and Response, is an Israeli company. Among other groups it tracked (one 
key focus was anti-fracking groups) were peace organizations--precisely the kind 
of group that might oppose Israel's actions in Gaza.

The concern that federal and state entities have been paying companies with 
Israeli ties to collect information on groups that might include the same peace 
groups targeted by this new initiative in Israel is one thing.

But think of the other logical possibility. Our federal and state governments 
usually show some embarrassment when they get caught collecting intelligence on 
peace groups (though that doesn't seem to stop it from happening over and over 
again). What will stop those same government entities from asking Israel to 
collect such information?

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/22/will-the-us-share-intelligence-with-israels-new-left-wing-intelligence-initiative/ 
[with links]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20110322/9e8effa4/attachment.html>