One wonders when the
penny will drop and the American
people will rise up and say
“enough is enough,”
July31, 2021 - "
SCF' -------It
is perhaps not necessary to point out how
the mainstream media in the United States as
well as in Europe and Oceania persist in
ignoring or otherwise covering up stories
that make the Israelis look bad. Recent
accounts of the slaughter of children and
mostly civilians in Gaza by Israeli planes,
missiles and artillery consistently try
depict the conflict as warfare between two
comparable opponents, ignoring the enormous
disparity in the military force available to
the two sides. Israel has a modern army, air
force and navy while Hamas has nothing but
some small arms as well as improvised
rockets and incendiary balloons.
The reluctance to criticize Israeli
behavior is largely attributable to the
power of the Zionist lobbies in the
respective countries but it is also at least
in part due to the complicity of Western
governments in conniving at the Jewish
state’s actions in its own region. The
persistence in Israeli demands for war
against Iran, preferable fought by the
United States, was clear again this past
week when the new government in Jerusalem
declared that it would be
increasing its military budget in
anticipation of war with the Islamic
Republic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S.
Congress also has several bills pending that
would increase military assistance to Israel
by a factor of three.
Aside from their overwhelming affection
for the Jewish state, politicians and
talking heads in Washington have always
sought to have an enemy to explain why the
foreign and national security policies have
been such failures. Russia was so designated
during the long years of the Cold War and
more recently both the White House and
Congress have begun to warn that it is China
that is seeking to confront democratic norms
and “export its authoritarian model.”
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Given all of that, there must have been
shock in a number of newsrooms when it
turned out that the guilty party behind an
explosive spy story that was revealed
recently appears to be none other than
America’s “closest ally and best friend.” It
seems that a private Israeli surveillance
plus security firm consisting of former
cyberwarfare military and intelligence
officers and having close ties to the
Benjamin Netanyahu government has been
selling advanced spyware to at least 45
governments. The sales are in theory
restricted for use only in terrorism and
criminal cases, but somehow the resource has
instead been routinely used against
journalists, political activists, business
executives, and politicians. Saudi Arabia,
for example,
used the spyware to track dissident
journal Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by
Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018.
And even though the software has been
regularly used against U.S. government
officials and journalists, it appears that
the Biden Administration has been aware of
its capabilities and has done nothing to
stop it. In its own defense, the Israeli
company NSO that developed the spyware has
claimed, implausibly, that it can no longer
be used to hack U.S. phones. That assertion
was debunked by former NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden, who tweeted “NSO’s claim
that it is ‘technologically impossible’ to
spy on American phone numbers is a
bald-faced lie: a exploit that works against
Macron’s iPhone will work the same on
Biden’s iPhone. Any code written to prohibit
targeting a country can also be unwritten.
It’s a fig leaf.”
The
surprise revelation of the Israeli
activity came not from a government
counter-intelligence agency, but rather from
a group of 17 international media
organizations that formed a consortium to
investigate a data leak relating to hacked
telephones. The group included major news
outlets that had apparently been targeted
using the Pegasus hacking spyware developed
by the NSO Group, which was primarily
designed to penetrate the security features
of smartphones. One former cybersecurity
engineer from the U.S. intelligence
community
described Pegasus as an “eloquently
nasty” tool that could be used to “spy on
almost the entire world population.” The
spyware “can be installed remotely on a
targeted person’s smartphone
without requiring them to take any action
such as clicking on a link or answering a
call. Once installed, it allows clients to
take complete control of the device,
including accessing messages from encrypted
messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal, and
turning on the microphone and camera.” It
can also reveal the phone’s location.
The software was designed
with a backdoor which allowed NSO to
monitor the surveillances and it is
presumed that the information was also
shared with Israeli intelligence.
By one estimate 50,000 smartphones were
accessed worldwide, including 10 prime
ministers, three presidents
including Emmanuel Macron of France, a
king, foreign ministers and assorted
journalists and government officials both in
the U.S. and elsewhere.
A more cautious estimate from the
Washington Post,
which participated in the investigation,
states only that “1,000 people spread across
50 different countries were identified as
having numbers on the list,
among them are ‘several Arab royal
family members, at least 65 business
executives, 85 human rights activists, 189
journalists, and more than 600 politicians
and government officials.’ This
includes Robert Malley, the Biden
administration’s lead Iran negotiator, and
journalists for CNN, the Associated Press,
the Wall Street Journal, and the
New York Times.” Other news
agencies that were hacked by Pegasus include
Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera, France 24,
Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El País, the
Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, the
Economist, Reuters and Voice of America.
Some are inevitably wondering why the
Biden White House has been silent about NSO.
It has not identified the Israeli firm as a
threat to national security and made demands
to the Israeli government that it intercede
with NSO and shut down the use of Pegasus
until some international regulation of the
use of hacking software can be developed.
Part of the
explanation for the reluctance might be
that Biden’s senior adviser Anita Dunn’s
consulting firm SKDKickerbocker was hired by
NSO in 2019 to provide “public relations”
advice to improve the company’s image.
The reluctance, of course, also derives
from the fact that Israel is involved, but
those with longer memories of the Jewish
state’s record in stealing American secrets
should not be surprised by this latest
venture. Israeli-recruited U.S. Navy analyst
Jonathan Pollard was, for example, the most
damaging spy in U.S. history. And Israel
has, in fact, a long history of stealing
U.S. technology and military secrets to
include sharing them with countries that
Washington has regarded as enemies,
including China and Russia.
Israel
always features prominently in the
annual FBI report called Foreign
Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage.
The 2005 report states: “Israel has an
active program to gather proprietary
information within the United States, these
collection activities are primarily directed
at obtaining information on military systems
and advanced computing applications that can
be used in Israel’s sizeable armaments
industry.” It adds that: “Israel recruits
spies, uses electronic methods, and carries
out computer intrusion to gain the
information.” A 1996 Defense Investigative
Service report noted that: “Israel has great
success stealing technology by exploiting
the numerous co-production projects that it
has with the Pentagon.” It says: “Placing
Israeli nationals in key industries is a
technique utilized with great success.” A
General Accounting Office (GAO) examination
of espionage directed against American
defense and security industries described
how: “Israeli citizens residing in the U.S.
had stolen sensitive technology to
manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtain
classified plans for reconnaissance systems,
and pass sensitive aerospace designs to
unauthorized users.” The GAO concluded that:
“Israel conducts,” and this is a quote,
“conducts the most aggressive espionage
operation against the United States of any
U.S. ally.” More recently, FBI
counterintelligence officer John Cole has
reported how many cases of Israeli espionage
are dropped under orders from the Justice
Department. He has provided a conservative
estimate of 125 viable investigations into
Israeli espionage — involving both American
citizens and Israelis — that were stopped
due to political pressure.
So Israel gets yet another pass on its
spying against the United States. Indeed,
the Biden Administration has yet to
definitively comment on the latest
impropriety. One wonders when the penny will
drop and the American people will rise up
and say “enough is enough.”