
Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal - not_that_noob
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/opinion/israels-nsa-scandal.html?_r=0
======
CamperBob2
Instead of being buried at the end of the article, Bamford's penultimate
paragraph

    
    
       In Moscow, Mr. Snowden told me that the document 
       reminded him of the F.B.I.’s overreach during the days 
       of J. Edgar Hoover, when the bureau abused its powers to 
       monitor and harass political activists. “It’s much like 
       how the F.B.I. tried to use Martin Luther King’s 
       infidelity to talk him into killing himself,” he said. 
       “We said those kinds of things were inappropriate back 
       in the ’60s. Why are we doing that now? Why are we 
       getting involved in this again?”
    

... should be cut-and-pasted into any comment thread where a security-state
apologist is trying to make people believe that Snowden is anything other than
a patriot.

We _can 't_ fix this by working within the system. That's what the Church
Committee tried to do. They failed. There is no reason to think their twenty-
first century counterparts will not fail again.

~~~
cryoshon
Okay, if not fixing it by working within the system, then what is the next
step?

~~~
CamperBob2
Those working within the system should follow Snowden's example, IMHO. Force
the government to either stop these practices altogether, or reveal their true
cost to the American way of life.

~~~
alan_cx
Why should any insider do that?

Snowden did it, and look what happened. Nothing. Sad truth is, the majority
don't care. If they did, then it would be reflected in voting, and things
would change. But no. Mean while, Snowden is a wanted man in exile.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like this one little bit, but it seems I'm in a
minority.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Snowden did it, and look what happened. Nothing.

"Nothing" understates the impact. Sure, no one insider's revelations alone
will suffice to radically change the situation, but, to borrow a Medieval
adaptation of a classical aphorism, _gutta cavet lapidem, non vi, sed saepe
cadendo_.

~~~
damon_c
For my fellow uneducated hackers: "a water drop hollows a stone not by force,
but by falling often"

~~~
eric_h
I know you're just being cheeky, but I don't believe that "knowing latin" ==
"educated", same for its corollary.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's the other way; _si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes_.

~~~
innguest
Siue, nimium linguam latinam diligis. Eruditio nunc mera charta est.

~~~
JetSpiegel
Hackers eunt domus!

------
jostmey
I think this is the most damning leak to date. There is no justification for
freely giving information to Israel. And the part about people's porn habits
being tracked is even scarier. That could be used to discredit virtually
anyone (well, any male at least). Who hasn't visited an embarrassing porn
website at least once in their life ? Now imagine your name being publicly
associated with that website.

~~~
ronreiter
There is justification, it's a co-operation between Israel and the U.S. Just
like the US helps Israel, Israel helps the US.

~~~
jostmey
I'm sorry but exactly how does Israel help the US?

~~~
prawn
Provides influence/reach in another part of the world?

------
guelo
The way Israel _owns_ American military and foreign policy should be a
national shame. Reminds me of this other story about Israel going behind
Obama's back to get weapons straight from the Pentagon.
[http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sway-over-israel-on-
gaza-...](http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-sway-over-israel-on-gaza-at-a-
low-1407979365)

~~~
sabalaba
Political influence arising from an active group of Jewish- _Americans_
lobbying their own government not "ownership". If you're against it, you too
are free to get involved, form a special interest group, and lobby our
government in the other direction.

~~~
colordrops
That's not how a democracy is supposed to work. Extreme influence by a small
group of individuals outside of the voting process indicated a broken system.

------
javajosh
I think this all is going to take time to sink in, but in the end, Americans
will do the right thing, which has been the overwhelming trend in the past.
Think slavery. Think women's suffrage. Think civil rights. Think gay marriage.

This one is a little tough because the targets are unsympathetic and the
anecdotes of specific harm are non-existent. It's difficult to argue against
fighting dirty as a principle; it's much easier when you can point to a
specific person (like MLK) and say, "That dude was clearly wronged."

I wish it was different. I wish people got more upset about government
fighting dirty against _anyone_ [1], even against the enemies that we
ourselves agree are despicable and evil. Fighting dirty hurts us far more than
it hurts them, because it damages our moral identity.

[1] The one exception is if there is an existential threat to the US. However,
terrorism has never been, and will never be, an existential threat to the
US[2] - except insofar as, in a fit of epic but unfunny irony, they manage to
manipulate us into destroying our own moral fabric.

[2] The same argument applies to Israel. Israel playing dirty against state
actors like Iran would be far more defensible, because Iran really could wipe
Israel out.

------
rrggrr
This was not a one-sided trade. You can be sure the NSA received similar feeds
from Israel on targets of great interest to US national interests. The
inherent problem in these NSA debates is the inability of the NSA or policy
makers to give the American people believable metrics that describe the value
received for the effort. Could it be the US received important intel in return
for its feeds? Yes. By not articulating a believable ROI on collection or
sharing its looks increasingly like there wasn't one.

------
shna
Sounds like U.S. has not been a sovereign country for sometime. It's
intelligence service has been working for another country, passing sensitive
information of its own citizens to Israel. Interesting. Even more interesting
is that the bulk of the comments are on somewhere else whether this is a witch
hunt or not, if it resembles to what Mr. Hoover did or did not do, if the
committee in the past succeeded or not.

------
not_that_noob
Why was the title changed? Here's the operative paragraph from the article
below - there is a document that indicates the NSA is spying on porn visits of
ordinary Americans to use against them in intimidation for exercising their
rights to free speech. It doesn't get any worse than this.

"It should also trouble Americans that the N.S.A. could head down a similar
path in this country. Indeed, there is some indication, from a top-secret 2012
document from Mr. Snowden’s leaked files that I saw last year, that it already
is. The document, from Gen. Keith B. Alexander, then the director of the
N.S.A., notes that the agency had been compiling records of visits to
pornographic websites and proposes using that information to damage the
reputations of people whom the agency considers “radicalizers” — not
necessarily terrorists, but those attempting, through the use of incendiary
speech, to radicalize others. (The Huffington Post has published a redacted
version of the document.)"

[Edit] For reference, the original title was: "NSA spying on porn visits of
ordinary Americans" \- which is exactly what they seem to be doing.

~~~
yetanotherHNacc
There was a similar incident that comes to mind, BlueCoat hardware deployed by
Assad's government in Syria.

It was found that Assad was having traffic monitored through BlueCoat proxies
installed at the ISP level. Logs were leaked showing monitoring of religious,
sexual, political content.

Of course many are now dead, countless others imprisoned. Much thanks to
BlueCoat and salesmen who assisted Assad's government in procuring the
hardware.

Sidenote: This topic, and others around it have gotten several accounts of
mine here ghosted. Best stick to discussing how your start-up wants to sell
traffic monitoring hardware and SaaS via independent sales agents to whoever
has cash.

~~~
rgkjrengkjreng
I've noticed this as well.

Similarly, reddit will completely shut down any threads that start to become
too activist on the grounds of "witch hunting." It's amazing how we've already
systematically nerfed the internet as a tool for bringing about political
change.

~~~
CamperBob2
To be fair to the authors of the HN guidelines, witch hunting has been a
serious problem on Reddit. Few people want to see HN become another Reddit.

But reverting this title was arguably inappropriate because the NYT's original
title _is_ misleading in its understatement.

------
BugBrother
A discussion of Unit 8200 I read today:
[http://strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20140923.aspx](http://strategypage.com/htmw/htintel/articles/20140923.aspx)

(I read other sources because my Swedish media is like some inverse of Fox
News. Stories like that Hamas had admitted murdering the three teens that
started the last war is not... emphasized. The biggest morning newspaper
didn't even mention that the accused murders of those teens died in a
firefight today. Pallywood was never mentioned. Neither torture between
Palestinian groups. Etc.)

------
autism_hurts
Palantir has their hand in all of this.

~~~
tokenadult
_Palantir has their hand in all of this._

What is the evidence for this statement? (I read the fine article, and didn't
see a lot of discussion of the business corporation Palantir there.)

~~~
autism_hurts
They're the only company that has the technology to parse / analyze datasets
like the ones mentioned in the article.

~~~
cyphunk
can you be more specific? the xkeyscore100 rule set leak seems to indicate
hadoop map reduce use which to me indicates a vanilla build out of the NSAs
own. so what could you use to show more clear involvement from Palantir

------
rasz_pl
> it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally
> identifiable information would be removed.

minimized?? Im pretty sure he meant Anonymized

~~~
mox1
No he meant minimized, which in FISA terms means purged of irrelevant and
over-collected information, including data about US persons.

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/20/exh...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/jun/20/exhibit-
b-nsa-procedures-document)

------
bengrunfeld
Israel's Arab civilian's regularly attempt to blow themselves up in public
places (believe me, I've stopped a few on them myself). Meanwhile the
Palestinians gleefully lob rockets at populated cities in Israel. Of course
Israel would want to monitor them as much as possible, and corroborate with
the NSA to get as much data as possible. If that monitoring saved YOUR child
from getting blown up on a bus, wouldn't you support it, or would you prefer
your kid gets blown to smithereens so that social justice can be upheld?
There's a big difference between America's domestic surveillance program and
Israel's. Last time I checked, the central USA hadn't just recently been
shelled.

~~~
conover
So if you object to this type of surveillance then you prefer your children to
be blown up by suicide bombers?

~~~
BugBrother
Most every democracy with serious and continuing problems with terrorism throw
out the law book and human rights.

Afaik, this goes for USA, Britain, Israel, Germany, Spain and Italy. And
probably more cases. (Note " _continuing problems_ ". e.g. Breivik was a lone
crazy.)

The reason is shown by the grandparent comment; terrorism is optimized to
scare voters. And politicians are scared of hysterical voters, they need to
_fix_ that to keep their jobs.

~~~
bengrunfeld
I've went through 9 terrorist attacks in Israel before I joined the military -
I lived in downtown Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. In the other
countries, you're right - there is no excuse for getting rid of personal
rights and freedoms, but in Israel the sheer number of terrorist attacks cause
the reality to be different. If we didn't have the intel, we could never stop
the terrorists, and that is simply unacceptable.

~~~
BugBrother
Israel do have everything on a different scale; multiples of times more terror
against its civilians than what the rest of the western world have --
combined.

Afaik, despite this the courts in Israel seems to better keep up rule of law
than the US ones, re terrorism... Which is sad.

But I think that without terror problems, the situation would be very
different in Israel. And you probably agree.

Edit: I think you missed my point a little. I didn't discuss if it is right to
throw out freedoms or not, I noted that empirically democracies seems to be
very likely to do that in a certain situation.

------
ronreiter
The US is a close ally of Israel for obvious reasons. Israel wants to better
defend itself, so it co-operates with the N.S.A. This is what Israel needs to
defend itself, and Israel probably does the same thing to help defend the US.

There will always be a conflict between privacy and security, you can stick to
one on expense of the other, but you will never be able to "fix" things.

~~~
colordrops
How is Israel any different from any other country? What's so obvious about
why they are a close ally?

