Tweet
Pakistan Daily, Pakistan
How the Zionists are able to listen in on any phone conversation in
America
Saturday, 04 October 2008 12:59 www.daily.pk
How Israeli Backdoor Technology Penetrated the U.S. Telecom System and
Compromised National Security
Since the late 1990s, federal agents have reported systemic
communications security breaches at the Department of Justice, FBI,
DEA, the State Department, and the White House. Several of the alleged
breaches, these agents say, can be traced to two hi-tech communications
companies, Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys), and Amdocs Ltd.,
that respectively provide major wiretap and phone billing/record-keeping
software contracts for the U.S. government. Together, Verint and
Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government's domestic
intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in
Israel ` having arisen to prominence from that country's cornering of
the information technology market ` and are heavily funded by the
Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and
Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board
memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and
intelligence officers). Verint is considered the world leader in
`electronic interception' and hence an ideal private sector candidate
for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world's largest billing service
for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007,
offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies
in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call
traffic among U.S. residents. The companies' operations, sources
suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted
trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans
for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers
(particularly organized crime). `The fact of the vulnerability of our
telecom backbone is indisputable,' says a high level U.S. intelligence
officer who has monitored the fears among federal agents. `How it came
to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what ` these are the
incendiary questions.' If the allegations are true, the electronic
communications gathered up by the NSA and other U.S. intelligence
agencies might be falling into the hands of a foreign government.
Reviewing the available evidence, Robert David Steele, a former CIA
case officer and today one of the foremost international proponents
for `public intelligence in the public interest,' tells me that
`Israeli penetration of the entire US telecommunications system means
that NSA's warrantless wiretapping actually means Israeli warrantless
wiretapping.'
As early as 1999, the National Security Agency issued a warning that
records of U.S. government telephone calls were ending up in foreign
hands ` Israel's, in particular. In 2002, assistant U.S. Attorney
General Robert F. Diegelman issued an eyes only memo on the matter to
the chief information technology (IT) officers at the Department of
Justice. IT officers oversee everything from the kind of cell phones
agents carry to the wiretap equipment they use in the field; their
defining purpose is secure communications. Diegelman's memo was a
reiteration, with overtones of reprimand, of a new IT policy
instituted a year earlier, in July 2001, in an internal Justice order
titled `2640.2D Information Technology Security.' Order 2640.2D stated
that `Foreign Nationals shall not be authorized to access or assist in
the development, operation, management or maintenance of Department IT
systems.' This might not seem much to blink at in the post-9/11 intel
and security overhaul. Yet 2640.2D was issued a full two months before
the Sept. 11 attacks. What group or groups of foreign nationals had
close access to IT systems at the Department of Justice? Israelis,
according to officials in law enforcement. One former Justice
Department computer crimes prosecutor tells me, speaking on
background, `I've heard that the Israelis can listen in to our calls.'
Retired CIA counterterrorism and counterintelligence officer Philip
Giraldi says this is par for the course in the history of Israeli
penetrations in the U.S. He notes that Israel always features
prominently in the annual FBI report called `Foreign Economic
Collection and Industrial Espionage' ` Israel is second only to China
in stealing U.S. business secrets. The 2005 FBI report states, for
example, `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 sizable
armaments industry.' A key Israeli method, warns the FBI report, is
computer intrusion.
In the big picture of U.S. government spying on Americans, the story
ties into 1994 legislation called the Communications Assistance for
Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which effected a sea-change in methods
of electronic surveillance. Gone are the days when wiretaps were
conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA
mandated sweeping new powers of surveillance for the digital age, by
linking remote computers into the routers and hubs of telecom firms `
a spyware apparatus linked in real-time, all the time, to American
telephones and modems. CALEA made spy equipment an inextricable
ligature in our telephonic life. Top officials at the FBI pushed for
the legislation, claiming it would improve security, but many field
agents have spoken up to complain that CALEA has done exactly the
opposite. The data-mining techniques employed by NSA in its
wiretapping exploits could not have succeeded without the technology
mandated by CALEA. It could be argued that CALEA is the hidden heart
of the NSA wiretap scandal.
THE VERINT CONNECTION
According to former CIA officer Giraldi and other US intelligence
sources, software manufactured and maintained by Verint, Inc. handles
most of American law enforcement's wiretaps. Says Giraldi: `Phone
calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators
by Verint, which claims that it has to be `hands on' with its
equipment to maintain the system.' Giraldi also notes Verint is
reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its R&D costs by the Israeli
Ministry of Industry and Trade. According to Giraldi, the extent of
the use of Verint technology `is considered classified,' but sources
have spoken out and told Giraldi they are worried about the security
of Verint wiretap systems. The key concern, says Giraldi, is the issue
of a `trojan' embedded in the software.
A trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that
can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access
to the secure system. Allegations of massive trojan spying have rocked
the Israeli business community in recent years. An AP article in 2005
noted, `Top Israeli blue chip companies¦are suspected of using
illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals
and enemies.' Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. `It is the
largest cybercrime case in Israeli history,' Boaz Guttmann, a veteran
cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, tells
me. `Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in
Israel. It's a culture of spying.'
This is of course the culture on which the U.S. depends for much of
its secure software for data encryption and telephonic security.
`There's been a lot discussion of how much we should trust security
products by Israeli telecom firms,' says Philip Zimmerman, one of the
legendary pioneers of encryption technology (Zimmerman invented the
cryptographic and privacy authentication system known as Pretty Good
Privacy, or PGP, now one of the basic modern standards for
communications encryption). `Generally speaking, I wouldn't trust
stuff made overseas for data security,' says Zimmerman. `A guy at NSA
InfoSec' ` the information security division of the National Security
Agency ` `once told me, `Foreign-made crypto is our nightmare.' But to
be fair, as our domestic electronics industry becomes weaker and
weaker, foreign-made becomes inevitable.' Look at where the expertise
is, Zimmerman adds: Among the ranks of the International Association
for Cryptological Research, which meets annually, there is a higher
percentage of Israelis than any other nationality. The Israeli-run
Verint is today the provider of telecom interception systems deployed
in over 50 countries.
Carl Cameron, chief politics correspondent at Fox News Channel, is one
of the few reporters to look into federal agents' deepening distress
over possible trojans embedded in Verint technology. In a wide-ranging
four-part investigation into Israeli-linked espionage that aired in
December 2001 [watch entire FOX series below], Cameron made a number
of startling discoveries regarding Verint, then known as Comverse
Infosys. Sources told Cameron that `while various FBI inquiries into
Comverse have been conducted over the years,' the inquiries had `been
halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for
leaks.' Cameron also noted a 1999 internal FCC document indicating
that `several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too
many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap
system.' Much of this access was facilitated through `remote
maintenance.'
Immediately following the Cameron report, Comverse Infosys changed its
name to Verint, saying the company was `maturing.' (The company issued
no response to Cameron's allegations, nor did it threaten a lawsuit.)
Meanwhile, security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice
Department, began examining the agency's own relationship with
Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA transformed its wiretap infrastructure
with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology
called `T2S2' ` `translation and transcription support services' `
with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software,
plus `support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options
throughout the life of the contract,' according to the `contracts and
acquisitions' notice posted on the DEA's website. This was
unprecedented. Prior to 1997, DEA staff used equipment that was
developed and maintained in-house.
But now Cameron's report raised some ugly questions of vulnerability
in T2S2.
The director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was
rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter,
dated Dec. 18, 2001, four days after the final installment in the
Cameron series. Referencing the Fox News report, she worried that
`Comverse remote maintenance' was `not addressed in the C&A [contracts
and acquisitions] process.' She also cited the concerns in Justice
Department order 2640.2D, and noted that the `Administrator' ` meaning
then DEA head Asa Hutchinson ` had been briefed. Then there was this
stunner: `It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security
cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on
record¦.Bottom line we should have caught it.' On its face, the
Raffanello memo is a frightening glimpse into a bureaucracy caught
with its pants down.
American law enforcement was not alone in suspecting T2S2 equipment
purchased from Comverse/Verint. In November 2002, sources in the Dutch
counterintelligence community began airing what they claimed was
`strong evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled
access to confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and
intelligence services,' according to the Dutch broadcast radio station
Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch
technology and computing magazine, c't, ran a follow-up to the EO
scoop, headlined `Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher.' The article began:
`All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the
tapping equipment of the national police force¦is insecure and is
leaking information to Israel.' The writer, Paul Wouters, goes on to
discuss the T2S2 tap-ware `delivered to the government in the last few
years by the Israeli company Verint,' and quoted several cryptography
experts on the viability of remote monitoring of encrypted `blackbox'
data. Wouters writes of this `blackbox cryptography':
¦a very important part of strong cryptography is a good random
source. Without a proper random generator, or worse, with an
intentionally crippled random generator, the resulting ciphertext
becomes trivial to break. If there is one single unknown chip involved
with the random generation, such as a hardware accelerator chip, all
bets are off¦.If you can trust the hardware and you have access to
the source code, then it should theoretically be possible to verify
the system. This, however, can just not be done without the source
code.
Yet, as Wouters was careful to add, `when the equipment was bought
from the Israelis, it was agreed that no one except [Verint] personnel
was authorized to touch the systems¦.Source code would never be
available to anyone.'
Cryptography pioneer Philip Zimmerman warns that `you should never
trust crypto if the source code isn't published. Open source code
means two things: if there are deliberate backdoors in the crypto,
peer review will reveal those backdoors. If there are inadvertent bugs
in the crypto, they too will be discovered. Whether the weaknesses are
by accident or design, they will be found. If the weakness is by
design, they will not want to publish the source code. Some of the
best products we know have been subject to open source review: Linux;
Apache. The most respected crypto products have been tested through
open source. The little padlock in the corner when you visit a
browser? You're going through a protocol called Secure Socket
Layer. Open source tested and an Internet standard. FireFox, the
popular and highly secure browser, is all open source.'
THE CALEA CONNECTION
None of U.S. law enforcement's problems with Amdocs and Verint could
have come to pass without the changes mandated by the Communications
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which, as noted, sought to
lock spyware into telecom networks. CALEA, to cite the literature,
requires that terrestrial carriers, cellular phone services and other
telecom entities enable the government to intercept `all wire and oral
communications carried by the carrier concurrently with their
transmission.' T2S2 technology fit the bill perfectly: Tied into the
network, T2S2 bifurcates the line without interrupting the data-stream
(a T2S2 bifurcation is considered virtually undetectable). One half of
the bifurcated line is recorded and stored in a remote tapping room;
the other half continues on its way from your mouth or keyboard to
your friend's. (What is `T2S2'? To simplify: The S2 computer collects
and encrypts the data; the T2 receives and decrypts.)
CALEA was touted as a law enforcement triumph, the work of decades of
lobbying by FBI. Director Louis Freeh went so far as to call it the
bureau's `highest legislative priority.' Indeed, CALEA was the widest
expansion of the government's electronic surveillance powers since the
Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which mandated carefully
limited conditions for wiretaps. Now the government could use coercive
powers in ordering telecom providers to `devise solutions' to law
enforcement's `emerging technology-generated problems' (imposing a
$10,000 per day penalty on non-compliant carriers). The government's
hand would be permanently inserted into the design of the nation's
telecom infrastructure. Law professor Lillian BeVier, of the
University of Virginia, writes extensively of the problems inherent to
CALEA. `The rosy scenario imagined by the drafters cannot survive a
moment's reflection,' BeVier observes. `While it is conventionally
portrayed as `but the latest chapter in the thirty year history of the
federal wiretap laws,' CALEA is not simply the next installment of a
technologically impelled statutory evolution. Instead, in terms of the
nature and magnitude of the interests it purports to `compromise' and
the industry it seeks to regulate, in terms of the extent to which it
purports to coerce private sector solutions to public sector problems,
and in terms of the foothold it gives government to control the design
of telecommunications networks, the Act is a paradigm shift. On close
and disinterested inspection, moreover, CALEA appears to embody
potentially wrong-headed sacrifices of privacy principles, flawed and
incomplete conceptions of law enforcement's ends and means, and an
imperfect appreciation of the incompatible incentives of the players
in the game that would inevitably be played in the process of its
implementation.'(emphasis mine)
The real novelty ` and the danger ` of CALEA is that telecom networks
are today configured so that they are vulnerable to surveillance.
`We've deliberately weakened the computer and phone networks, making
them much less secure, much more vulnerable both to legal surveillance
and illegal hacking,' says former DOJ cybercrimes prosecutor Mark
Rasch. `Everybody is much less secure in their communications since
the adopting of CALEA. So how are you going to have secure
communications? You have to secure the communications themselves,
because you cannot have a secure network. To do this, you need
encryption. What CALEA forced businesses and individuals to do is go
to third parties to purchase encryption technology. What is the major
country that the U.S. purchases IT encryption from overseas? I would
say it's a small Middle Eastern democracy. What we've done is the
worst of all worlds. We've made sure that most communications are
subject to hacking and interception by bad guys. At the same time, the
bad guys ` organized crime, terrorist operations ` can very easily
encrypt their communications.' It is notable that the first
CALEA-compliant telecom systems installed in the U.S. were courtesy of
Verint Inc.
THE AMDOCS CONNECTION
If a phone is dialed in the U.S., Amdocs Ltd. likely has a record of
it, which includes who you dialed and how long you spoke. This is
known as transactional call data. Amdocs' biggest customers in the
U.S. are AT&T and Verizon, which have collaborated widely with the
Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping programs. Transactional
call data has been identified as a key element in NSA data mining to
look for `suspicious' patterns in communications.
Over the last decade, Amdocs has been the target of several
investigations looking into whether individuals within the company
shared sensitive U.S. government data with organized crime elements
and Israeli intelligence services. Beginning in 1997, the FBI
conducted a far-flung inquiry into alleged spying by an Israeli
employee of Amdocs, who worked on a telephone billing program
purchased by the CIA. According to Paul Rodriguez and J. Michael
Waller, of Insight Magazine, which broke the story in May of 2000, the
targeted Israeli had apparently also facilitated the tapping of
telephone lines at the Clinton White House (recall Monica Lewinsky's
testimony before Ken Starr: the president, she claimed, had warned her
that `a foreign embassy' was listening to their phone sex, though
Clinton under oath later denied saying this). More than two dozen
intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials
told Insight that a `daring operation,' run by Israeli intelligence,
had `intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the
most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis.'
Insight's chief investigative reporter, Paul Rodriguez, told me in an
e-mail that the May 2000 spy probe story `was (and is) one of the
strangest I've ever worked on, considering the state of alert, concern
and puzzlement' among federal agents. According to the Insight report,
FBI investigators were particularly unnerved over discovering the
targeted Israeli subcontractor had somehow gotten his hands on the
FBI's `most sensitive telephone numbers, including the Bureau's
`black' lines used for wiretapping.' `Some of the listed numbers,' the
Insight article added, `were lines that FBI counterintelligence used
to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation. The hunted were
tracking the hunters.' Rodriguez confirmed the panic this caused in
American intel. `It's a huge security nightmare,' one senior
U.S. official told him. `The implications are severe,' said a second
official. `All I can tell you is that we think we know how it was
done,' a third intelligence executive told Rodriguez. `That alone is
serious enough, but it's the unknown that has such deep consequences.'
No charges, however, were made public in the case. (What happened
behind the scenes depends on who you talk to in law enforcement: When
FBI counterintelligence sought a warrant for the Israeli subcontractor,
the Justice Department strangely refused to cooperate, and in the end
no warrant was issued. FBI investigators were baffled.)
London Sunday Times reporter Uzi Mahnaimi quotes sources in Tel Aviv
saying that during this period e-mails from President Clinton had also
been intercepted by Israeli intelligence. Mahnaimi's May 2000 article
reveals that the operation involved `hacking into White House computer
systems during intense speculation about the direction of the peace
process.' Israeli intelligence had allegedly infiltrated a company
called Telrad, subcontracted by Nortel, to develop a communications
system for the White House. According to the Sunday Times, `Company
managers were said to have been unaware that virtually undetectable
chips installed during manufacture made it possible for outside agents
to tap into the flow of data from the White House.'
In 1997, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department, working in
tandem with the Secret Service, FBI, and DEA, found themselves
suffering a similar inexplicable collapse in communications
security. LAPD was investigating Israeli organized crime: drug runners
and credit card thieves based in Israel and L.A., with tentacles in
New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and Egypt. The name of the crime group and
its members remains classified in `threat assessment' papers this
reporter obtained from LAPD, but the documents list in some detail the
colorful scope of the group's operations: $1.4 million stolen from
Fidelity Investments in Boston through sophisticated computer fraud;
extortion and kidnapping of Israelis in L.A. and New York; cocaine
distribution in connection with Italian, Russian, Armenian and Mexican
organized crime; money laundering; and murder. The group also had
access to extremely sophisticated counter-surveillance technology and
data, which was a disaster for LAPD. According to LAPD internal
documents, the Israeli crime group obtained the unlisted home phone,
cell phone, and pager numbers of some 500 of LAPD's narcotics
investigators, as well as the contact information for scores of
federal agents ` black info, numbers unknown even to the
investigators' kin. The Israelis even set up wiretaps of LAPD
investigators, grabbing from cell-phones and landlines conversations
with other agents ` FBI and DEA, mostly ` whose names and phone
numbers were also traced and grabbed.
LAPD was horrified, and as the word got out of the seeming total
breakdown in security, the shock spread to agents at DEA, FBI and even
CIA, who together spearheaded an investigation. It turned out that the
source of much of this black intel could be traced to a company called
J&J Beepers, which was getting its phone numbers from a billing
service that happened to be a subsidiary of Amdocs.
A source familiar with the inquiries into Amdocs put to me several
theories regarding the allegations of espionage against the
company. `Back in the early 1970s, when it became clear that AT&T was
going to be broken up and that there was an imminent information and
technology revolution, Israel understood that it had a highly-educated
and highly-worldly population and it made a few calculated economic
and diplomatic discoveries,' the source says. `One was that
telecommunications was something they could do: because it doesn't
require natural resources, but just intellect, training and cash. They
became highly involved in telecommunications. Per capita, Israel is
probably the strongest telecommunications nation in the world. AT&T
break-up occurs in 1984; Internet technology explodes; and Israel has
all of these companies aggressively buying up contracts in the form of
companies like Amdocs. Amdocs started out as a tiny company and now
it's the biggest billing service for telecommunications in the
world. They get this massive telecommunications network underway. Like
just about everything in Israel, it's a government sponsored
undertaking.
`So it's been argued that Amdocs was using its billing records as an
intelligence-gathering exercise because its executive board over the
years has been heavily peopled by retired and current members of the
Israeli government and military. They used this as an opportunity to
collect information about worldwide telephone calls. As an
intelligence-gathering phenomenon, an analyst with an MIT degree in
algorithms would rather have 50 pages of who called who than 50 hours
of actual conversation. Think about conversations with friends,
husbands, wives. That raw information doesn't mean anything. But if
there's a pattern of 30 phone calls over the course of a day, that can
mean a lot. It's a much simpler algorithm.'
Another anonymous source ` a former CIA operative ` tells me that
U.S. intelligence agents who have aired their concerns about Verint
and Amdocs have found themselves attacked from all sides. `Once it's
learned that an individual is doing footwork on this [the
Verint/Amdocs question], he or she is typically identified somehow as
a troublemaker, an instigator, and is hammered mercilessly,' says the
former CIA operative. `Typically, what happens is the individual finds
him or herself in a scenario where their retirement is jeopardized `
and worse. The fact that if you simply take a look at this question,
all of a sudden you're an Arabist or anti-Semitic ` it's pure baloney,
because I will tell you first-hand that people whose heritage lies
back in that country have heavily worked this matter. You can't buy
that kind of dedication.'
The former CIA operative adds, `There is no defined policy, at this
time, for how to deal with this [security issues involving Israel] `
other than wall it off, contain it. It's not cutting it. Not after
9/11. The funeral pyre that burned on for months at the bottom of the
rubble told a lot of people they did not need to be `politically
correct.' The communications nexuses [i.e. Amdocs/Verint] didn't occur
yesterday; they started many years ago. And that's a major
embarrassment to organizations that would like to say they're on top
of things and not co-opted or compromised. As you start to work this,
you soon learn that many people have either looked the other way or
have been co-opted along the way. Some people, when they figure out
what has occurred, are highly embarrassed to realize that they've been
duped. Because many of them are bureaucrats, they don't want to be
made to look as stupid as they are. So they just go along with it.
Sometimes, it's just that simple.'
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
How the Zionists are able to listen in on any phone conversation in
America
Saturday, 04 October 2008 12:59 www.daily.pk
How Israeli Backdoor Technology Penetrated the U.S. Telecom System and
Compromised National Security
Since the late 1990s, federal agents have reported systemic
communications security breaches at the Department of Justice, FBI,
DEA, the State Department, and the White House. Several of the alleged
breaches, these agents say, can be traced to two hi-tech communications
companies, Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys), and Amdocs Ltd.,
that respectively provide major wiretap and phone billing/record-keeping
software contracts for the U.S. government. Together, Verint and
Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government's domestic
intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in
Israel ` having arisen to prominence from that country's cornering of
the information technology market ` and are heavily funded by the
Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and
Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board
memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and
intelligence officers). Verint is considered the world leader in
`electronic interception' and hence an ideal private sector candidate
for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world's largest billing service
for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007,
offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies
in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call
traffic among U.S. residents. The companies' operations, sources
suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted
trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans
for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers
(particularly organized crime). `The fact of the vulnerability of our
telecom backbone is indisputable,' says a high level U.S. intelligence
officer who has monitored the fears among federal agents. `How it came
to pass, why nothing has been done, who has done what ` these are the
incendiary questions.' If the allegations are true, the electronic
communications gathered up by the NSA and other U.S. intelligence
agencies might be falling into the hands of a foreign government.
Reviewing the available evidence, Robert David Steele, a former CIA
case officer and today one of the foremost international proponents
for `public intelligence in the public interest,' tells me that
`Israeli penetration of the entire US telecommunications system means
that NSA's warrantless wiretapping actually means Israeli warrantless
wiretapping.'
As early as 1999, the National Security Agency issued a warning that
records of U.S. government telephone calls were ending up in foreign
hands ` Israel's, in particular. In 2002, assistant U.S. Attorney
General Robert F. Diegelman issued an eyes only memo on the matter to
the chief information technology (IT) officers at the Department of
Justice. IT officers oversee everything from the kind of cell phones
agents carry to the wiretap equipment they use in the field; their
defining purpose is secure communications. Diegelman's memo was a
reiteration, with overtones of reprimand, of a new IT policy
instituted a year earlier, in July 2001, in an internal Justice order
titled `2640.2D Information Technology Security.' Order 2640.2D stated
that `Foreign Nationals shall not be authorized to access or assist in
the development, operation, management or maintenance of Department IT
systems.' This might not seem much to blink at in the post-9/11 intel
and security overhaul. Yet 2640.2D was issued a full two months before
the Sept. 11 attacks. What group or groups of foreign nationals had
close access to IT systems at the Department of Justice? Israelis,
according to officials in law enforcement. One former Justice
Department computer crimes prosecutor tells me, speaking on
background, `I've heard that the Israelis can listen in to our calls.'
Retired CIA counterterrorism and counterintelligence officer Philip
Giraldi says this is par for the course in the history of Israeli
penetrations in the U.S. He notes that Israel always features
prominently in the annual FBI report called `Foreign Economic
Collection and Industrial Espionage' ` Israel is second only to China
in stealing U.S. business secrets. The 2005 FBI report states, for
example, `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 sizable
armaments industry.' A key Israeli method, warns the FBI report, is
computer intrusion.
In the big picture of U.S. government spying on Americans, the story
ties into 1994 legislation called the Communications Assistance for
Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which effected a sea-change in methods
of electronic surveillance. Gone are the days when wiretaps were
conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA
mandated sweeping new powers of surveillance for the digital age, by
linking remote computers into the routers and hubs of telecom firms `
a spyware apparatus linked in real-time, all the time, to American
telephones and modems. CALEA made spy equipment an inextricable
ligature in our telephonic life. Top officials at the FBI pushed for
the legislation, claiming it would improve security, but many field
agents have spoken up to complain that CALEA has done exactly the
opposite. The data-mining techniques employed by NSA in its
wiretapping exploits could not have succeeded without the technology
mandated by CALEA. It could be argued that CALEA is the hidden heart
of the NSA wiretap scandal.
THE VERINT CONNECTION
According to former CIA officer Giraldi and other US intelligence
sources, software manufactured and maintained by Verint, Inc. handles
most of American law enforcement's wiretaps. Says Giraldi: `Phone
calls are intercepted, recorded, and transmitted to U.S. investigators
by Verint, which claims that it has to be `hands on' with its
equipment to maintain the system.' Giraldi also notes Verint is
reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its R&D costs by the Israeli
Ministry of Industry and Trade. According to Giraldi, the extent of
the use of Verint technology `is considered classified,' but sources
have spoken out and told Giraldi they are worried about the security
of Verint wiretap systems. The key concern, says Giraldi, is the issue
of a `trojan' embedded in the software.
A trojan in information security hardware/software is a backdoor that
can be accessed remotely by parties who normally would not have access
to the secure system. Allegations of massive trojan spying have rocked
the Israeli business community in recent years. An AP article in 2005
noted, `Top Israeli blue chip companies¦are suspected of using
illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals
and enemies.' Over 40 companies have come under scrutiny. `It is the
largest cybercrime case in Israeli history,' Boaz Guttmann, a veteran
cybercrimes investigator with the Israeli national police, tells
me. `Trojan horse espionage is part of the way of life of companies in
Israel. It's a culture of spying.'
This is of course the culture on which the U.S. depends for much of
its secure software for data encryption and telephonic security.
`There's been a lot discussion of how much we should trust security
products by Israeli telecom firms,' says Philip Zimmerman, one of the
legendary pioneers of encryption technology (Zimmerman invented the
cryptographic and privacy authentication system known as Pretty Good
Privacy, or PGP, now one of the basic modern standards for
communications encryption). `Generally speaking, I wouldn't trust
stuff made overseas for data security,' says Zimmerman. `A guy at NSA
InfoSec' ` the information security division of the National Security
Agency ` `once told me, `Foreign-made crypto is our nightmare.' But to
be fair, as our domestic electronics industry becomes weaker and
weaker, foreign-made becomes inevitable.' Look at where the expertise
is, Zimmerman adds: Among the ranks of the International Association
for Cryptological Research, which meets annually, there is a higher
percentage of Israelis than any other nationality. The Israeli-run
Verint is today the provider of telecom interception systems deployed
in over 50 countries.
Carl Cameron, chief politics correspondent at Fox News Channel, is one
of the few reporters to look into federal agents' deepening distress
over possible trojans embedded in Verint technology. In a wide-ranging
four-part investigation into Israeli-linked espionage that aired in
December 2001 [watch entire FOX series below], Cameron made a number
of startling discoveries regarding Verint, then known as Comverse
Infosys. Sources told Cameron that `while various FBI inquiries into
Comverse have been conducted over the years,' the inquiries had `been
halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for
leaks.' Cameron also noted a 1999 internal FCC document indicating
that `several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too
many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap
system.' Much of this access was facilitated through `remote
maintenance.'
Immediately following the Cameron report, Comverse Infosys changed its
name to Verint, saying the company was `maturing.' (The company issued
no response to Cameron's allegations, nor did it threaten a lawsuit.)
Meanwhile, security officers at DEA, an adjunct of the Justice
Department, began examining the agency's own relationship with
Comverse/Verint. In 1997, DEA transformed its wiretap infrastructure
with the $25 million procurement from Comverse/Verint of a technology
called `T2S2' ` `translation and transcription support services' `
with Comverse/Verint contracted to provide the hardware and software,
plus `support services, training, upgrades, enhancements and options
throughout the life of the contract,' according to the `contracts and
acquisitions' notice posted on the DEA's website. This was
unprecedented. Prior to 1997, DEA staff used equipment that was
developed and maintained in-house.
But now Cameron's report raised some ugly questions of vulnerability
in T2S2.
The director of security programs at DEA, Heidi Raffanello, was
rattled enough to issue an internal communiqué on the matter,
dated Dec. 18, 2001, four days after the final installment in the
Cameron series. Referencing the Fox News report, she worried that
`Comverse remote maintenance' was `not addressed in the C&A [contracts
and acquisitions] process.' She also cited the concerns in Justice
Department order 2640.2D, and noted that the `Administrator' ` meaning
then DEA head Asa Hutchinson ` had been briefed. Then there was this
stunner: `It remains unclear if Comverse personnel are security
cleared, and if so, who are they and what type of clearances are on
record¦.Bottom line we should have caught it.' On its face, the
Raffanello memo is a frightening glimpse into a bureaucracy caught
with its pants down.
American law enforcement was not alone in suspecting T2S2 equipment
purchased from Comverse/Verint. In November 2002, sources in the Dutch
counterintelligence community began airing what they claimed was
`strong evidence that the Israeli secret service has uncontrolled
access to confidential tapping data collected by the Dutch police and
intelligence services,' according to the Dutch broadcast radio station
Evangelische Omroep (EO). In January 2003, the respected Dutch
technology and computing magazine, c't, ran a follow-up to the EO
scoop, headlined `Dutch Tapping Room not Kosher.' The article began:
`All tapping equipment of the Dutch intelligence services and half the
tapping equipment of the national police force¦is insecure and is
leaking information to Israel.' The writer, Paul Wouters, goes on to
discuss the T2S2 tap-ware `delivered to the government in the last few
years by the Israeli company Verint,' and quoted several cryptography
experts on the viability of remote monitoring of encrypted `blackbox'
data. Wouters writes of this `blackbox cryptography':
¦a very important part of strong cryptography is a good random
source. Without a proper random generator, or worse, with an
intentionally crippled random generator, the resulting ciphertext
becomes trivial to break. If there is one single unknown chip involved
with the random generation, such as a hardware accelerator chip, all
bets are off¦.If you can trust the hardware and you have access to
the source code, then it should theoretically be possible to verify
the system. This, however, can just not be done without the source
code.
Yet, as Wouters was careful to add, `when the equipment was bought
from the Israelis, it was agreed that no one except [Verint] personnel
was authorized to touch the systems¦.Source code would never be
available to anyone.'
Cryptography pioneer Philip Zimmerman warns that `you should never
trust crypto if the source code isn't published. Open source code
means two things: if there are deliberate backdoors in the crypto,
peer review will reveal those backdoors. If there are inadvertent bugs
in the crypto, they too will be discovered. Whether the weaknesses are
by accident or design, they will be found. If the weakness is by
design, they will not want to publish the source code. Some of the
best products we know have been subject to open source review: Linux;
Apache. The most respected crypto products have been tested through
open source. The little padlock in the corner when you visit a
browser? You're going through a protocol called Secure Socket
Layer. Open source tested and an Internet standard. FireFox, the
popular and highly secure browser, is all open source.'
THE CALEA CONNECTION
None of U.S. law enforcement's problems with Amdocs and Verint could
have come to pass without the changes mandated by the Communications
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which, as noted, sought to
lock spyware into telecom networks. CALEA, to cite the literature,
requires that terrestrial carriers, cellular phone services and other
telecom entities enable the government to intercept `all wire and oral
communications carried by the carrier concurrently with their
transmission.' T2S2 technology fit the bill perfectly: Tied into the
network, T2S2 bifurcates the line without interrupting the data-stream
(a T2S2 bifurcation is considered virtually undetectable). One half of
the bifurcated line is recorded and stored in a remote tapping room;
the other half continues on its way from your mouth or keyboard to
your friend's. (What is `T2S2'? To simplify: The S2 computer collects
and encrypts the data; the T2 receives and decrypts.)
CALEA was touted as a law enforcement triumph, the work of decades of
lobbying by FBI. Director Louis Freeh went so far as to call it the
bureau's `highest legislative priority.' Indeed, CALEA was the widest
expansion of the government's electronic surveillance powers since the
Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, which mandated carefully
limited conditions for wiretaps. Now the government could use coercive
powers in ordering telecom providers to `devise solutions' to law
enforcement's `emerging technology-generated problems' (imposing a
$10,000 per day penalty on non-compliant carriers). The government's
hand would be permanently inserted into the design of the nation's
telecom infrastructure. Law professor Lillian BeVier, of the
University of Virginia, writes extensively of the problems inherent to
CALEA. `The rosy scenario imagined by the drafters cannot survive a
moment's reflection,' BeVier observes. `While it is conventionally
portrayed as `but the latest chapter in the thirty year history of the
federal wiretap laws,' CALEA is not simply the next installment of a
technologically impelled statutory evolution. Instead, in terms of the
nature and magnitude of the interests it purports to `compromise' and
the industry it seeks to regulate, in terms of the extent to which it
purports to coerce private sector solutions to public sector problems,
and in terms of the foothold it gives government to control the design
of telecommunications networks, the Act is a paradigm shift. On close
and disinterested inspection, moreover, CALEA appears to embody
potentially wrong-headed sacrifices of privacy principles, flawed and
incomplete conceptions of law enforcement's ends and means, and an
imperfect appreciation of the incompatible incentives of the players
in the game that would inevitably be played in the process of its
implementation.'(emphasis mine)
The real novelty ` and the danger ` of CALEA is that telecom networks
are today configured so that they are vulnerable to surveillance.
`We've deliberately weakened the computer and phone networks, making
them much less secure, much more vulnerable both to legal surveillance
and illegal hacking,' says former DOJ cybercrimes prosecutor Mark
Rasch. `Everybody is much less secure in their communications since
the adopting of CALEA. So how are you going to have secure
communications? You have to secure the communications themselves,
because you cannot have a secure network. To do this, you need
encryption. What CALEA forced businesses and individuals to do is go
to third parties to purchase encryption technology. What is the major
country that the U.S. purchases IT encryption from overseas? I would
say it's a small Middle Eastern democracy. What we've done is the
worst of all worlds. We've made sure that most communications are
subject to hacking and interception by bad guys. At the same time, the
bad guys ` organized crime, terrorist operations ` can very easily
encrypt their communications.' It is notable that the first
CALEA-compliant telecom systems installed in the U.S. were courtesy of
Verint Inc.
THE AMDOCS CONNECTION
If a phone is dialed in the U.S., Amdocs Ltd. likely has a record of
it, which includes who you dialed and how long you spoke. This is
known as transactional call data. Amdocs' biggest customers in the
U.S. are AT&T and Verizon, which have collaborated widely with the
Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping programs. Transactional
call data has been identified as a key element in NSA data mining to
look for `suspicious' patterns in communications.
Over the last decade, Amdocs has been the target of several
investigations looking into whether individuals within the company
shared sensitive U.S. government data with organized crime elements
and Israeli intelligence services. Beginning in 1997, the FBI
conducted a far-flung inquiry into alleged spying by an Israeli
employee of Amdocs, who worked on a telephone billing program
purchased by the CIA. According to Paul Rodriguez and J. Michael
Waller, of Insight Magazine, which broke the story in May of 2000, the
targeted Israeli had apparently also facilitated the tapping of
telephone lines at the Clinton White House (recall Monica Lewinsky's
testimony before Ken Starr: the president, she claimed, had warned her
that `a foreign embassy' was listening to their phone sex, though
Clinton under oath later denied saying this). More than two dozen
intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials
told Insight that a `daring operation,' run by Israeli intelligence,
had `intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the
most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis.'
Insight's chief investigative reporter, Paul Rodriguez, told me in an
e-mail that the May 2000 spy probe story `was (and is) one of the
strangest I've ever worked on, considering the state of alert, concern
and puzzlement' among federal agents. According to the Insight report,
FBI investigators were particularly unnerved over discovering the
targeted Israeli subcontractor had somehow gotten his hands on the
FBI's `most sensitive telephone numbers, including the Bureau's
`black' lines used for wiretapping.' `Some of the listed numbers,' the
Insight article added, `were lines that FBI counterintelligence used
to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation. The hunted were
tracking the hunters.' Rodriguez confirmed the panic this caused in
American intel. `It's a huge security nightmare,' one senior
U.S. official told him. `The implications are severe,' said a second
official. `All I can tell you is that we think we know how it was
done,' a third intelligence executive told Rodriguez. `That alone is
serious enough, but it's the unknown that has such deep consequences.'
No charges, however, were made public in the case. (What happened
behind the scenes depends on who you talk to in law enforcement: When
FBI counterintelligence sought a warrant for the Israeli subcontractor,
the Justice Department strangely refused to cooperate, and in the end
no warrant was issued. FBI investigators were baffled.)
London Sunday Times reporter Uzi Mahnaimi quotes sources in Tel Aviv
saying that during this period e-mails from President Clinton had also
been intercepted by Israeli intelligence. Mahnaimi's May 2000 article
reveals that the operation involved `hacking into White House computer
systems during intense speculation about the direction of the peace
process.' Israeli intelligence had allegedly infiltrated a company
called Telrad, subcontracted by Nortel, to develop a communications
system for the White House. According to the Sunday Times, `Company
managers were said to have been unaware that virtually undetectable
chips installed during manufacture made it possible for outside agents
to tap into the flow of data from the White House.'
In 1997, detectives with the Los Angeles Police Department, working in
tandem with the Secret Service, FBI, and DEA, found themselves
suffering a similar inexplicable collapse in communications
security. LAPD was investigating Israeli organized crime: drug runners
and credit card thieves based in Israel and L.A., with tentacles in
New York, Miami, Las Vegas, and Egypt. The name of the crime group and
its members remains classified in `threat assessment' papers this
reporter obtained from LAPD, but the documents list in some detail the
colorful scope of the group's operations: $1.4 million stolen from
Fidelity Investments in Boston through sophisticated computer fraud;
extortion and kidnapping of Israelis in L.A. and New York; cocaine
distribution in connection with Italian, Russian, Armenian and Mexican
organized crime; money laundering; and murder. The group also had
access to extremely sophisticated counter-surveillance technology and
data, which was a disaster for LAPD. According to LAPD internal
documents, the Israeli crime group obtained the unlisted home phone,
cell phone, and pager numbers of some 500 of LAPD's narcotics
investigators, as well as the contact information for scores of
federal agents ` black info, numbers unknown even to the
investigators' kin. The Israelis even set up wiretaps of LAPD
investigators, grabbing from cell-phones and landlines conversations
with other agents ` FBI and DEA, mostly ` whose names and phone
numbers were also traced and grabbed.
LAPD was horrified, and as the word got out of the seeming total
breakdown in security, the shock spread to agents at DEA, FBI and even
CIA, who together spearheaded an investigation. It turned out that the
source of much of this black intel could be traced to a company called
J&J Beepers, which was getting its phone numbers from a billing
service that happened to be a subsidiary of Amdocs.
A source familiar with the inquiries into Amdocs put to me several
theories regarding the allegations of espionage against the
company. `Back in the early 1970s, when it became clear that AT&T was
going to be broken up and that there was an imminent information and
technology revolution, Israel understood that it had a highly-educated
and highly-worldly population and it made a few calculated economic
and diplomatic discoveries,' the source says. `One was that
telecommunications was something they could do: because it doesn't
require natural resources, but just intellect, training and cash. They
became highly involved in telecommunications. Per capita, Israel is
probably the strongest telecommunications nation in the world. AT&T
break-up occurs in 1984; Internet technology explodes; and Israel has
all of these companies aggressively buying up contracts in the form of
companies like Amdocs. Amdocs started out as a tiny company and now
it's the biggest billing service for telecommunications in the
world. They get this massive telecommunications network underway. Like
just about everything in Israel, it's a government sponsored
undertaking.
`So it's been argued that Amdocs was using its billing records as an
intelligence-gathering exercise because its executive board over the
years has been heavily peopled by retired and current members of the
Israeli government and military. They used this as an opportunity to
collect information about worldwide telephone calls. As an
intelligence-gathering phenomenon, an analyst with an MIT degree in
algorithms would rather have 50 pages of who called who than 50 hours
of actual conversation. Think about conversations with friends,
husbands, wives. That raw information doesn't mean anything. But if
there's a pattern of 30 phone calls over the course of a day, that can
mean a lot. It's a much simpler algorithm.'
Another anonymous source ` a former CIA operative ` tells me that
U.S. intelligence agents who have aired their concerns about Verint
and Amdocs have found themselves attacked from all sides. `Once it's
learned that an individual is doing footwork on this [the
Verint/Amdocs question], he or she is typically identified somehow as
a troublemaker, an instigator, and is hammered mercilessly,' says the
former CIA operative. `Typically, what happens is the individual finds
him or herself in a scenario where their retirement is jeopardized `
and worse. The fact that if you simply take a look at this question,
all of a sudden you're an Arabist or anti-Semitic ` it's pure baloney,
because I will tell you first-hand that people whose heritage lies
back in that country have heavily worked this matter. You can't buy
that kind of dedication.'
The former CIA operative adds, `There is no defined policy, at this
time, for how to deal with this [security issues involving Israel] `
other than wall it off, contain it. It's not cutting it. Not after
9/11. The funeral pyre that burned on for months at the bottom of the
rubble told a lot of people they did not need to be `politically
correct.' The communications nexuses [i.e. Amdocs/Verint] didn't occur
yesterday; they started many years ago. And that's a major
embarrassment to organizations that would like to say they're on top
of things and not co-opted or compromised. As you start to work this,
you soon learn that many people have either looked the other way or
have been co-opted along the way. Some people, when they figure out
what has occurred, are highly embarrassed to realize that they've been
duped. Because many of them are bureaucrats, they don't want to be
made to look as stupid as they are. So they just go along with it.
Sometimes, it's just that simple.'
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress