Two Israeli companies, including one exposed by EIR in 2001-02 as under investigation in the U.S. for being part of a massive Israeli espionage network (see EIR, Feb. 1, 2002), have been identified as playing a central role in handling the NSA’s acquisition of call information from major telecommunications companies.
* VERINT Systems, formerly known as Comverse Systems, a U.S.-based subsidiary of the Israeli Comverse Technologies, was reported by author and NSA expert James Bamford to have been designated by the NSA to process all the call information (metadata) obtained from Verizon. By the time it got the NSA contract, Comverse was already well-known as a leading firm in wiretapping, or what it called the “lawful interception market” for law-enforcement agencies. In 2002, about the time NSA launched its Stellar Wind operation, tapping into the major telecoms, former NSA Director Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan joined the Board of Directors of Comverse-Verint.
* NARUS, another Israeli company, similarly processes all the information obtained from AT&T for the NSA. Narus was founded in Israel in 1997, and in 2010 was acquired by Boeing. Narus’s NarusInsight supercomputer system, which was installed in AT&T’s San Francisco Internet facility and identified by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, gave rise to a famous 2006 class action lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, Hepting v. AT&T.
Additionally, AMDOCS, another Israeli telecommunications firm profiled by EIR in 2001-02, specializes in analyzing (i.e. data-mining) customer billing records for major U.S. telecoms; this data is similar to the “metadata” collected by the NSA on all phone calls in the U.S. Some investigators believe Amdocs is also involved in the NSA Stellar Wind program; indeed, it would be surprising if they were not.
Ha’aretz reported on June 8 that both Verint and Narus have ties to both the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Ha’aretz also raises the question of whether Mossad is a party to the intelligence-sharing arrangement between the U.S.’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ, Britain’s Cheltenham-based signals-intelligence agency.
larouchepac.com, June 12, 2013