Even though I'm troubled that the NSA has allegedly spied on U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, I am also rather amused at the righteous indignation expressed by foreign governments and their leaders. As has been said previously in this thread, every government spies on every other government... the only thing open to debate is the degree to which that happens. Anyone who believes otherwise is (willfully) naive.
Especially amusing to me are the Americans who are wringing their hand about what the NSA has/is doing, but when it has been proven time and time again that our "friend and ally", Israel, has and is engaged in the exact same activity against the United States government, they suddenly develop a case of Tongue Tieditis. IMO, this is just another clear example that we have more than a few people who wear our jersey but aren't really playing for the home team.
The Israeli Spy Ring
"Israel does not spy on the United States of America."
-- Mark Regev, a spokesman at the Israeli embassy in Washington
Prior to 9/11, the FBI had discovered the presence of a massive spy ring inside the United States run by the government of Israel. This seems a harsh gratitude from a nation which obtains 10% of its annual budget from the American taxpayer, $3+ billion a year. Over the years, American taxpayers have been required to send Israel more than four times what the US spent to go to the moon.
What Israel has done in return was to set up government subsidized telecommunications companies which operate here in the United States. One of these companies is Amdocs, which provides billing and directory assistance for 90% of the phone companies in the USA. Amdocs' main computer center for billing is actually in Israel and allows those with access to do what intelligence agencies call "traffic analysis"; a picture of someone's activities based on a pattern of who they are calling and when. Another Israeli telecom company is Comverse Infosys, which subcontracts the installation of the automatic tapping equipment now built into every phone system in America. Comverse maintains its own connections to all this phone tapping equipment, insisting that it is for maintenance purposes only. However, Converse has been named as the most likely source for leaked information regarding telephone calls by law enforcement that derailed several investigations into not only espionage, but drug running as well. Yet another Israeli telecom company is Odigo, which provides the core message passing system for all the "Instant Message" services. Two hours before the attacks on the World Trade Towers, Odigo employees received a warning. Odigo has an office 2 blocks from the former location of the World Trade Towers.
Let us be clear here. There is nothing benign about Israel spying on the United States. When Jonathan Pollard stole our nuclear secrets (which your taxes paid to develop) and sent them to Israel, Israel did not hesitate to trade those secrets to the USSR in exchange for increased emigration quotas.
The implication of these facts is that the billions of our tax dollars sent to Israel (while women and children sleep in America's alleys and eat out of trash bins) have bought and paid for a monstrous phone tracking and phone tapping system that can eavesdrop on almost any phone call in America. Even the White House phones were open to such tapping by listening in on the other end outside the White House itself.
This actually happened. The Ken Starr report on Whitewater describes how Bill Clinton informed Monica Lewinsky that their phone sex conversations had been recorded. At the same time, Clinton ordered the FBI to cease the hunt for an Israeli mole known to be operating inside the White House itself!
Kind of funny that I didn't see any in-depth, investigative news reports about these activities on NBC, CBS, ABC, Bloomberg or Fox. Well, to be fair, there was a Fox News report. But once people began using it as a reference and asking questions, Fox forbade sites from linking to it and it has since been removed. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I do find that rather interesting. If it walks like a duck and quacks, I wouldn't be convinced that it was a horse. But what do I know? The media and our bought & paid for politicians (Dems and Repubs - especially Evangelical types) would suggest that the creature be entered in the Kentucky Derby, just to protect their cover.
