OBAMA’S SPYING VIA NSA TREACHEROUS: BETRAYALS REACH INTO ISRAEL’S FRONT YARD…Commentary By Adina Kutnicki

And this brings us to Jonathan Pollard, the American Jewish naval intelligence analyst who is now serving the 29th year of his life sentence for transferring classified materials to Israel.

Snowden’s revelations and the story of the CIA’s anti-Israel front group in Washington make clear that US indignation over Israel’s fielding of an agent in Washington was equal parts self-righteousness and hypocrisy.

There was nothing extraordinary in Israel’s efforts to gain information that its American ally didn’t wish to share with it. Allies spy on each other. And they use sympathetic locals to achieve their ends. South Korean Americans have been caught spying for South Korea. Taiwanese Americans have been caught spying for Taiwan, and so on.

US prosecutors prosecuted, and US judges convicted these agents of friendly countries for their criminal activities. The average prison term meted out to such agents of friendly governments runs from four to seven years. Their average time served in prison is two to four years.

Pollard was different not because of what he did, nor even, necessarily because he transferred classified information to Israel rather than to Britain.

Pollard was unique because he was an American Jew transferring classified information to Israel. And the discriminatory treatment he has received from the US government owes entirely to the same institutional anti-Jewish bias that caused the CIA to form the first anti-Israel lobby in Washington, just three years after Israel gained independence.……

Ever since NSAgate revealed many of its skeletons, foreign friends came to realize that they were very much in the dark. And what they thought they knew, re the rules of the spy “game”, was something much more insidious. 

Snowden’s revelations paves the way towards what Obama Inc. is really afraid of. 

Many Israelis were scandalized when documents released by Edward Snowden revealed that their best friend, America, had in 2009 targeted a former prime minister and defense minister for secret surveillance. But their political leaders were not surprised. For years, the United States has been running a complex eavesdropping and surveillance web to spy on friends and foes alike, including Israel. Satellites gather and transmit data to command centers, “informers” operate in the field and the most fertile sources of all are not human but the instruments which bug cell phones, tablets and social networks.

The US National Security Agency, NSA, exposed by its former agent the whistleblower Edward Snowden, can monitor these devices whenever it wants, just by beaming its instruments at a defined country, location, group of people or topics.
If, for instance, NSA electronically obtains a list of Israeli servicemen, their cell phone numbers and credit cards, its monitors can keep each one under constant surveillance.

The same applies to the personnel of Israel’s Air Force, Aerospace industry and other high-tech military manufacturers, such as Elbit and Rafael. Those lists may safely be assumed to be already in the agency’s hands.
To collect videos and images, American spy agencies only have to pan through such data gold mines as YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, the last of which was recently crowned Content Curation. This is because Pinterest does much of the intelligence watchers’ work for them by assorting the material according to subject and field of interest and so unknowingly providing them with neat data packages.

The network catching on like wildfire of late is WhatsApp.

It is also a favorite of Israel’s elementary schoolchildren for swapping their thoughts and news.
A child may explain he or she can’t join the gang that afternoon because his or her father, an Air Force colonel or captain of a naval vessel, is just home from Crete or Sardinia. This will tell the eavesdropper that Israeli crews have been changed at those bases.

An Israeli officer driving his car only has to consult Waze for a short cut to his secret destination to reveal it to a clandestine watcher.

So who controls these armies of spies and directs their focus?

Those are murky waters which are virtually uncharted, as President Barack Obama implied obliquely in the comments he made at his end-of-year news conference Friday, Dec. 20. To still the uproar against indiscriminate spying on Americans, he promised a review and possibly reforms of the NSA, adding tellingly: “Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we necessarily should.”

Snowden’s revelations about the spies sitting on the phones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazilian President Dilma Roussef have got Washington into hot water. They also revealed the negligence of their own security services.

However, Israel, to our certain knowledge, has lived with this unwanted American attention from its earliest days. In the 1980s, when the late Menahem Begin was prime minister, an odd-looking vehicle sprouting a forest of antennae stood permanently and quite visibly beneath his office window in Jerusalem.
His staff identified it quite frankly as a mobile American listening station. The measures used later were a lot more sophisticated. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and other Israeli officials, in their turn, had their e-mails intercepted regularly.

But after 2009, Washington introduced a high-powered, multilayered system of intelligence-gathering – especially against Israel, about which neither Snowden nor the Israelis have been forthcoming. This system had a single narrow focus: to pick up the slightest murmur or clue suggesting that Israel was about to launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, which it had threatened to do without prior notice to Washington.

Listening in on the laconic conversations Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu held with Ehud Barak was not enough. What the spies were told to look for was out-of-the-way conduct, such as an order placed suddenly for a large quantity of aircraft fuel, or the import of an unusual amount of emergency medical equipment.

At the high noon of this period of mistrust, US officers of the highest ranks began dropping in on Israel with increasingly frequency. Every week to ten days, some many-starred general or fast-talking Pentagon official arrived for a visit. They were told to ferret out any signs of Israel getting ready for an attack on Iran in time for Washington to step in and stop it.

These emissaries had two directives:

1. To maintain a tight grip on the prime minister, defense minister and chief of staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz and other IDF generals and keep them in sight at all times;

2. To pick up on their every nuance of speech or behavior for signals of hidden activity too subtle for monitoring devices to register.
The tempo of these visits tapered off when Washington concluded that Israel had given up on a military strike on Iran at that stage.

However, the spying did not.

DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report that in recent months Israeli complained to the Obama administration about hotel suites which undercover agents had rented in Jerusalem at sites overlooking a secret military installation frequented by high Israeli officials for their most private consultations. The Netanyahu government asked Washington to stop this underhand surveillance. But meanwhile certain other – less friendly – Western spy agencies had caught on and took suites at the same location.
The conclusion from these incidents is that US clandestine surveillance of Israel is unlikely to stop in the foreseeable future – and not just against key figures and military personnel, but also involving economic and industrial espionage.

To combat the expanding exposure of its secrets, Israel has been introducing “sterile spaces” impenetrable to illicit penetration as well as using tricks to misdirect attention. However, the Americans and other interested parties keep on looking for holes in these barriers – and so the contest goes on.

As to NSAgate and whatever one thinks about Snowden’s actions, rest assured he shines a spotlight on the level of duplicity emanating out of the bowels of Washington.

NOT only in regard to foreign spying, but most pointedly in relation to Obama Inc’s violations of the Constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, amply demonstrated through the purging: an omerta re Islam + terror within America’s power centers eviscerates NSA’s domestic spying. 

So there you have it. As Muslim Americans remain out of bounds…off limits…hands off…everything else is a GO.