WARRANTLESS SURVEILLANCE PROVES THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION IS A DECEPTIVE JOKE

The Government Long Ago Sold Us Out To The Highest Bidder. The Highest Bidder, By The Way, Has Always Been The Deep State.

What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.

Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.

Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government’s spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.

Basically, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.

As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) explains:

“If you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy. That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a Wi-Fi router, a phone, or a computer. So think for a moment about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.

After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. The people are not just the engineers who install, maintain, and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government can deputize any of these people against their will, and force them in effect to become what amounts to an agent for Big Brother – for example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.

This could all happen without any oversight whatsoever: The FISA Court won’t know about it, Congress won’t know about it. Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. Unless they can afford high-priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all.”

This is how an effort to reform Section 702 has quickly steamrollered into an expansion of the government’s surveillance powers.

We should have seen this coming.

After all, the Police State doesn’t relinquish power easily, the Surveillance State doesn’t look favorably on anything that might weaken its control, and Big Brother doesn’t like to be restricted.

What most Americans don’t get is that even without Section 702 in play, the government will still target the populace for warrantless, suspicionless mass surveillance, because that’s how the police state maintains its stranglehold on power.

These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg.

For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.

This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military.

It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful.

It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins. They have become one and the same entity.

The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the American government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.

Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking you. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. These corporate trackers monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere and share the data with the government.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between – now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to collect data and spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies – the police, public health officials, transportation, etc. – and make it accessible for all those in power.

These government snoops are constantly combing through and harvesting vast quantities of our communications, then storing it in massive databases for years. Once this information—collected illegally and without any probable cause—is ingested into NSA servers, other government agencies can often search through the databases to make criminal cases against Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism or anything national security-related.

Empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment.

Talk about a system rife for abuse.

Now, the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.

Don’t believe it.

The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.

Indeed, the government has become the biggest lawbreaker of all.

It’s telling that even after it was revealed that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state’s vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times in order to target American citizens, we’re still debating whether they should be allowed to continue to sidestep the Fourth Amendment.

This is how the government operates, after all: our objections are routinely overruled and our rights trampled underfoot.

It works the same every time.

First, the government seeks out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis – in this case, warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism – and then they use those powers against the American people.

According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702 in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.

This abuse of its so-called national security powers is par for the course for the government.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, intelligence agencies conduct roughly 200,000 of these warrantless “backdoor” searches for Americans’ private communications each year.

No one is spared.

Many of the targets of these searches have done nothing wrong.

Government agents have spied on the communications of protesters, members of Congress, crime victims, journalists, and political donors, among many others.

The government has claimed that its spying on Americans is simply “incidental,” as though it were an accident, but it fully intends to collect this information.

As journalist Jake Johnson warns, under an expanded Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies “could, without a warrant, compel gyms, grocery stores, barber shops, and other businesses to hand over communications data.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database – the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT – that monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests in the stock market.”

Journalist Leo Hohmann reports that the government is also handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

Ask the government why it’s carrying out this far-reaching surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting in response to every so-called crisis to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

What this is really all about, however, is control.

What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.

When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out dragnet searches of customer transactions – warrantlessly and without probable cause – for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.

You don’t have to do anything illegal.

For that matter, you don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.

Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.

All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.

As long as the government is allowed to weaponize its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, it’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.

THE CIA NOW WANTS EVEN MORE POWER TO SPY ON AMERICANS IN VIOLATION OF THE CONSTITUTION

You Need To Be Aware Of The Federal Intelligence Agencies Spying On All Of Us Without Search Warrants As Required By The Fourth Amendment To The Constitution.

These agencies say they believe that the Fourth Amendment – which protects the individual right to privacy – only regulates law enforcement and does not apply to domestic spying.

There is no basis in the constitutional text, history or judicial interpretations for such a limiting and toothless view of this constitutional guarantee. The courts have held that the Fourth Amendment restrains government – all government. Last week, the CIA asked Congress to expand its current spying in the United States.

Here is the backstory.

When the CIA was created in 1947, members of Congress who feared the establishment here of the type of domestic surveillance apparatus that the Allies had just defeated in Germany insisted that the new CIA have no role in American law enforcement and no legal ability to spy within America. The legislation creating the CIA contains those unambiguous limitations.

Nevertheless, we know that CIA agents are present in all 50 statehouses in the United States. They didn’t arrive there until after Dec. 4, 1981. That’s the date that President Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, which purports to give the CIA authority to spy in America – supposedly looking for narcotics from foreign countries – but keeps from law enforcement whatever it finds.

Stated differently, while Reagan purported to authorize the CIA to defy the limitations imposed upon it by the Constitution and by federal law, he insisted on a “wall” of separation between domestic spying and law enforcement.

So, if the CIA using unconstitutional spying discovered that a janitor in the Russian Embassy in Washington was really a KGB colonel who abused his wife in their suburban Maryland home, under E.O. 12333, it could continue to spy upon him in defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the CIA charter, but it could not reveal to Maryland prosecutors – who can only use evidence lawfully obtained – any evidence of his domestic violence.

All this changed 20 years later when President George W. Bush demolished Reagan’s “wall” between law enforcement and domestic spying and directed the CIA and other domestic spying agencies to share the fruits of their spying with the FBI.

Thus, thanks to Reagan and Bush, and their successors looking the other way, CIA agents have been engaging in fishing expeditions on a grand scale inside America for the past 20 years. Congress knows about this because all intelligence agencies are required by statute to report the extent of their spying secretly to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

This, of course, does not absolve the CIA of its presidentially authorized computer hacking crimes; rather, it gives Congress a false sense of security that it has a handle on what’s going on.

What’s going on is not government lawyers appearing before judges asking for surveillance warrants based upon probable cause of crime, as the Constitution requires. What’s going on is CIA agents going to Big Tech and paying for access to communications used by ordinary Americans. Some Big Tech firms told the CIA to take a hike. Others took the CIA’s cash and opened the spigots of their fiber-optic data to the voracious federal appetite.

If government lawyers went to a judge and demonstrated probable cause of crime – for example, that a janitor in the Russian Embassy was passing defense secrets to Moscow – surely the judge would have signed a surveillance warrant. But to the government, following the Constitution is too limiting.

Thus, by acquiring bulk data – fiber-optic data on hundreds of millions of Americans acquired without search warrants – the government avoids the time and trouble of demonstrating probable cause to a judge. But that time and trouble were intentionally baked into the Fourth Amendment so as to keep the government off our backs.

Not to be outdone by its principal rival, the FBI soon began doing the same thing – gathering bulk data without search warrants.

When Congress learned of this, it enacted legislation that banned the warrantless acquisition of bulk data. Apparently, Congress is naive enough to believe that the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency, their cousin with 60,000 domestic spies, will actually comply with federal law.

Last week, that naivete was manifested front and center when the CIA sent a letter to both congressional intelligence committees addressing its spying on foreign persons and the Americans with whom they communicate, and asking to expand that reach inside America.

The timing of the CIA’s letter coincides with a decision Congress must make in the next 10 days – whether to reenact Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, allow it to expire on April 19 or expand it as the CIA has requested. Section 702 permits warrantless spying on foreigners and the Americans whom intelligence agencies suspect communicate with them. Section 702 is an unconstitutional free pass for domestic spying.

So, notwithstanding the persistent efforts of members of Congress from both parties to limit and in some cases to prohibit the warrantless acquisition of bulk data by the CIA from Americans, the practice continues, the CIA defends it and presidents look the other way.

In 1947, Congress created the CIA monster, which today is so big and so powerful and so indifferent to the Constitution and the federal laws its agents have sworn to uphold that it can boast about its lawlessness, have no fear of defying Congress and always escape the consequences of all this largely unscathed. Even President Harry Truman, who signed the 1947 legislation into law, later acknowledged as much and condemned what the CIA had become.

You should suspect the CIA and its cousins will get away with this because they spy on Congress and possess damning personal data on members who regularly vote to increase their secret budgets.

When will we ever have a government whose officials are courageous enough to uphold the Constitution?

Don’t count on it during your lifetime unless you finally decide to be brave enough to actually support freedom rather than submit to authoritarianism as most Americans do now.

THE BIDEN REGIME SAYS CONSTITUTIONALLY REQUIRED WARRANTS ARE BAD BUT THE FSA IS GOOD

Trump Has Repeatedly Attacked The “Deep State” Concerning Misuse Of The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) To Target His 2016 Presidential Campaign.

So, Trump is actually right about at least one thing.

On Valentine’s Day, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan made it clear that it’s not some nebulous, governmental Illuminati‐style cabal seeking to retain the power to spy at scale on Americans. It’s the Biden administration itself.

Just after 6:30 p.m. last Wednesday—and after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) once again canceled a vote on an extremely controversial FISA reauthorization bill—The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein posted a clip from the White House press conference where Sullivan was asked whether Biden would veto any FISA reform bill that requires a warrant to access data collected on Americans. Since the Office of Management and Budget has not issued an official state of administration policy on any FISA bill as yet, Sullivan declined to directly answer the question. Instead, he claimed that any warrant requirement to access FISA data on Americans would not be “in the national interest” of the United States.

The national security adviser to the president of the United States, a man who absolutely has President Biden’s ear and undoubtedly knows his thinking on this issue, is claiming that requiring the FBI, NSA, and CIA to abide by the Fourth Amendment vis-à‐vis access to FISA Section 702 data is “not in the national interest.”

That’s a story that should’ve been, but was not, front page news today in every American media outlet.

It should also tell FISA reformers in the House and Senate something else. They will need a bipartisan veto‐override majority to pass any reform bill over what now seems like an inevitable Biden veto if the final reform bill does mandate warrants to access FISA Section 702 data on Americans.

If you still believe that you live in a “Constitutional Democracy” – dream on…

THE PENTAGON ATTEMPTED TO HIDE THE PURCHASE OF AMERICAN’S PRIVATE DATA WITHOUT A WARRANT

American Spy Agencies Purchased Phone Location Data And Internet Data Without A Warrant But Only Admitted It After The Appointment Of New NSA Director Was Blocked.

The American regime fought to conceal details of arrangements between it’s spy agencies and private companies tracking the whereabouts of Americans via their cell phones. Obtaining location data from phones normally requires a warrant, but police and intelligence agencies routinely pay companies instead for the data, effectively circumventing the courts and the constitution.

Ron Wyden, the senator from Oregon, informed the nation’s intelligence chief, Avril Haines, on Thursday that the Pentagon only agreed to release details about the data purchases, which had always been unclassified, after Wyden hindered the Senate’s efforts to appoint a new director of the National Security Agency. “The secrecy around data purchases was amplified,” Wyden wrote, “because intelligence agencies have sought to keep the American people in the dark.”

Wyden’s office says it’s been investigating sales of location data to the government for years, uncovering multiple ties between the Department of Defense and what the senator refers to as “shady companies” committing “flagrant violations” of people’s privacy. The companies’ practices are “not just unethical, but illegal,” he says.

Pentagon offices known to have purchased location data from these companies include the Defense Intelligence Agency and the NSA, among others. Wyden’s letter, first reported by The New York Times, indicates that the NSA is also “buying Americans’ domestic internet metadata.”

Wyden’s disclosure comes amid a fight in the House of Representatives over efforts to outlaw the purchases entirely. Last month, members of the House Judiciary Committee attached legislation doing so, known as the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, to a bill reauthorizing a contentious surveillance program known as Section 702.

The bill, originally coauthored by Wyden, nearly received a vote last month during a showdown with rival legislation introduced by the House Intelligence Committee that does not seek to ban the purchases. Congressional sources said the vote was called off at the last minute after Biden regime officials and members of the intelligence committee staged a campaign against the privacy-enhancing measures.

Intelligence officials in the House held separate meetings with members and their aides aiming to discourage support for the judiciary bill—the Protect Liberty Act—alleging that new warrant requirements would be overly burdensome for law enforcement, despite a slew of exemptions for cyberwarfare, terrorism, and espionage threats.

Six sources who attended the meetings told WIRED that intelligence committee members used images of Hamas militants in presentations to drive home its argument for relaxing limits on domestic surveillance. The message, Republican aides said, was, “it could happen here.” Three Democrats who attended meetings with representatives from the FBI, CIA, and NSA, among other agencies, described the presentation as a “scare tactic.”

The home surveillance debate, which has exploded in recent months, hampering the passing of routine legislation, has largely focused on Section 702, an authority under which the government monitors the calls, texts, and emails of foreign nationals. Section 702 is set to expire in under four months.

Both the Protect Liberty Act and its intelligence committee rival—the FISA Reform and Reauthorization Act—aim to reauthorize Section 702 into the future. In how that’s accomplished the bills are radically different. With access by the FBI to foreign intelligence for domestic investigations being the biggest point of contention, federal lawmakers can now effectively be divided into two factions: people who support surveillance warrants and people who don’t.

The pro-warrant Protect Liberty Act could receive a vote as early as next month, with its provisions banning the government from buying data as a means of evading warrant requirements. Republicans on the Hill say they can’t be sure whether House Speaker Mike Johnson will allow a vote, however, due to the intense amount of pressure he faces from the intelligence system.

“There is a lot of baloney going around about surveillance reform,” Wyden says. “Probably because some surveillance supporters are worried they won’t win an honest debate.” Please, note that constitutional protections are not discussed in the debate because the constitution no longer effectively exists.

YOU SHOULD WONDER IF THE CIA IS IN YOUR UNDERWEAR

In A Year, If A Friend Asks You If The CIA Is In Your Underwear, You’d Probably Not Take The Question Seriously. You’d Be Wrong. The CIA Is Spending Millions To Get Into Your Underwear Next Year.

So, you might want to stock up now.

Eleven years ago, when a column asked if the CIA was in your kitchen, folks who read only the title of the column mocked it. Yet, then-CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus gave a talk to CIA analysts that he fully expected to be kept secret. In the talk he revealed that CIA vendors had discovered a means to log on to the computer chips in kitchen microwave ovens and dishwashers. From there, they could listen in real time to the conversations in a kitchen if those chatting were nearby the appliances.

Unfortunately for Petraeus, but fortunately for the Constitution, one of his analysts was so critical of the CIA’s disdain for constitutional norms that the analyst recorded a major portion of Petraeus’s talk and leaked it to the media. Is the CIA in your kitchen? Yes, not physically, but virtually.

The CIA, notwithstanding a clause in its charter that prohibits it from engaging in surveillance in the United States or from engaging in any law enforcement activities, has a long history of domestic spying without search warrants.

That last phrase “without search warrants” when used in conjunction with CIA spying is redundant. The CIA does not deal with search warrants. It behaves as if the Fourth Amendment – and the First (protecting the freedom of speech and of the press) and Fifth (protecting life, liberty and property), for that matter – do not exist or somehow do not pertain to its agents.

Not long ago, a reporter was challenged to a public debate at the Conservative Political Action Conference by the general who was then the head of the National Security Agency, the CIA’s domestic surveillance cousin. The topic of the debate was whether domestic warrantless spying is constitutional. The reporter accepted the challenge and aggressively pressed the general on the notorious lack of fidelity that the 17 federal spying agencies have for the Constitution in general, and specifically the Fourth Amendment.

The general gave two answers, both of which would have flunked a bar examination. First, he argued that the Fourth Amendment only protects against unreasonable surveillance, and his 60,000 domestic spies were behaving reasonably. After the laughter died down, it was pointed out that the Supreme Court has held that all searches and seizures – all surveillance – conducted without search warrants are as a matter of law unreasonable, and thus violative of the amendment.

Then he retreated to a post-9/11 argument crafted by the Department of Justice in the George W. Bush administration. That argument offers that the Fourth Amendment only restrains law enforcement; it does not restrain the intelligence community. It was pointed out that this view is defied by both language and history.

The plain language of the amendment has no exceptions to it. Rather, it protects “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

The reporter could not let him get away with publicly trashing the document he had both sworn to preserve, protect and defend – that the Fourth Amendment was written in the aftermath of British intelligence agents breaking down the doors of colonists’ homes ostensibly looking for compliance with the Stamp Act of 1765 but really looking for subversive materials by folks whom today we call the Founding Fathers.

This brief background was presented so as to offer a flavor for the mindset of the feds who spy on us and to address the latest craze among senior level intelligence folks in the Biden administration.

Last week, the Director of National Intelligence – she is the nominal head of all 17 federal surveillance agencies – revealed to Congress that she had spent $22 million in order to develop cotton fibers that she called smart clothing. The fibers will enable the CIA and other federal spies to record audio, video and geolocation data from your shirt, pants, socks and even your underwear. She billed this as the largest single investment ever made to develop Smart ePants.

Smarty pants – how appropriate is that name for federal intrusion? Smarty pants is the jerk who can’t stop talking and won’t change the subject.

The CIA does not directly develop its ability to connect to your kitchen microwave and dishwasher or your socks and underwear. Rather, it hires outside groups to do so. In the case of smarty pants, 28 American tech firms and laboratories have helped to develop this monstrosity. Most are not household names, but some are – like the University of Virginia (which is owned by the state of Virginia), Penn State (which is owned by the state of Pennsylvania) and DuPont (which owns most of the state of Delaware).

You can’t make this stuff up. The federal government’s appetite for surveillance is quite literally insatiable. And its respect for the individual natural right to be left alone is nonexistent. It traffics in evading and avoiding the Constitution, using absurd and puerile arguments that have never been accepted by the courts, even though every single federal employee has sworn an oath of fidelity to the Constitution as it is generally understood and interpreted.

When the DNI told Congress about this – while Congress was on its summer break – not a peep was heard from anyone in Congress or from the sleepy White House for whom the DNI works.

Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government? What employee gets to spy on his bosses by putting trick textiles into the bosses’ underwear and then gets away with it? When will Congress protect our liberties? When will enough of this warrantless spying be enough?

If you believe you live in a constitutional democracy – dream on…

AMERICA’S NSA SEEMS TO BE TRYING TO STOP CONGRESS’ ATTEMPTS TO STOP ITS SPYING ON AMERICANS

America’s Intelligence And Spy Agencies Buy Large Amounts Of Data On American Citizens, Including Web Browsing Information And Data From Smartphones.

American National Security Agency (NSA) officials have been making attempts to thwart an effort by American lawmakers to effectively prevent the agency from tracking American citizens domestically without a warrant.

The amendment in question, brought forth by House Representatives Warren Davidson and Sara Jacobs, would essentially bar American agencies such as the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency from “purchasing data that would otherwise require a warrant, court order, or subpoena” to procure, according to an American media outlet that first reported on this matter.

The amendment has already been approved by the House during the consideration of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), though it remains to be seen which policies are going to be included in the Senate version of this bill, the media outlet points out. Now, NSA officials have been reportedly approaching lawmakers and trying to convince them to oppose the aforementioned amendment.

While the NSA previously did confirm that it uses data obtained from “commercial” sources for cyber defense purposes, it was not immediately clear to what extent it uses such means to procure the data on people’s location and web-browsing, the media outlet notes, adding that the agency did not respond to their multiple requests for comment.

A declassified Office of the Director of National Intelligence report that made headlines in the United States last month also confirmed that American intelligence and spy agencies do buy large amounts of commercially available data on American citizens, including web browsing information and data from smartphones.

If you think your rights are protected by a Constitution – think again.

LEARN ABOUT THE BIGGEST FBI SPY SCANDAL OF THE YEAR

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Opinion Revealed That The FBI Violated The Constitutional Rights Of 278,000 Americans In 2020 And 2021 With Warrantless Searches Of Their Email Etc.

For each American that the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the FBI illicitly surveiled almost a thousand additional Americans. This is only the latest federal surveillance scandal stretching back to the years after 9/11.

The FISA law was enacted in 1978 to curb the rampant illegal political spying exposed during the Richard Nixon administration. After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration decided that the president was entitled to order the National Security Agency to vacuum up Americans’ emails and other data without a warrant. After The New York Times exposed the surveillance scheme in late 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that “the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander in chief, to engage in this kind of activity.” Gonzales apparently forgot the congressional impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. The Bush White House also asserted that the September 2001 “Authorization to Use Military Force” resolution Congress passed entitled Bush to tap Americans’ phones. But if the authorization actually allowed the president to do whatever he thinks necessary on the homefront, Americans had been living under martial law.

Federal judges disagreed with Bush’s prerogative to obliterate American privacy. The result was a 2008 FISA reform that authorized the feds to continue commandeering vast amounts of data. But under Section 702 of that law, the FBI was permitted to conduct warrantless searches of that stash for Americans’ data only to seek foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime.

President Barack Obama responded to the new law by sharply expanding the NSA’s seizures of Americans’ personal data. The Washington Post characterized Obama’s first term as “a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.” Obama’s Justice Department thwarted court challenges to the surveillance, thereby permitting the White House to claim that it was respecting Americans’ rights and privacy.

Edward Snowden blew the roof off the surveillance state with his disclosures starting in June 2013. But there was no reason to presume that federal crime sprees were not occurring before Snowden blew the whistle. Professor David Rothkopf explained in 2013 how FISA’s Section 702 worked:

“What if government officials came to your home and said that they would collect all of your papers and hold onto them for safe-keeping, just in case they needed them in the future. But don’t worry…they wouldn’t open the boxes until they had a secret government court order…sometime, unbeknownst to you.”

The 2008 FISA amendments and Section 702 snared vast numbers of hapless Americans in federal surveillance nets. The Washington Post analyzed a cache of 160,000 secret email conversations/threads (provided by Snowden) that the NSA intercepted and found that nine out of ten account holders were not the “intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were American citizens. The files “tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes,” the Post noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled without a warrant.

Snowden also leaked secret court rulings that proved that the FISA Court had “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2013. FISA judges rubberstamped massive seizures of Americans’ personal data that flagrantly contradicted Supreme Court rulings on the Fourth Amendment. The Times noted that the FISA court had “become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues,” and almost always giving federal agencies all the power they sought.

Unfortunately, Snowden’s courageous disclosures did not stop the outrages. The heavily-redacted 2022 opinion finally released Friday revealed that the FBI wrongly searched almost 300,000 Americans’ online lives. And this was on top of the roughly 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans in 2021 via Section 702 that the FBI conducted that the Justice Department claimed was justified.

The latest disclosure from the FISA court signals that the FBI presumed that any American suspected of supporting the January 6, 2021 protests forfeited his constitutional rights. Roughly 2,000 pro-Trump protestors (including an unknown number of undercover agents and informants) entered the Capitol that day. But an FBI analyst exploited FISA to unjustifiably conduct searches on 23,132 Americans citizens “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras. The court ruling did not disclose the standards (if any) the FBI used for its warrantless January 6^th searches. Did Twitter retweets suffice?

The FBI exploited FISA to target 19,000 donors to the campaign of a candidate who challenged an incumbent member of Congress. An FBI analyst justified the warrantless searches by claiming “the campaign was a target of foreign influence,” but even the Justice Department concluded that almost all of those searches violated FISA rules. Apparently, merely reciting the phrase “foreign influence” suffices to nullify Americans’ rights nowadays. (In March, Rep. Darin LaHood (R-IL) revealed that he had been wrongly targeted by the FBI in numerous FISA 702 searches.)

The FBI conducted secret searches of the emails and other data of 133 people arrested during the protests after the killing of George Floyd in 2020.

The FBI conducted 656 warrantless searches to see if they could find any derogatory information on people they planned to use as informants. The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on “individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.” Even the Justice Department complained those searches were improper.

Judge Contreras lamented: “Compliance problems with the querying of Section 702 information have proven to be persistent and widespread.” The FBI responded to the damning report with piffle:

“We are committed to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security, and privacy and civil liberties, at the same time.”

In 2002, the FISA court revealed that FBI agents had false or misleading claims in 75 cases and a top FBI counterterrorism official was prohibited from ever appearing before the court again.

In 2005, FISA chief judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly proposed requiring FBI agents to swear to the accuracy of the information they presented; that never happened because it could have “slowed such investigations drastically,” the Washington Post reported. So FBI agents continued to have a license to exploit FISA secrecy to lie to the judges.

In 2017, a FISA court decision included a 10-page litany of FBI violations, which “ranged from illegally sharing raw intelligence with unauthorized third parties to accessing intercepted attorney-client privileged communications without proper oversight.”

In 2018, a FISA ruling condemned the FBI for ignoring limits on “unreasonable searches.” As The New York Times noted, “F.B.I. agents had carried out several large-scale searches for Americans who generically fit into broad categories…so long as agents had a reason to believe that someone within that category might have relevant information. But [under FISA] there has to be an individualized reason to search for any particular American’s information.” The FBI treated the FISA repository like the British agents treated general warrants in the 1760s, helping spark the American Revolution.

In April 2021, the FISA court reported that the FBI conducted warrantless searches of the data trove for “domestic terrorism,” “public corruption and bribery,” “health care fraud,” and other targets—including people who notified the FBI of crimes and even repairmen entering FBI offices. If you sought to report a crime to the FBI, an FBI agent may have illegally surveilled your email. Even if you merely volunteered for the FBI “Citizens Academy” program, the FBI may have illegally tracked all your online activity. As was revealed after that report came out, “The FISA court has gone from pretending FBI violations don’t occur to pretending violations don’t matter. Only task left is to cease pretending Americans have any constitutional right to privacy.” FISA court Chief Judge James Boasberg lamented “apparent widespread violations” of the legal restrictions for FBI searches but shrugged them off and permitted the scouring of Americans’ personal data to continue.

The FISA court treats the FBI like liberal judges treat serial shoplifters. Going back more than 20 years, FISA court rulings have complained of FBI agents lying to the court and abusing the law. As long as the FBI periodically promises to repent, the FISA court entitles them to continue decimating the Fourth Amendment.

Federal intelligence agencies refuse to even estimate how many Americans’ private data has been rounded up in government databases. There is no reason to presume that the feds have disclosed all their FISA wrongdoing. Prior to Edward Snowden’s leaks, the feds probably admitted less than 1% of federal surveillance abuses.

Section 702 will expire this year unless Congress reauthorizes that provision of the law. But the FBI’s perpetual crime wave has created a hornet’s nest on Capitol Hill. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) asked: “How much longer must we watch the FBI brazenly spy on Americans before we strip it of its unchecked authority?” Rep. Mike Garcia (R-CA) declared, “We need a pound of flesh. We need to know someone has been fired.” Even Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, opposes reauthorizing Section 702 without fundamental reforms.

But will Congress finally stop the federal spying spree on Americans? Only a fool would expect members of Congress to give a damn about the constitutional rights and liberties of Americans. Without radical reform, FISA should be renamed the “Trust Me, Chumps!” Surveillance Act.

Get real and realize that you live in a police state, not a free country.

ISRAELI SPYWARE COMPANY FLOODS WASHINGTON WITH LOBBYISTS DESPITE BEING BLACKLISTED

A Recent House Intel Hearing Found That Americans Had Been Caught Up In The Technology’s Illegal Surveillance. Now NSO Wants Federal Contracts?

During a House Intelligence Committee hearing on foreign spyware Wednesday, one company dominated discussion: NSO Group.

The controversial Israeli spyware company is best known for Pegasus, a spyware capable of discreetly extracting messages, contacts, photos, and videos from a target’s phone without ever even needing to click a link. Pegasus has been used by client governments from Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates to Mexico and Rwanda to infect the phones of dissidents, journalists, human rights organizations, and even American officials.

Carine Kanimba, the daughter of arrested Rwandan dissident Paul Rusesabagina, testified about her experience as a victim of Pegasus even after seeking refuge with her family in Texas; “It is horrifying to me that they knew everything I was doing, precisely where I was, who I was speaking with, my private thoughts and actions, at any moment they desired,” she told the committee.

Shane Huntley, the Senior Director of the Threat Analysis Group at Google labeled Pegasus “a weapon against which there is no defense.”

Last November, the Biden Administration blacklisted NSO Group after a series of national security breaches were brought to light – including the infection of the phones of 11 American diplomats in Uganda. Kanimba, an American citizen, testified that there were times when the spyware “was active during calls with the U.S. presidential envoy for Hostage Affairs team and the U.S. State Department,” despite NSO Group’s claims that its spyware cannot be used against Americans.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) drove this point home while addressing Kanimba:

“NSO Group claims its spyware cannot be used against Americans…Your experience is clear evidence that this is simply not true, as [is] the experience of U.S. diplomats in Uganda and other locations who had their phones hacked with NSO spyware.”

Perhaps Pegasus’ most famous target is Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and American resident murdered at the direction of Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman. Though it’s unknown whether Khashoggi’s own phone was infected with Pegasus, the phones of several people in Khashoggi’s inner circle, including his close friends and fiancée, were penetrated. Now, an organization created by Khashoggi, Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, is mobilizing pressure against NSO Group’s lobby operation in Washington.

But even as Pegasus has been used to target Americans and American residents, some in government have wanted to weaponize what NSO Group is offering. Last month, defense firm L3Harris was in talks to buy NSO Group’s spyware capabilities, and even claimed that American intelligence agencies “supported the acquisition as long as certain conditions were met.” ( L3Harris has reportedly dropped its bid under pressure from the Biden administration.) Meanwhile, the FBI even tested NSO’s spyware, with the Israeli company reportedly offering it an attractive workaround designed specifically to target American phone numbers and turn them into “intelligence gold mine(s).”

To NSO Group, potential business with the federal government represents redemption for a company in a tailspin with a mountain of debt. John Scott-Railton, a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, explained to the committee:

“Right now, doing business with the federal government, getting acquired by a U.S. company, or even doing business with an American police department is the golden prize for many in the spyware industry. As long as that remains a possibility for problematic actors, they are going to get support from investors because that is the prize…If we can make it clear that the door closes, then we can accomplish a lot.”

To keep that door open, NSO Group is doubling down on an all-American strategy: lobbying.

After NSO Group’s blacklisting, the company hired a series of lobbying firms in D.C. Today, the Israeli spyware company maintains an impressive influence operation that spans four separate firms: Chartwell Strategy Group, LLP, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, LLP, Paul Hastings, LLP, and Bluelight Strategies. DAWN’s Adam Shapiro told Responsible Statecraft that the hiring spree is likely related to renewed attention to the agency’s operations. “With the Whatsapp lawsuit, their placement on the entity list, and several Congressmen calling for Magnitsky sanctions, they needed to bring in a whole new batch of lobbyists.”

These firms have distributed materials to government officials papering over NSO Group’s human rights concerns. In a document distributed by Pillsbury titled “NSO Group: Here for You, Here for Good,” the firm boasts that it has developed an “unparalleled human rights governance program” and that its technologies have “made our world immeasurably safer.” In a position paper sent by Paul Hastings to Lisa Peterson, the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, “human rights” is referenced 104 times.

But those same lobbyists are now in hot water, facing accusations of violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), the law that requires people representing foreign interests to register with the Department of Justice and disclose their relationship.

Last Friday, DAWN filed a complaint with the FARA Unit charging that lobbyists misrepresented the relationship between NSO Group and the government of Israel. In their FARA filings, all of the lobbyists reported that their client was not “supervised…owned…directed…controlled…financed by…or subsidized in part by…a foreign government, foreign political party, or other foreign principal.”

DAWN’s investigation alleges this is a misrepresentation. It cited “numerous examples” that indicate the Israeli government’s de facto control over NSO Group. It points, for instance, to a Guardian report detailing how “Israel blocked Ukraine from buying NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware for fear that Russian officials would be angered by the sale of the sophisticated hacking tool to a regional foe.”

On occasion, even revenue-driven lobbyists will reject contracts because of the reputational cost. Former Senator Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) registered to lobby for Chinese surveillance company Hikvision, only to resign four days later due to public outrage. Yet, with NSO Group, that hasn’t happened. As Raed Jarrar, Director of Advocacy at DAWN asked, “What more must a company do to support dictators, enable gross violations of human rights, and attack privacy rights before lobbyists in Washington will say no to a contract.”

Not only is their lobbying operation intact, but the United States and its allies are home to some of the largest investors in NSO Group. Scott-Railton testified that “The largest owner of the majority owner of NSO Group is Oregon PERS (Public Employee Retirement System).”

Congress appears to be waking up to Washington’s complicity, passing provisions in both the annual defense and intelligence bills that, according to Tim Starks of the Washington Post, “would make it harder for U.S. firms to purchase companies on a Department of Commerce trade restriction list.” But Shapiro tells me that Congress needs to do more. “It’s really concerning that Khashoggi was murdered 5 years ago and in some ways, Congress is still at the beginning of figuring out what to do with this technology.”

ISRAELI SPYWARE FIRM IN HOT WATER OVER ALLEGED INTEREST IN AMERICANS’ DATA

Lawmakers Are Threatening Sanctions Under The Magnitsky Act, Which Would Cut The Company Off From American Financing And Customers.

The NSO Group, the Israeli firm infamous for selling spyware to foreign governments that used it against activists, journalists, and dissidents, is in turmoil once again.

Just this week, the Washington Post reported on an account from a whistleblower, Gary Miller, who alleged NSO offered “bags of cash” to Mobileum — a California-based company that works with cellular companies to enhance security — to access global communication networks. Miller, then vice president of Mobileum, said NSO officials wanted to purchase access to the SS7 network, which allows companies to route calls and data for their users. Access to the SS7 network would allow the user to query locations, divert calls, and eavesdrop on targets, providing NSO with a skeleton key that its Pegasus app could use on any phone in the world — including American’s phone numbers.

Miller reported the conversation to the online FBI tip portal several months later but never received a response.

The company’s role in enabling repressive regimes to conduct surveillance on their critics around the world — in deals licensed by the Israeli government — has led members of Congress like Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) to call for the imposition of sanctions on the firm under the Global Magnitsky Act, which permits the State Department to impose visa bans and freeze assets in American banks against people or entities that commit human rights abuses or corrupt acts.

The latest allegations, which were made possible by a new “Project Pegasus” consortium involving the Post, the Guardian, Israel’s Haaretz and more than 15 other international news outlets, will likely fuel the push for more sanctions.

Just last week, prior to the revelations in the, NSO’s chairman, Asher Levi, announced his resignation, although he insisted that his decision was unrelated to the myriad of scandals in which NSO has been implicated. His timing, however, was impeccable, coming just days before the latest revelation and a feature piece in The New York Times Magazine last weekend about NSO’s dealings with American government agencies. The latter investigation revealed that NSO had developed a new spyware called Phantom specifically for American law enforcement that could be used to transform American smartphones into “intelligence gold mines.”

Phantom is an adapted version of Pegasus, NSO’s notorious spyware which provides clients with full access to targeted phones via links in highly personalized phishing messages in WhatsApp, iMessage, and Android. In 2019, the Federal Bureau of Investigation paid NSO millions of dollars to test Phantom, triggering years of debate between the agency and the Department of Justice on the lawfulness of such surveillance. Last summer the agency decided against deploying either Pegasus or Phantom, according to the Times account.

However, in 2018, the Central Intelligence Agency paid for the government of Djibouti to obtain Pegasus despite the country’s record of persecuting journalists and torturing government political detainees, the Times reported. A spokesman for Djibouti’s government denied that the country ever acquired or used Pegasus.

Despite the earlier federal flirtation with NSO, the Commerce Department in November placed the company on the Entity List of businesses whose actions negatively affect American national security and foreign policy interests. Placing NSO on the Entity List effectively banned the company from buying software components from American vendors without a license. It is unclear why America went from testing the spyware to blacklisting the company, although Haaretz later reported that at least eleven State Department diplomats serving in Uganda found Pegasus spyware on their phones.

Spyware capable of infecting American phones brings home the myriad of reports that foreign governments have used NSO spyware to target activists and journalists around the world. In total, Pegasus has infected at least 450 phones belonging to activists, journalists, and dissidents in at least 16 countries, according to a digital forensics investigation led by Amnesty International and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

Pegasus’s stated purpose is to target and disrupt terrorism, trafficking, and other illicit crimes, but the spyware has been found on the phones of activists, journalists, and dissidents around the world. Targets were concentrated in countries such as Hungary, Saudi Arabia, and El Salvador, where repression of free speech against government corruption and other abuses are frequent. Perhaps most infamously, Saudi Arabia is believed to have used Pegasus to target the close friends and fiancée of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered and dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

But you wouldn’t know all of that if you read NSO’s Foreign Agents Registration Act filings with the Justice Department. Amid all the negative publicity, NSO appears to have launched a major effort to improve its badly damaged image and escape further scrutiny. The main PR firm that represents NSO Group — Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP —has been busy. In its most recent brief dated January 12, Pillsbury claimed that NSO “is in fact a force for good in the world,” and that it only sells spyware to “governments in the coalition of Western democracy-led countries.”

The Israeli Defense Ministry regulates exports of the Pegasus license, a fact NSO repeatedly points to as evidence of its strict licensing criteria. The cast of suspects in Haaretz’s NSO File, however, includes Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the UAE — not countries known for their democratic governance. Last month, NSO added Chartwell Strategy Group to its PR campaign with a new contract for “strategic communications counsel.”

“Who will want to work with a company that’s been so publicly sanctioned by the U.S. government,” asked David Kaye, a former UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of expression who called for global restrictions on surveillance technology shortly after the Commerce Department’s listing. “Who would invest in a company with this kind of black mark?”

Apparently, the state of Oregon would. In 2017, the Oregon Public Employees Retirement System invested $233 million in Novalpina Capital, a private equity firm that acquired a controlling stake in NSO in 2019, earning Oregon the dubious distinction of being the spyware company’s largest indirect investor. John Russell, the chairman of the Oregon Investment Council, defended the decision by insisting that divesting from “questionable sectors” would exceed the Council’s mandate and turn it into an “activist body.”

At least one Oregonian doesn’t see it that way. As noted above, Sen. Wyden and Rep. Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and a dozen other Democratic lawmakers, have proposed taking the Commerce Department’s decision one step further by implementing targeted Global Magnitsky sanctions against technology companies that have facilitated human rights abuses, including NSO. American persons are prohibited from engaging in transactions with entities under such sanctions, effectively cutting them off from the political access and financial backing that many arms exporters depend on.

So why is this a necessary step? As Wyden and Schiff point out, “these surveillance companies do depend on the U.S. financial system and U.S.-based investors.” Since NSO depends on a significant amount of business and investors located in the United States, such as Oregon’s pension fund, this would be an effective way of sanctioning NSO’s ties to abusive governments. President Biden could also encourage American allies to sanction the company, exerting pressure on UK-based Novalpina, which bought shares of NSO valued at $1 billion. Lastly, sanctioning NSO would be a way for the Biden Administration to regain trust with the American public after the CIA and FBI reported previous cooperation with NSO.

Even if America forgoes purchasing such surveillance technology, NSO customers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE remain eager consumers. International cooperation and diplomacy are more important than ever. A restraint-based approach to cyber warfare is imperative to protect fundamental values of democracy – freedom of speech and right to privacy – and Global Magnitsky sanctions on human rights violators like NSO would be a strong step in enforcing those values on the world stage.

ANOTHER ISRAELI SPY STORY – WILL THEY EVER END?

One Wonders When The Penny Will Drop And The American People Then Rise Up And Say “Enough Is Enough.”

It is perhaps not necessary to point out how the mainstream media in the United States as well as in Europe and Oceania persist in ignoring or otherwise covering up stories that make the Israelis look bad. Recent accounts of the slaughter of children and mostly civilians in Gaza by Israeli planes, missiles and artillery consistently try to depict the conflict as warfare between two comparable opponents, ignoring the enormous disparity in the military force available to the two sides. Israel has a modern army, air force and navy while Hamas has nothing but some small arms as well as improvised rockets and incendiary balloons.

The reluctance to criticize Israeli behavior is largely attributable to the power of the Zionist lobbies in the respective countries but it is also at least in part due to the complicity of Western governments in conniving at the Jewish state’s actions in its own region. The persistence in Israeli demands for war against Iran, preferable fought by the United States, was clear again this past week when the new government in Jerusalem declared that it would be increasing its military budget in anticipation of war with the Islamic Republic. Perhaps not surprisingly, Congress also has several bills pending that would increase military assistance to Israel by a factor of three.

Aside from their overwhelming affection for the Jewish state, politicians and talking heads in Washington have always sought to have an enemy to explain why the foreign and national security policies have been such failures. Russia was so designated during the long years of the Cold War and more recently both the White House and Congress have begun to warn that it is China that is seeking to confront democratic norms and “export its authoritarian model.”

Given all of that, there must have been shock in a number of newsrooms when it turned out that the guilty party behind an explosive spy story that was revealed recently appears to be none other than America’s “closest ally and best friend.” It seems that a private Israeli surveillance plus security firm consisting of former cyberwarfare military and intelligence officers and having close ties to the Benjamin Netanyahu government has been selling advanced spyware to at least 45 governments. The sales are in theory restricted for use only in terrorism and criminal cases, but somehow the resource has instead been routinely used against journalists, political activists, business executives, and politicians. Saudi Arabia, for example, used the spyware to track dissident journal Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018.

And even though the software has been regularly used against American government officials and journalists, it appears that the Biden Administration has been aware of its capabilities and has done nothing to stop it. In its own defense, the Israeli company NSO that developed the spyware has claimed, implausibly, that it can no longer be used to hack American’s phones. That assertion was debunked by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who tweeted “NSO’s claim that it is ‘technologically impossible’ to spy on American phone numbers is a bald-faced lie: a exploit that works against Macron’s iPhone will work the same on Biden’s iPhone. Any code written to prohibit targeting a country can also be unwritten. It’s a fig leaf.”

The surprise revelation of the Israeli activity came not from a government counter-intelligence agency, but rather from a group of 17 international media organizations that formed a consortium to investigate a data leak relating to hacked telephones. The group included major news outlets that had apparently been targeted using the Pegasus hacking spyware developed by the NSO Group, which was primarily designed to penetrate the security features of smartphones. One former cybersecurity engineer from the American intelligence community described Pegasus as an “eloquently nasty” tool that could be used to “spy on almost the entire world population.” The spyware “can be installed remotely on a targeted person’s smartphone without requiring them to take any action such as clicking on a link or answering a call. Once installed, it allows clients to take complete control of the device, including accessing messages from encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal, and turning on the microphone and camera.” It can also reveal the phone’s location.

The software was designed with a backdoor which allowed NSO to monitor the surveillance and it is presumed that the information was also shared with Israeli intelligence. By one estimate 50,000 smartphones were accessed worldwide, including 10 prime ministers, three presidents including Emmanuel Macron of France, a king, foreign ministers and assorted journalists and government officials both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A more cautious estimate from the Washington Post, which participated in the investigation, states only that “1,000 people spread across 50 different countries were identified as having numbers on the list, among them are ‘several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials.’ This includes Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s lead Iran negotiator, and journalists for CNN, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.” Other news agencies that were hacked by Pegasus include Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera, France 24, Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El País, the Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, the Economist, Reuters and Voice of America.

Some are inevitably wondering why the Biden White House has been silent about NSO. It has not identified the Israeli firm as a threat to national security and made demands to the Israeli government that it intercede with NSO and shut down the use of Pegasus until some international regulation of the use of hacking software can be developed. Part of the explanation for the reluctance might be that Biden’s senior adviser Anita Dunn’s consulting firm SKDKickerbocker was hired by NSO in 2019 to provide “public relations” advice to improve the company’s image.

The reluctance, of course, also derives from the fact that Israel is involved, but those with longer memories of the Jewish state’s record in stealing American secrets should not be surprised by this latest venture. Israeli-recruited American Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was, for example, the most damaging spy in American history. And Israel has, in fact, a long history of stealing technology American and military secrets to include sharing them with countries that Washington has regarded as enemies, including China and Russia.

Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage. The 2005 report states: “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 sizeable armaments industry.” It adds that: “Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information.” A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that: “Israel has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it has with the Pentagon.” It says: “Placing Israeli nationals in key industries is a technique utilized with great success.” A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage directed against American defense and security industries described how: “Israeli citizens residing in the U.S. had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtain classified plans for reconnaissance systems, and pass sensitive aerospace designs to unauthorized users.” The GAO concluded that: “Israel conducts,” and this is a quote, “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally.” More recently, FBI counterintelligence officer John Cole has reported how many cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department. He has provided a conservative estimate of 125 viable investigations into Israeli espionage — involving both American citizens and Israelis — that were stopped due to political pressure.

So Israel gets yet another pass on its spying against the United States. Indeed, the Biden Administration has yet to definitively comment on the latest impropriety. One wonders when the penny will drop and the American people will rise up and say “enough is enough.”