by Amir Rappaport
Have you wondered lately how Israelis would react to an intelligence gathering apparatus like NSA? This is the third of a three-part article addressing Israel's approach to the balance between security and privacy.
Read Part I hereRead Part II here
Many of the Israeli intelligence developments are so secret, that nothing can be written about them at all, and the companies involved in these projects are strictly forbidden to sell any of their products internationally. Some of the developments become unclassified over time, usually after the enemy has already learned about them.
For example, Variant, a company which was mentioned in the recent disclosures in the United States as one of the companies that supplied advanced listening equipment to American intelligence apparatuses, is developing a long line of intelligence tools. One of the most creative ones is an innocent looking suitcase that can locate cellular phones within a specific area and record every SMS that they receive. Furthermore: this equipment enables its operators to disguise themselves as users of a different telephone line, and then send messages to specific people from those telephone lines, whose actual owners would never be aware that their phone had sent any message at all. This sort of capability is thought to be elementary in the world of intelligence.
"Things are changing significantly in the field of global intelligence," said Yaron Tchwella, CEO of the security division of NICE Systems, which is also considered a world leader in intelligence. NICE is one of the producers of these state-of-the-art "listening cameras". Tchwella said recently in an interview with this writer in the magazine "Israel Defense", that "You can see a real revolution in technological fields. These days, people are accessible anywhere in the world. They consider the iPhone a computer, not a mobile phone. If all the intelligence organizations had to do is continuously monitor the cellular telephone conversations and the SMS messages, it would be fairly simple, but almost every day there is a new application for transferring messages, communications, emails or SMS messages. Communications are fragmented, meaning that I can start by sending an SMS and then go to WhatsApp to continue the conversation there. So you have to monitor all methods of communication in order to obtain the information. There are very many channels. The field of communications today is divided into many small components - split up into very many methods and various media.
The greatest challenge is that even basic communications are becoming encoded - Skype and other services use encoding services. In the past, if you came across something that was encoded, you would conclude that the information was important and that the effort to decode it was worthwhile. Today, almost everything is encoded - and you need more clues to indicate what might be interesting and what might be just a waste of time.
Moreover, if you look at the number of phone calls that any particular person makes these days - in the past, an average person would make ten telephone calls per day. Today it's hundreds of calls and messages per day.
We have very complex software systems that can extract insights from a large amount of data, and we are beginning to look at phenomena of patterns that look anomalous at first, and we believe that this is a trend".
Companies such as NICE supply "big brother" services today to industrial concerns and not just governmental ones. Information from the Internet might also be of interest to commercial companies, banks and insurance companies, not only intelligence agencies.
"If a mayor wants to know if people like him, he can also collect information from the messages that the residents write about him on Facebook or Twitter", says Tchwella. There is also some degree of integration between the security and the civil worlds: surveillance cameras that continually monitor what is happening in a specific train station for security reasons can also be an important source of information to the train stations as well. Such information might bring about changes in scheduling for certain lines, thereby resulting in significant savings".
Did You Think that Your Email is Private?
The masses of Israelis who use the email servers of Gmail or other Internet companies are totally unaware that in many respects, the information that flows through them is almost public. This huge amount of data is stored in the Google "cloud", and apparently, it is not impossible for any intelligence agency in the world to access it and "look it over".
Furthermore: the data that Google collects from its users is also used by commercial companies, especially Google itself, to tailor its targeted advertisements to a specific individual.
So can "Big Brother" eavesdrop without restrictions? Israel is considered relatively proper in this regard. The consternation that grips the American public stems not only from the American tradition of honoring individual rights above all, but also because the intelligence agencies there operate in an environment that is relatively unregulated.
In Israel, surprisingly, there has been relatively modern General Security Service [GSS or Shabak] legislation by the Knesset within the past decade. Article 11 of that law states that every three months, the prime minister must approve the reasons for wiretapping those citizens of Israel whom the GSS is investigating. If there are no security reasons, then according to the legal limitations, only the police can wiretap the citizens, not Shabak.
On the other hand, Shabak and Military Intelligence can listen in on non-Israelis without restriction. Regarding this, one security operative says : "Shabak acts exactly in accordance with the law".
If we want to check who is talking to whom in a telephone conversation, the law allows Shabak to get the basic data from local communications companies, in accordance with a few unpublicized restrictions.
Contrary to the case with telephone conversations, tracking of Internet use is less regulated. Anyway, all intelligence agencies attentively track information that certain individuals or groups bring up on Internet sites or blogs. It is not even considered "wiretapping".
Brigadier General (Reserves) Ephraim Lapid, who served as commander of the overt intelligence gathering unit "Hatsav", was head of the Military Intelligence Gathering unit, and served as the IDF spokesman, says that "Also, the amount of unconcealed information today is not as it was in the era when Hatsav usually had only a few Arab television channels and announcements in Arab newspapers to track. Nowadays, you need automated tools even to track the unconcealed announcements ".
Amir Rappaport
Translated from Hebrew by Sally Zahav
Source: Makor Rishon Newspaper, Issue 827, Yoman section, pg. 10
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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