Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA
The NSA's new super-secret 1-million-square-foot data center in Utah. Photo: Name Withheld
Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a
busy year — hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases
and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping
network.
In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort
Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the
604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.
Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators,
analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private
contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7,
47 conference rooms and VTCs, and “22 caves,” according to an NSA
brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within
two miles of the ceremony.
Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s giant satellite listening post in
Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping
dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68
million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new
supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of
them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to
increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in
Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course
to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot
expansion of the NSA’s headquarters, including a cybercommand complex
and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.
The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA’s
mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The
centerpiece in the agency’s decade-long building boom, it will be the
“cloud” where the trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls,
e-mails, and data trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant
analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.
Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA
says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and
that it takes the Constitution and the nation’s privacy laws seriously.
But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is
with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much
of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable
contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the
agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and
analysis.
And with some of the key companies building the U.S.’s surveillance
infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked
executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services,
it’s not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even
if its current agency chief claims he doesn’t approve of extrajudicial
spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made
similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping
program.
Until now, the actual mechanics of how the agency constructed its highly secret U.S. eavesdropping net, code-named Stellar Wind, has never been revealed. But in the weeks following 9/11, as the agency and the White House agreed to secretly ignore U.S. privacy laws and bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court,
J. Kirk Wiebe noticed something odd. A senior analyst, he was serving
as chief of staff for the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation
Research Center (SARC), a sort of skunkworks within the agency where
bureaucratic rules were broken, red tape was cut, and innovation was
expected.
“One day I notice out in the hallway, stacks and stacks of new servers in boxes just lined up,” he said.
Passing by the piles of new Dell 1750 servers, Wiebe, as he often
did, headed for the Situation Room, which dealt with threat warnings. It
was located within the SARC’s Lab, on the third floor of Operations
Building 2B, a few floors directly below the director’s office. “I walk
in and I almost get thrown out by a guy that we knew named Ben Gunn,” he
said. It was the launch of Stellar Wind and only a handful of agency
officials were let in on the secret.
“He was the one who organized it,” said Bill Binney of Gunn. A former
founder and co-director of SARC, Binney was the agency official
responsible for automating much of the NSA’s worldwide monitoring
networks. Troubled by the unconstitutional nature of tapping into the
vast domestic communications system without a warrant, he decided to
quit the agency in late 2001 after nearly forty years.
Gunn, said Binney, was a Scotsman and naturalized U.S. citizen who
had formerly worked for GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, and later
become a senior analyst at the NSA. The NSA declined Wired’s request to
interview Gunn, saying that, as policy, it doesn’t confirm or deny if a
person is employed by the agency.
Shortly after the secret meeting, the racks of Dell servers were
moved to a room down the hall, behind a door with a red seal indicating
only those specially cleared for the highly compartmented project could
enter. But rather than having NSA employees putting the hardware and
software together and setting up walls of monitors showing suspected
terrorism threats and their U.S. communications, the spying room was
filled with a half-dozen employees of a tiny mom-and-pop company with a
bizarre and troubling history.
“It was Technology Development Corporation,” said Binney.
The agency went to TDC, he says, because the company had helped him
set up a similar network in SARC — albeit one that was focused on
foreign and international communications — the kind of spying the NSA is
chartered to undertake.
“They needed to have somebody who knew how the code works to set it
up,” he said. “And then it was just a matter of feeding in the
attributes [U.S. phone numbers, e-mail addresses and personal data] and
any of the content you want.” Those “attributes” came from secret rooms
established in large telecom switches around the country. “I think
there’s 10 to 20 of them,” Binney says.
Formed in April 1984, TDC was owned by two brothers, Randall and Paul
Jacobson, and largely run out of Randall’s Clarkesville, Maryland
house, with his wife acting as bookkeeper. But its listed address is a
post office box in Annapolis Junction, across the Baltimore-Washington
Parkway from the NSA, and the company’s phone number in various business directories is actually an NSA number in Binney’s old office.
The company’s troubles began in June 1992 when Paul lost his security
clearance. “If you ever met this guy, you would know he’s a really
strange guy,” Binney said of Paul. “He did crazy stuff. I think they
thought he was unstable.” At the time, Paul was working on a contract at
the NSA alongside a rival contractor, Unisys Corporation. He later
blamed Unisys for his security problems and sued it,
claiming that Unisys employees complained about him to his NSA
supervisors. According to the suit, Unisys employees referred to him as
“weird” and that he “acted like a robot,” “never wore decent clothes,”
and was mentally and emotionally unstable. About that time, he also
began changing his name, first to Jimmy Carter, and later to Alfred
Olympus von Ronsdorf.
With “von Ronsdorf’s” clearance gone and no longer able to work at
the NSA, Randy Jacobson ran the company alone, though he kept his
brother and fellow shareholder employed in the company, which led to
additional problems.
“What happened was Randy still let him have access to the funds of
the company and he squandered them,” according to Binney. “It was so
bad, Randy couldn’t pay the people who were working for him.” According
to court records,
Ronsdorf allegedly withdrew about $100,000 in unauthorized payments.
But Jacobson had troubles of his own, having failed to file any income
tax statements for three years in the 1990s, according to tax court records.
Then in March 2002, around the time the company was completing Stellar
Wind, Jacobson fired his brother for improper billing and conversion of
company funds. That led to years of suits and countersuits over mismanagement and company ownership.
Despite that drama, Jacobson and his people appeared to have serious
misgivings about the NSA’s program once they discovered its true nature,
according to Binney. “They came and said, ‘Do you realize what these
people are doing?’” he said. “‘They’re feeding us other stuff [U.S.] in
there.’ I mean they knew it was unconstitutional right away.” Binney
added that once the job was finished, the NSA turned to still another
contractor to run the tapping operation. “They made it pretty well
known, so after they got it up and running they [the NSA] brought in the
SAIC people to run it after that.” Jacobsen was then shifted to other
work at the NSA, where he and his company are still employed.
Randall Jacobsen answered his phone inside the NSA but asked for time to respond. He never called back.
In addition to constructing the Stellar Wind center, and then running
the operation, secretive contractors with questionable histories and
little oversight were also used to do the actual bugging of the entire
U.S. telecommunications network.
According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, Verint, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon, which I first reported in my book The Shadow Factory in 2008. Verint did not return a call seeking comment, while Verizon said it does not comment on such matters.
At AT&T the wiretapping rooms are powered by software and hardware from Narus, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein in 2004. Narus did not return a call seeking comment.
What is especially troubling is that both companies have had
extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to that country’s
intelligence service, a country with a long and aggressive history of
spying on the U.S.
In fact, according to Binney, the advanced analytical and data mining
software the NSA had developed for both its worldwide and international
eavesdropping operations was secretly passed to Israel by a mid-level
employee, apparently with close connections to the country. The
employee, a technical director in the Operations Directorate, “who was a
very strong supporter of Israel,” said Binney, “gave, unbeknownst to
us, he gave the software that we had, doing these fast rates, to the
Israelis.”
Because of his position, it was something Binney should have been alerted to, but wasn’t.
“In addition to being the technical director,” he said, “I was the
chair of the TAP, it’s the Technical Advisory Panel, the foreign
relations council. We’re supposed to know what all these foreign
countries, technically what they’re doing…. They didn’t do this that
way, it was under the table.” After discovering the secret transfer of
the technology, Binney argued that the agency simply pass it to them
officially, and in that way get something in return, such as access to
communications terminals. “So we gave it to them for switches,” he said.
“For access.”
But Binney now suspects that Israeli intelligence in turn passed the
technology on to Israeli companies who operate in countries around the
world, including the U.S. In return, the companies could act as
extensions of Israeli intelligence and pass critical military, economic
and diplomatic information back to them. “And then five years later,
four or five years later, you see a Narus device,” he said. “I think
there’s a connection there, we don’t know for sure.”
Narus was formed in
Israel in November 1997 by six Israelis with much of its money coming
from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture capital company. Its founder and
former chairman, Ori Cohen, once told Israel’s Fortune Magazine that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. And among the five founders was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who had previously worked for Elta Systems, Inc. A division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta
specializes in developing advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli
defense and intelligence organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the
chief technology officer.
A few years ago, Narus boasted that it is “known for its ability to
capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.”
The company says its equipment is capable of “providing unparalleled
monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and
government organizations around the world” and that “Anything that comes
through [an Internet protocol network], we can record. We can
reconstruct all of their e-mails, along with attachments, see what Web
pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice over Internet
Protocol] calls.”
Like Narus, Verint was founded by in Israel by Israelis, including
Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, a former Israeli intelligence officer. Some 800
employees work for Verint, including 350 who are based in Israel,
primarily working in research and development and operations, according to the Jerusalem Post. Among its products is STAR-GATE, which according to the company’s sales literature,
lets “service providers … access communications on virtually any type
of network, retain communication data for as long as required, and query
and deliver content and data …” and was “[d]esigned to manage vast
numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and
communications.”
In a rare and candid admission to Forbes,
Retired Brig. Gen. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the highly secret
Unit 8200, Israel’s NSA, noted his former organization’s influence on
Comverse, which owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that
dominate the U.S. eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE,
Comverse and Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech
companies, which were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said
Gefen. “Check Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product,
the Logger, is based on the Unit’s technology.”
According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the
group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed
are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious
estimates indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli newspaper Ha’artez
in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech
companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred
to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between
serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech
companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around
the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies
and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”
Equally troubling is the issue of corruption. Kobi Alexander, the founder and former chairman of Verint, is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering and other crimes. And two of his top associates at Comverse, Chief Financial Officer David Kreinberg and former General Counsel William F. Sorin,
were also indicted in the scheme and later pleaded guilty, with both
serving time in prison and paying millions of dollars in fines and
penalties.
When asked about these contractors, the NSA declined to “verify the allegations made.”
But the NSA did “eagerly offer” that it “ensures deliberate and
appropriate measures are taken to thoroughly investigate and resolve any
legitimate complaints or allegations of misconduct or illegal activity”
and “takes seriously its obligation to adhere to the U.S. Constitution
and comply with the U.S. laws and regulations that govern our
activities.”
The NSA also added that “we are proud of the work we do to protect
the nation, and allegations implying that there is inappropriate
monitoring of American communications are a disservice to the American
public and to the NSA civilian and military personnel who are dedicated
to serving their country.”
However, that statement elides the voluminous reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times
and Wired on the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Also not
reflected is that in the only anti-warrantless wiretapping lawsuit to
survive the government’s use of the “state secrets” privilege to throw them out, a federal judge ruled that two American lawyers had been spied on illegally by the government and were entitled to compensation.
So take the NSA’s assurances as you will.
But as NSA director Alexander flies around the country, scissors in
hand, opening one top-secret, outsourced eavesdropping center after
another, someone might want to ask the question no one in Congress seems
willing to ask: Who’s listening to the listeners?
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