NSA - and the "Thought Police"

The National Security Agency (NSA) is developing a tool that George Orwell's Thought Police might have found useful: an artificial intelligence system designed to gain insight into what people are thinking.

With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected —through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records — it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.

The system is so potentially intrusive that at least one researcher has resigned, citing concerns over the dangers in placing such a powerful weapon in the hands of a top-secret agency with little accountability.

Christopher Ketcham in September, wrote an article "The Trojan Horse ", that focuses on Verint, Amdocs, and CALEA (the legislation which brought all of these problems into existence):

"Together, Verint and Amdocs form part of the backbone of the government's domestic intelligence surveillance technology. Both companies are based in Israel, having arisen to prominence from that country's cornering of the information technology market, and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence (both companies have a long history of board memberships dominated by current and former Israeli military and intelligence officers).

Verint is considered the world leader in electronic interception and hence an ideal private sector candidate for wiretap outsourcing. Amdocs is the world’s largest billing service for telecommunications, with some $2.8 billion in revenues in 2007, offices worldwide, and clients that include the top 25 phone companies in the United States that together handle 90 percent of all call traffic among US residents. The companies' operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized crime)"

James Bamford is the author of 3 books on the National Security Agency and has done a great service to the public by revealing the extent of the NSA’s wiretapping on U.S. soil, and how the NSA sub-contracts the vast majority of its work to Israeli high-tech firms bristling with former Israeli military intelligence agents, and, in the case of Verint, a company with serious corruption issues. He wrote in 2006:

“The large Israeli firm NICE, like Verint and Narus, is also a major eavesdropper in the U.S., and like the other two, it keeps its government and commercial client list very secret. it was formed in 1986 by seven veterans of Unit 8200, according to the company’s founder, Benny Levin."

In The Shadow Factory, he sheds light in the secret rooms of Verizon and AT&T, and shows NSA to be a very poor custodian of the nation’s security.

Along with the mass surveillance being conducted on all U.S. users of AT&T and Verizon by Narus and Verint, two other Israeli-owned companies, Amdocs and NICE Systems, have their fingers in the wiretapping pie as well. Both have direct links to 9/11 via the milieu known as the Israeli DEA Groups.

None of US law enforcement’s problems with Amdocs and Verint could have come to pass without the changes mandated by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which sought to lock spyware into telecom networks. CALEA, to cite the literature, requires that terrestrial carriers, cellular phone services and other telecom entities enable the government to intercept “all wire and oral communications carried by the carrier concurrently with their transmission.”

“Former” Israeli military intelligence personnel are scattered throughout the high-tech wiretapping industry. This fact, (along with Bamford’s new book), prompted Israeli journalist Yossi Melman to ask on in Haaretz.com : “Is Israel’s booming high-tech industry a branch of the Mossad?”.

(All Jewish names shown in bold type)