"marx404" <404@404.com> wrote in
news:47c19021$0$30705$4c368faf@roadrunner.com:
> A good reason never to say the word "bomb" over your cell phone. Here
> we go again.
>
> http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...29053420080224
>
What galls me is it's the Israeli intelligence doing the real
monitoring:
"The 9-11 legacy
Part of the troubling aspect in the choice of Verint – formerly Comverse
Infosys – is its implication in an international espionage saga
involving Israeli spies which had been tracking the Al Qaeda terrorists
who carried out the September 11 attacks.
Following a far-reaching report by Fox News in January 2002, Comverse
Infosys changed its name to Verint Systems Inc on 1 February 2002. As of
31 January 2005, approximately 59 per cent of Verint’s common stock was
owned by Comverse Technology.
According to Le Monde, some 60 Israeli suspects – military spies
parading as “art students” – were detained following the September 11
attacks, suspected of having tracked the 19 Arab terrorists who carried
out the attacks without ever sharing their information with the US
government.
Six of the suspects, linked with Mossad and also the Israeli general
command, were employees of Comverse Infosys, which provided the US
government with its eavesdropping technology. Others were employed with
another Israeli firm, Amdocs.
A report by the Drug Enforcement Administration, seen by MaltaToday,
collated dozens of interrogations it held with the Israeli spies. The
DEA report says the spies “targeted and penetrated military bases”,
including DEA, FBI and other secret officers and unlisted private homes
of intelligence personnel, purporting to be art students selling their
work.
When Fox News picked up on the report in early 2001, it claimed American
terrorist investigators feared certain suspects in the September 11
attacks managed to stay ahead of them by knowing who and when
investigators are calling on the telephone.
Suspicion fell upon Amdocs, an Israeli-based telecommunications company
which has contracts with the 25 biggest phone companies in America, and
which generates records on every single telephone call made in the US.
Allegedly, the information had been used to inform suspects they were
being watched by counter-terrorism officers.
The FBI had repeatedly conducted investigations on Amdocs over security
breaches after it suspected that records of calls in the US were falling
into the hands of the Israeli government. Suspicion had been rooted in a
1997 drug trafficking case in Los Angeles in which telephone
information, the type that Amdocs collects, was used to “completely
compromise the communications of the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEO
and the LAPD.”
The crime syndicate was found in possession of investigating officers’
cell phones, and had used them to avoid arrest. When investigators tried
to find out where the information might have come from, they looked at
Amdocs. As investigators checked their own wiretapping system for leaks,
they grew concerned about potential vulnerabilities in the computers
that intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls. A main contractor
was Comverse Infosys, which is reimbursed for up to 50 per cent of its
research and development costs by Israel’s Ministry of Industry and
Trade.
Comverse Infosys provided law enforcement with eavesdropping technology
but also had continuing access to the computers so they can service them
and keep them free of glitches. According to Fox News, Comverse
Infosys’s software had a “back door” through which wiretaps themselves
could be intercepted by unauthorised parties.
Investigations into Comverse Infosys were never fully carried out: Fox
News reported investigators saying that even suggesting Israeli spying
was considered career suicide, and that FBI inquiries into Comverse had
been halted before the actual equipment was ever tested for leaks.
But the parent company is also mired in controversy: US prosecutors this
week filed criminal charges against three former executives of Comverse
over manipulation of stock options. They are its founder Kobi Alexander,
and former chief executive David Kreinberg, and William F. Sorin, former
corporate secretary."
White House says phone wiretaps back on "for now" 
Linear Mode
