by Oui
Sat Nov 9th, 2013 at 04:24:59 AM EST
For unlimited snooping on Internet communication, the Dutch governement have ordered Israeli systems as reported today. With the intent to start in 2014, this would be illegal today, so lawmakers are urged to make minor changes to the law. An investigative journalist of De Volkskrant joined technical website Tweakers to file this report. I am taking the article at face value.
Data Hunger: Dutch Intelligence Wants to Know All
The project called Argo II is intended to 'process data communication to intelligence' in 2014 in a note written by Interior Minister Plasterk this summer to the House of Parliament . The new equipment will be used by both domestic and military security service AIVD and MIVD. A description of the Department of Defense that Argo II is primarily intended to cover 'the world of the Internet' - where the services can not reach in present day.
The system will probably be built by the Israeli Nice Systems, specializing in surveillance and interception software. This company, which according to U.S. intelligence expert James Bamford has its roots in the Mossad, was one of two companies who enrolled in a public tender. The other candidate, Accenture, has told weekly Vrij Nederland it did not get the contract. The Ministry of Defence does not provide information about the tender.
Automatic alert
The technology website Tweakers describes some systems of Nice Systems, such as Nice Track Mass Detection Center and Nice Track Pattern Analyzer, which is able to intercept data on a national level, monitor, analyze and store it with an automatic alert you for suspicious patterns.
Continued below the fold ...
James Bamford and Israeli wiretapping technology giants
James Bamford was introduced to NICE Systems at the 2006 Intelligence Support System World Conference or informally... the Wiretappers' Ball, held in Crystal City, along the Potomac. Bamford writes:
"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. A key member of the Wiretappers' Ball, it was formed in 1986 by seven veterans of Unit 8200, according to the company's founder, Benny Levin. "We were seven people from the Unit," he said, "we all worked on a project for more than four years, we knew each other very well. We had very good complementary skills." Like a page out of Orwell, all their high-tech bugging systems are called "Nice". Nice Perform, for example, "provides voice content analysis with features such as: word spotting, emotion detection, talk pattern analysis, and state-of-the-art visualization techniques." Nice Universe "captures voice, email, chat, screen activity, and essential call details." Nice Log offers "audio compression technology that performs continuous recordings of up to thousands of analog and digital telephone lines and radio channels." And Nice VoIP "can use both packet sniffing and active recording methods for recording VoIP sessions (both by telephone and internet)."*
"Former" Israeli military intelligence personnel are scattered throughout the high-tech wiretapping industry. And this fact, (along with James Bamford's new book), prompted Israeli journalist Yossi Melman to ask this rhetorical question in Haaretz, "Is Israel's booming high-tech industry a branch of the Mossad?"
