U.S. Spied on Israel Even as They Shared Intelligence
Israel has been the target of spying by the United States’ National Security Agency, the New York Times reported, citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
According to the report published Saturday, the U.S. and Israel collaborate on intelligence gathering, with the Israel Signals Intelligence, or Sigint, National Unit, a high level intelligence unit, receiving raw NSA eavesdropping material from the U.S. and providing raw material from its own surveillances in return.
According to the documents, the NSA tracked “high priority Israeli military targets,” including drones and the Black Sparrow missile system.
The report also shows that the United States has spied on world leaders, including was Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.
The NSA, according to the documents, has for decades shared intelligence information from eavesdropping with rest of its “Five Eyes” partners, the Sigint agencies of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. More limited cooperation occurs with many more countries, including formal arrangements called Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes and Nacsi, an alliance of the agencies of 26 NATO countries, according to the New York Times.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO