The announcement last week by the United
States of the largest military aid
package in its history – to Israel – was
a win for both sides.
Israeli prime
minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast
that his lobbying had boosted aid from
$3.1 billion a year to $3.8bn – a 22 per
cent increase – for a decade starting in
2019.
Mr Netanyahu has presented this as a
rebuff to those who accuse him of
jeopardising Israeli security interests
with his government’s repeated affronts
to the White House.
In the past weeks alone, defence
minister Avigdor Lieberman has compared
last year’s nuclear deal between
Washington and Iran with the 1938 Munich
pact, which bolstered Hitler; and Mr
Netanyahu has implied that US opposition
to settlement expansion is the same as
support for the “ethnic cleansing” of
Jews.
American president Barack Obama,
meanwhile, hopes to stifle his own
critics who insinuate that he is
anti-Israel. The deal should serve as a
fillip too for Hillary Clinton, the
Democratic party’s candidate to succeed
Mr Obama in November’s election.
In reality, however, the Obama
administration has quietly punished Mr
Netanyahu for his misbehaviour. Israeli
expectations of a $4.5bn-a-year deal
were whittled down after Mr Netanyahu
stalled negotiations last year as he
sought to recruit Congress to his battle
against the Iran deal.
In fact, Israel already receives
roughly $3.8bn – if Congress’s
assistance on developing missile defence
programmes is factored in. Notably,
Israel has been forced to promise not to
approach Congress for extra funds.
The deal takes into account neither
inflation nor the dollar’s depreciation
against the shekel.
A bigger blow still is the White
House’s demand to phase out a special
exemption that allowed Israel to spend
nearly 40 per cent of aid locally on
weapon and fuel purchases. Israel will
soon have to buy all its armaments from
the US, ending what amounted to a
subsidy to its own arms industry.
Nonetheless, Washington’s renewed
military largesse – in the face of
almost continual insults – inevitably
fuels claims that the Israeli tail is
wagging the US dog. Even The New York
Times has described the aid package as
“too big”.
Since the 1973 war, Israel has
received at least $100bn in military
aid, with more assistance hidden from
view. Back in the 1970s, Washington paid
half of Israel’s military budget. Today
it still foots a fifth of the bill,
despite Israel’s economic success.
But the US expects a return on its
massive investment. As the late Israeli
politician-general Ariel Sharon once
observed, Israel has been a US
“aircraft carrier” in the Middle East,
acting as the regional bully and
carrying out operations that benefit
Washington.
Almost no one blames the US for
Israeli attacks that wiped out Iraq’s
and Syria’s nuclear programmes. A
nuclear-armed Iraq or Syria would have
deterred later US-backed moves at regime
overthrow, as well as countering the
strategic advantage Israel derives from
its own nuclear arsenal.
In addition, Israel’s US-sponsored
military prowess is a triple boon to the
US weapons industry, the country’s most
powerful lobby. Public funds are
siphoned off to let Israel buy goodies
from American arms makers. That, in
turn, serves as a shop window for other
customers and spurs an endless and
lucrative game of catch-up in the rest
of the Middle East.
The first F-35 fighter jets to arrive
in Israel in December – their various
components produced in 46 US states –
will increase the clamour for the
cutting-edge warplane.
Israel is also a “front-line
laboratory”, as former Israeli army
negotiator Eival Gilady admitted at the
weekend, that develops and field-tests
new technology Washington can later use
itself.
The US is planning to buy back the
missile interception system Iron Dome –
which neutralises battlefield threats of
retaliation – it largely paid for.
Israel works closely too with the US in
developing cyberwarfare, such as the
Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s
civilian nuclear programme.
But the clearest message from
Israel’s new aid package is one
delivered to the Palestinians:
Washington sees no pressing strategic
interest in ending the occupation. It
stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran
deal but will not risk a damaging clash
over Palestinian statehood.
Some believe that Mr Obama signed the
aid package to win the credibility
necessary to overcome his domestic
Israel lobby and pull a rabbit from the
hat: an initiative, unveiled shortly
before he leaves office, that corners Mr
Netanyahu into making peace.
Hopes have been raised by an expected
meeting at the United Nations in New
York on Wednesday. But their first talks
in 10 months are planned only to
demonstrate unity to confound critics of
the aid deal.
If Mr Obama really wanted to pressure
Mr Netanyahu, he would have used the aid
agreement as leverage. Now Mr Netanyahu
need not fear US financial retaliation,
even as he intensifies effective
annexation of the West Bank.
Mr Netanyahu has drawn the right
lesson from the aid deal – he can act
against the Palestinians with continuing
US impunity.
- See more at: http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2016-09-19/palestinians-lose-in-us-military-aid-deal-with-israel/#sthash.fL4Eq28N.dpuf
The
company complied with a classified U.S.
government demand, scanning hundreds of
millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the
behest of the National Security Agency or
FBI, said three former employees and a
fourth person apprised of the events.
Some
surveillance experts said this represents
the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet
company agreeing to an intelligence agency's
request by searching all arriving messages,
as opposed to examining stored messages or
scanning a small number of accounts in real
time.
It is
not known what information intelligence
officials were looking for, only that they
wanted Yahoo to search for a set of
characters. That could mean a phrase in an
email or an attachment, said the sources,
who did not want to be identified.
Reuters was unable to determine what data
Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if
intelligence officials had approached other
email providers besides Yahoo with this kind
of request.
According to two of the former employees,
Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's
decision to obey the directive roiled some
senior executives and led to the June 2015
departure of Chief Information Security
Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top
security job at Facebook Inc.
"Yahoo
is a law abiding company, and complies with
the laws of the United States," the company
said in a brief statement in response to
Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo
declined any further comment.
Through a Facebook spokesman, Stamos
declined a request for an interview.
The
NSA referred questions to the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, which
declined to comment.
The
request to search Yahoo Mail accounts came
in the form of a classified edict sent to
the company's legal team, according to the
three people familiar with the matter.
U.S.
phone and Internet companies are known to
have handed over bulk customer data to
intelligence agencies. But some former
government officials and private
surveillance experts said they had not
previously seen either such a broad demand
for real-time Web collection or one that
required the creation of a new computer
program.
"I've
never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a
'selector,'" said Albert Gidari, a lawyer
who represented phone and Internet companies
on surveillance issues for 20 years before
moving to Stanford University this year. A
selector refers to a type of search term
used to zero in on specific information.
"It
would be really difficult for a provider to
do that," he added.
Experts said it was likely that the NSA or
FBI had approached other Internet companies
with the same demand, since they evidently
did not know what email accounts were being
used by the target. The NSA usually makes
requests for domestic surveillance through
the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency
is seeking the information.
Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp,
two major U.S. email service providers,
separately said on Tuesday that they had not
conducted such email searches.
"We've
never received such a request, but if we
did, our response would be simple: 'No
way'," a spokesman for Google said in a
statement.
A
Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement,
"We have never engaged in the secret
scanning of email traffic like what has been
reported today about Yahoo." The company
declined to comment on whether it had
received such a request.
CHALLENGING THE NSA
Under
laws including the 2008 amendments to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
intelligence agencies can ask U.S. phone and
Internet companies to provide customer data
to aid foreign intelligence-gathering
efforts for a variety of reasons, including
prevention of terrorist attacks.
Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden and others have exposed the extent
of electronic surveillance and led U.S.
authorities to modestly scale back some of
the programs, in part to protect privacy
rights.
Companies including Yahoo have challenged
some classified surveillance before the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a
secret tribunal.
Some
FISA experts said Yahoo could have tried to
fight last year's demand on at least two
grounds: the breadth of the directive and
the necessity of writing a special program
to search all customers' emails in transit.
Apple
Inc made a similar argument earlier this
year when it refused to create a special
program to break into an encrypted iPhone
used in the 2015 San Bernardino massacre.
The FBI dropped the case after it unlocked
the phone with the help of a third party, so
no precedent was set.
"It is
deeply disappointing that Yahoo declined to
challenge this sweeping surveillance order,
because customers are counting on technology
companies to stand up to novel spying
demands in court," Patrick Toomey, an
attorney with the American Civil Liberties
Union, said in a statement.
Some
FISA experts defended Yahoo's decision to
comply, saying nothing prohibited the
surveillance court from ordering a search
for a specific term instead of a specific
account. So-called "upstream" bulk
collection from phone carriers based on
content was found to be legal, they said,
and the same logic could apply to Web
companies' mail.
As
tech companies become better at encrypting
data, they are likely to face more such
requests from spy agencies.
Former
NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker said email
providers "have the power to encrypt it all,
and with that comes added responsibility to
do some of the work that had been done by
the intelligence agencies."
SECRET SIPHONING PROGRAM
Mayer
and other executives ultimately decided to
comply with the directive last year rather
than fight it, in part because they thought
they would lose, said the people familiar
with the matter.
Yahoo
in 2007 had fought a FISA demand that it
conduct searches on specific email accounts
without a court-approved warrant. Details of
the case remain sealed, but a partially
redacted published opinion showed Yahoo's
challenge was unsuccessful.
Some
Yahoo employees were upset about the
decision not to contest the more recent
edict and thought the company could have
prevailed, the sources said.
They
were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General
Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the
company's security team in the process,
instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to
write a program to siphon off messages
containing the character string the spies
sought and store them for remote retrieval,
according to the sources.
The
sources said the program was discovered by
Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within
weeks of its installation. The security team
initially thought hackers had broken in.
When
Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized
the program, he resigned as chief
information security officer and told his
subordinates that he had been left out of a
decision that hurt users' security, the
sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he
told them hackers could have accessed the
stored emails.
Stamos's announcement in June 2015 that he
had joined Facebook did not mention any
problems with Yahoo. (bit.ly/2dL003k)
In a
separate incident, Yahoo last month said
"state-sponsored" hackers had gained access
to 500 million customer accounts in 2014.
The revelations have brought new scrutiny to
Yahoo's security practices as the company
tries to complete a deal to sell its core
business to Verizon Communications Inc for
$4.8 billion.
(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by
Jonathan Weber and Tiffany Wu)
