The administration of US President Barack Obama shares with Israel the raw intelligence data vacuumed up by country’s National Intelligence Agency without even taking out the information about the American public and even government officials, according to a newly-leaked document.
A copy of a top secret agreement, signed in 2009 and provided by the American whistle blower Edward Snowden, shows that the NSA “routinely” passes to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli Signals-intelligence National Unit (ISNU), the vast digital data it gathers under secret court authority from US Internet providers.

President Obama has previously insisted that his administration protects the privacy of American citizens by removing their names when sending NSA intercepts to other US agencies. The intelligence community calls this court-mandated process “minimization”.

But according to the Israeli-US deal, the handed over information “includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

The document reveals Israeli officials can keep the data on US citizens for up to a year. They are, however, required to immediately destroy the communications of US government officials.

This as many US officials say Israel has been trying to spy on the American government.

Snowden’s previous leaks also revealed that the Israeli intelligence has been aggressively seeking to spy on the US government.

Former intelligence officials say the unfiltered information could have been used by Israeli intelligence agencies to carry out assassinations including the killings and bombings of some Iranian scientists in past years.

“One of the biggest concerns in all intelligence sharing relationships is that the partner would use the data to take action that would result in killing somebody,” said a former senior NSA official speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The worry is they might go off and bomb somebody and assassinate somebody.”

By Press TV

 

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