Otto Dettmer/New York Times
The U.S. regularly sends un-redacted data on U.S. citizens to a secret Israeli unit called Unit 8200. New York Times. This data is not just so-called meta data, the logs of who was contacted and for how long, but the actual contents of the communications. None of the data sent to Israel was altered or protected in any way and all identifying data was left intact. Last week several former and current members of Unit 8200 sent a complaint to Prime Minster Netanyahu, detailing how they abused Palestinians by using this data. Both the Israelis and the NSA routinely collect the data of which pornographic sites that certain Muslims use. All of the information comes from an interview with Edward Snowden and the leaks he provided.
My Comment:
This is kind of an old story, but when it first came out nobody paid attention to it. Even anti-Semites ignored the story. I don't like writing about Israel under any circumstances due to the inevitable flame war that erupts but in this case the story is too important to ignore. Regardless of what you think of Israel there is no reason why they should ever have unrestricted access to the private data of United States citizens. I don't care who those citizens are, if they are American they should be protected from foreign governments. Israel's interests are not our own and the is no reason to share data with them.
As for the revelation that the NSA and Israel collect data on what adult websites Muslims use, that's not a new revelation either. I have no doubt that non-Muslims are being targeted this way too. It would be naive to think they wouldn't do so. The difference is that for non-Muslims adult websites don't carry anywhere near the stigma it does for fundamentalist Muslims. Still there are other groups that could be blackmailed this way.
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