The National Security Agency openly shares unfiltered intelligence files with the Israeli government, according to a classified document leaked to the Guardian newspaper by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
As the Guardian reports Wednesday, the NSA memorandum details an “intelligence-sharing agreement” between the two countries and shows that the “US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens” to Israeli intelligence.
According to the Guardian, the agreement places “no legally binding limits” on how Israel could explore or handle the data.
“The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet,” writes Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewan MacAskill, the team of journalists behind the report. “The intelligence community calls this process ‘minimization,’ but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.”
The Guardian published the NSA memorandum in full here.
According to the document, raw files shared with Israel come from the NSA’s collection of “signals intelligence” or Sigint—which includes both electronic and telephonic metadata swept up in any number of NSA surveillance programs.
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That data, according to the Guardian, includes, but is not limited to, “unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.” Much of this unfiltered data, the Guardian suggests, contains detailed information belonging to unsuspecting U.S. citizens whose communications have been caught up in the NSA’s extensive surveillance dragnet.
The reporting continues:
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