Investigative reporter James Bamford, who has been writing books about the National Security Administration since The Puzzle Palace in the early 1980s, writes in the NYT:

Israel’s N.S.A. Scandal

By JAMES BAMFORD SEPT. 16, 2014 WASHINGTON — IN Moscow this summer, while reporting a story for Wired magazine, I had the rare opportunity to hang out for three days with Edward J. Snowden. It gave me a chance to get a deeper understanding of who he is and why, as a National Security Agency contractor, he took the momentous step of leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents. Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the N.S.A. was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.

Over a year ago in Taki’s Magazine, I wrote about Unit 8200 in “Does Israel Have a Backdoor to U.S. Intelligence?”

Snowden’s impresario Glenn Greenwald’s genius at stage management can be seen in his pragmatic decision to initially downplay the Israeli role in the NSA scandal since the thought of Israel tends to induce crimestop in the brains of Americans in the media business with career ambitions.

In contrast, Bamford has been frank about the Israel connection for a long time, which is probably one reason why his impressive work over the decades, which is respected even by many NSA insiders, never had much traction.

Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another country, it would first be “minimized,” meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing with Israel, the N.S.A. evidently did not ensure that the data was modified in this way. Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to Israel contained the communications — email as well as phone calls — of countless Arab- and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories could become targets based on the communications. “I think that’s amazing,” he told me. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.” It appears that Mr. Snowden’s fears were warranted. Last week, 43 veterans of Unit 8200 — many still serving in the reserves — accused the organization of startling abuses. In a letter to their commanders, to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to the head of the Israeli army, they charged that Israel used information collected against innocent Palestinians for “political persecution.” In testimonies and interviews given to the media, they specified that data were gathered on Palestinians’ sexual orientations, infidelities, money problems, family medical conditions and other private matters that could be used to coerce Palestinians into becoming collaborators or create divisions in their society.

You know, if Israel’s Unit 8200 is spying on the sex lives of Palestinian-Americans, how do we know they’re not also spying on the sex lives of Congressman-Americans? Might that have something to do with the 29 standing ovations Netanyahu got the last time he spoke to Congress?

Carl Cameron did a fascinating four part series for Fox News on Israel’s infiltration of the American telecom metadata business way back in 2001, but it was quickly spiked by higher-ups at Fox with no explanation. Fortunately, patriotic citizens have kept copies available online, links to which you can find in my old Taki’s article.