Think About It

Israel's Spies Among Us

Federal agents arrested 84-year-old Ben-Ami Kadish, an American, last week on four counts of conspiracy and espionage.  Kadish is suspected of passing secrets on nuclear weapons, fighter jets, and missiles to Israel in the 1980s.  This case is linked to the Jonathan Pollard spy scandal that rocked U.S.-Israeli relations.  Pollard is currently serving a life term.

Spying by Israeli agents may have been more wide spread than originally thought according to persons close to the case.  Kadish admitted he spied for Israel, reporting to the same Israeli government handler to whom Pollard answered.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said, "This was not the kind of behavior we would expect from friends and allies...”

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Arye Mekel said of the arrest: "We know nothing about it.  We heard it from the media."   Israel has unsuccessfully sought Pollard's release.

Kadish was born in Connecticut and worked as a mechanical engineer at the Army's Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey.  He spied from 1979 to 1985, and he continued contact with the unidentified Israeli handler until last month.

Kadish allegedly passed 50-100 classified documents on nuclear weaponry to his Israeli handler.  Other documents pertained to the f-15 fighter jet and Patriot missiles.

Even though we are an ally of Israel, they apparently feel the need to steal our military secrets. 

The questions are:
Why is Israel engaging in espionage against us?
What actions should we take against Israel?
When caught, should Israeli agents be treated differently from those of another country?
Should Pollard or Kadish be  pardoned?

The Unseen War with China

  The U.S. is at war, but not in the conventional sense.  Computer hacking, once the domain of geeky teenagers, has now moved into the shadowy world of foreign intelligence agencies.  Our government is reluctantly admitting that secret files within the Pentagon have been breached by unknown an unknown person or persons in China.  Recently, an innocent looking military shopping list from India was found to contain a deeply embedded computer code known as “Poison Ivy,” which allows the foreign agent to view each and every keystroke that is subsequently made on the recipient’s computer.  Poison Ivy also renders firewalls useless, and malware software isn’t detecting the embedded codes.  Last year, over 12,000 of these mysterious e-mails turned up in government agencies and defense contractors, and most of these intrusions can be traced back to the Internet address cybersyndrome.org, which is based in China.  Cybersyndrome is one of China’s largest Internet providers.  Other hacking has been traced back to Russia.  “It’s espionage on a massive scale,” said Paul Kurtz, a former high-ranking national security official.

   Often these foreign intruders route their electronic spying through one or more other countries, such as Saudi Arabia.  The detection is difficult because the foreign agents constantly change the coding, which means as soon as one is discovered and erradicated, another pops up.  This problem is not confined to the U.S.; Britain’s MI5 notified nearly 300 companies in 2007 that hackers from China were attempting to gain information. 

   The questions are:  How much sensitive information have they gotten?  How many of our intelligence agents are known to China and Russia?  How many trade secrets have they stolen?  How many Trojan Horses have they planted deep into our computer systems?  Will all of this render our missile defenses useless?    Think About It.