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Were Israeli companies Verint and Narus the ones that collected information from the U.S. communications network for the National Security Agency? The question arises amid controversy over revelations that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans every day, creating a database through which it can learn whether terror suspects have been in contact with people in the United States. It also was disclosed this week that the NSA has been gathering all Internet usage - audio, video, photographs, emails and searches - from nine major U.S. Internet providers, including Microsoft and Google, in hopes of detecting suspicious behavior that begins overseas.

According to an article in the American technology magazine "Wired" from April 2012, two Israeli companies – which the magazine describes as having close connections to the Israeli security community – conduct bugging and wiretapping for the NSA. Verint, which took over its parent company Comverse Technology earlier this year, is responsible for tapping the communication lines of the American telephone giant Verizon, according to a past Verizon employee sited by James Bamford in Wired. Neither Verint nor Verizon commented on the matter.

Natus, which was acquired in 2010 by the American company Boeing, supplied the software and hardware used at AT&T wiretapping rooms, according to whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed the information in 2004. Klein, a past technician at AT&T who filed a suit against the company for spying on its customers, revealed a "secret room" in the company's San Fransisco office, where the NSA collected data on American citizens' telephone calls and Internet surfing. Klein's claims were reinforced by former NSA employee Thomas Drake who testified that the agency uses a program produced by Narus to save the personal electrical communications of AT&T customers.  Both Verint and Narus have ties to the Israeli intelligence agency and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the 8200 unit, told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse's technology, which was formerly the parent company of Verint and merged with it this year, was directly influenced by the technology of 8200. Ori Cohen, one of the founders of Narus, told Fortune magazine in 2001 that his partners had done technology work for the Israeli intelligence.

Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act This bill amends the federal judicial code to narrow the scope of foreign sovereign immunity by authorizing U.S. courts to hear cases involving claims against a foreign state for injuries, death, or damages that occur inside the United States as a result of a tort, including an act of terrorism, committed anywhere by a foreign state or official. It amends the federal criminal code to permit civil claims against a foreign state or official for injuries, death, or damages from an act of international terrorism. Additionally, the bill authorizes federal courts to exercise personal jurisdiction over and impose liability on a person who commits, or aids, abets, or conspires to commit, an act of international terrorism against a U.S. national.

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi discusses the inequality in the American justice system, where only the least powerful go to jail. This is a case that has everything. everything except an arrest. that struck some as odd, because in an 80-page document of court papers, the bank admits to almost going out of its way to act as a financial clearinghouse for international pariahs and drug dealers.

Scotland Yard was thwarted yesterday in its attempt to seize a former senior Israeli army officer at Heathrow airport for alleged war crimes in occupied Palestinian lands after a British judge had issued a warrant for his arrest.British detectives were waiting for retired Major General Doron Almog who was aboard an El Al flight which arrived from Israel yesterday. It is believed he was tipped off about his impending arrest while in the air and stayed on the plane to avoid capture until it flew back to Israel. Scotland Yard detectives were armed with a warrant naming Mr Almog as a war crimes suspect for offences that breached the Geneva conventions.The Guardian understands police would have arrested him if he had set foot on British soil. The arrest warrant was issued on Saturday at Bow Street magistrates court, central London. It is believed to be the first warrant for war crimes of its kind issued in Britain against an Israeli national over conduct in the conflict with Palestinians.

Despite the alleged offences occurring in the Gaza Strip, war crimes law means Britain has a duty to arrest and prosecute alleged suspects if they arrive in Britain. The warrant alleges Mr Almog committed war crimes in the Gaza Strip in 2002 when he ordered the destruction of 59 homes near Rafah, which Palestinians say was in revenge for the death of Israeli soldiers. The warrant was issued by senior district judge Timothy Workman after an application by lawyers acting for Mr Almog's alleged Palestinian victims. According to legal sources, before granting the warrant Mr Workman decided his court had jurisdiction for the offences; that diplomatic immunity did not apply; and there was evidence to support a prima facie case for war crimes.If Mr Almog had been arrested he would have been bailed on condition that he did not leave Britain. The attorney general would have to have sanctioned any prosecution against him for war crimes.Mr Almog was commanding officer of the Israeli defence forces' southern command from December 2000 to July 2003. British lawyers representing Palestinians who say they suffered as a result of Mr Almog's orders had presented their evidence to Scotland Yard detectives last month and they began investigating him.

Officials in this administration have a funny way of blaming the victim. Did the CIA spy on Senate intelligence committee staffers who were investigating the agency’s torture program? No. OK, yes, you caught us — but the staffers were poking their nose into the CIA’s business. Are communities in some cities suffering from an uptick in crime rates? That must be because they were critical of police practices, and so the police are afraid to do their job. Are American Muslims disproportionately singled out for law enforcement scrutiny? It wouldn’t be necessary if they did a better job of identifying and rooting out the terrorists in their midst. Did a drone strike kill a 16-year-old boy who wasn’t on any target list but happened to be the son of alleged al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Aulaqi? I guess he “should have had a more responsible father,” as then-White House press secretary Robert Gibbs helpfully explained. At the annual conference of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on National Security Law, officials were at it again. Both the CIA’s General Counsel, Caroline Krass, and the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), Karl Thompson, observed that agencies are issuing fewer requests for formal OLC opinions and are seeking “informal,” unwritten advice from OLC instead. This trend undermines the public’s ability to obtain OLC opinions through FOIA requests. And, according to Krass, we have no one to blame but ourselves:

I do think one reason is a focus the office has gotten [in] the past 10 years or so in the public which has now led to Freedom of Information Act requests pretty much anytime the administration adopts a position in the context of domestic law or national security that could be [or] seems a little bit edgy or slightly controversial, immediately the request for the OLC opinion comes. What were we thinking? Well, we might have had in mind OLC officials’ own acknowledgment that their opinions constitute the working law of the executive branch, and are binding on agencies in the same manner that a court’s decision would be. When the public expresses interest in a controversial court opinion, that isn’t cited as a reason to move the judicial system into the shadows. To the contrary, it’s well-understood that the public has a right to know how judges are interpreting the law. That’s true regardless of whether the law deals with the rights and obligations of private parties or (as is usually the case with OLC opinions) the authorities of the government.  It’s high time we stop pretending that OLC opinions are merely attorneys’ advice, and thereby entitled to confidentiality. A private person is free to accept or reject her attorney’s advice. By contrast, as Thompson recognized, OLC opinions — even informal, unwritten ones — are “binding by custom and practice . … People are supposed to and do follow [them].” Moreover, in ordinary circumstances, it is no defense to criminal charges that the defendant’s lawyer gave bad advice. OLC opinions, on the other hand, confer effective immunity, as the Justice Department will not prosecute any official who acted in reliance on OLC’s conclusions.

The government nonetheless argues, and many courts have agreed, that OLC opinions are exempt from disclosure under FOIA because they are “deliberative” and “pre-decisional.” This assessment conflates two distinct decisions: the decision of an agency whether to adopt a course of conduct, and OLC’s decision regarding how to interpret the law. The latter decision may be one factor — along with other, non-legal factors, such as political viability, financial cost, and the existence of competing priorities — in the agency’s “deliberations” on the former. The agency ultimately must decide whether to move forward with a policy. But on the question of how the law should be interpreted, it is OLC, not the agency, which has the final word. If the agency were to issue a different legal interpretation, there is no question that OLC’s would take precedence, and the agency would be courting legal jeopardy by adopting a course of action in tension with OLC’s reading of the law. Perhaps the solution is simply to require the government to abide by its own characterization. If OLC opinions are to be given the status of deliberative documents and/or legal advice, so be it; but in that case, they cannot be binding on any agency or official, nor can they mitigate any official’s criminal or civil liability (unless they genuinely negate a required state of mind). If, on the other hand, the government wishes to treat OLC opinions as authoritative and a shield against prosecution or civil suit, then they must be called what they are — law — and made available to the public. Until that happens, the public will remain a victim of secret law, and there will be no one but the administration to blame.

Several African nations, first and foremost South Africa, have signaled that AU member States have no advantage from being bound by the Rome Statutes and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The development comes in response to what a growing number of African policy makers denounce as the ICC’s selective prosecution and the ICC being an impediment to conflict resolution.

South Africa’s governing African National Congress is trailblazing a development that could result in South Africa’s and eventually African Union (AU) member States’ withdrawal from the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court (ICC). This month, former South African President Thabo Mbeki gave a lecture at the 2015 Tmali Alumni Forum that reflects a growing consensus among African nations. That is, that the ICC is notorious for selective prosecution, and especially for the prosecution of African and other political leaders and nationals from States with a policy that opposes the western neo-colonialist discourse.

Mbeki would also stress that the ICC is an impediment to conflict resolution on the African continent. Mbeki stressed the example of the ousted Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo was ousted by a clearly French-backed coup d’état in 2010. Gbagbo has since been extradited to The Hague.

The National Security Agency created a "secret backdoor" so its massive databases could be searched for the contents of U.S. citizens' confidential phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant, according to the latest classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden. A report in the Guardian on Friday quoted Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as saying the secret rule offers a loophole allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans." That appears to confirm what Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said in June after receiving a classified briefing from administration officials a few days earlier on the extent of the NSA's domestic surveillance operations. If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he had been told during the briefing. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney who serves on the House Judiciary Committee.

FBI Director Robert Mueller responded by assuring Nadler, according to a transcript of the hearing, that to "listen to the phone," the government would need "a particularized order" from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court -- a claim that is contradicted by today's Guardian report and other documents. Mueller has been succeeded by James Comey, who was confirmed last month by the Senate. In response to a CNET article at the time, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a statement saying: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress." Clapper never elaborated, however, on what "proper" authorization would be. Today's top-secret document leaked by Snowden reveals that "procedures approved on 3 October 2011 now allow for use of certain United States person names and identifiers as query terms when reviewing collected FAA 702 data."

FAA 702 is a reference to section 702 of a 2008 law that amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Those amendments created a warrantless surveillance process that could be employed by NSA analysts, but Congress never intended it to be used domestically against American citizens: A congressional report accompanying the law claimed it allows electronic surveillance only of "persons located outside the United States in order to acquire foreign intelligence information." In reality, though, the Obama Justice Department has devised secret interpretations of FAA 702 carving out loopholes in what were intended to be strict privacy safeguards. One loophole revealed in June shows that NSA, CIA, and FBI analysts are granted broad access to data vacuumed up by the world's most powerful intelligence agency -- but are supposed to follow certain "targeting" and "minimization" procedures to limit the number of Americans who become individual targets of warrantless surveillance.

Eric Holder was U.S. attorney general at a time when the world desperately needed the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to hold accountable the elite bankers who oversaw the epidemic of fraud that drove the 2008 global financial crisis and triggered the Great Recession. After nearly six years in office, Holder announced on Sept. 25 that he plans to step down, without having brought to justice even one of the executives responsible for the crisis. His tenure represents the worst strategic failure against elite white-collar crime in the history of the Department of Justice (DOJ).  In both the U.S. savings and loan debacle of the late 1980s and the Enron-era accounting frauds of the early 2000s, there were more than 1,000 successful felony convictions in cases designated as major by the DOJ. In both those fraud epidemics, federal prosecutors prioritized the top executives of the corporations responsible. This context makes Holder’s failure to prosecute — much less convict — the elite bank frauds that caused this far larger crisis all the more damning.

In addition to the failure to prosecute the leaders of those massive frauds, Holder’s dismal record includes 1) failing to prosecute the elite bankers who led the largest (by several orders of magnitude) price-rigging cartel in history — the LIBOR scandal, in which the world’s largest banks conspired to rig the reported interest rates at which the banks were willing to lend to one another, which affected prices on over $300 trillion in transactions; 2) failing to prosecute the massive foreclosure frauds (robo-signing), in which bank employees perjured themselves by signing more than 100,000 false affidavits in order to deceive the authorities that they had a right to foreclose on homes; 3) failing to prosecute the bid-rigging cartels of bond issuances in order to raise the costs to U.S. cities, counties and states of borrowing money in order to increase banks’ illegal profits; 4) failing to prosecute money laundering by HSBC for the murderous Sinaloa and Norte del Valle drug cartels; 5)  failing to prosecute the senior bank officers of Standard Chartered who helped fund of terrorists and nations that support terrorism; and 6) failing to prosecute the controlling officers of Credit Suisse who for decades helped wealthy Americans unlawfully evade U.S. taxes and then obstructed investigations by the DOJ and Internal Revenue Service for many years.  

the CEOs knew that they could trade off a slightly larger fine in return for complete immunity for themselves and other officers who might otherwise be flipped by federal prosecutors to testify against more senior officers. The fines, of course, would be paid not by the CEOs but by the banks they ran. Indeed, one of the lesser-known aspects of the crisis is that the DOJ almost never sued a banker (as opposed to a bank) and virtually never sought to claw back bankers’ fraud proceeds. It is telling that, as even Holder admitted last week, “A corporation may enter a guilty plea and still see its stock price rise the next day.”

A treason investigation has been launched against a Turkish MP who alleged in an exclusive interview with RT that Islamic State jihadists delivered deadly sarin gas to Syria through Turkey. Ankara’s Chief Prosecutor's Office opened the case against Istanbul MP Eren Erdem of Republican People's Party (CHP) after his interview about sarin was aired on RT on Monday. "Chemical weapon materials were brought to Turkey and put together in ISIS camps in Syria, which was known as the Iraqi Al-Qaeda at that time." 

Erdem noted that the chemicals used for the production of weapons did not originate from Turkey. “All basic materials are purchased from Europe. Western institutions should question themselves about these relations. Western sources know very well who carried out the sarin gas attack in Syria,” Erdem told RT.

As Turkish media reported Wednesday, the prosecutor’s office is planning to send a summary of proceedings to the Ministry of Justice on Thursday. Following that, the summary may be forwarded to the Turkish parliament, which could vote to strip Erdem of his parliamentary immunity.Once Turkish mass-media reported the criminal investigation had been opened against Erdem, the hashtags #ErenErdemYalnızDeğildir - #ErenErdemYouAreNotAlone began to circulate in Turkish social networks.On Tuesday, MP Erdem issued a written statement in his defense, saying he had become the target of a smear campaign because of his statements made in parliament.He claimed he had received death threats over social media following the publication of his interview with RT, revealing the Turkish paramilitary organization Ottoman Hearths had published his home address on Twitter to enable an attack on his house.“I am being targeted with death threats because I am patriotically opposed to something that tramples on my country's prestige,” said the MP.As for his accusations about Turkish businessmen being involved in supplying Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) with the poisonous gas sarin and other reactants needed for chemical warfare, Erdem maintained this statement was made based on the results of a Turkish court investigation in 2013.Erdem revealed that five Turkish citizens had been arrested by the Adana Chief Prosecutor's Office as a result of an investigation coded 2013/139. A Syrian national was prosecuted in Turkey for procuring chemical agents for Islamist groups in Syria. At the same time, Erdem noted all the persons arrested within the framework of the 2013/139 investigation were released a week later.

Martin Shkreli, a boastful pharmaceutical executive who came under withering criticism for price gouging vital drugs, denied securities fraud charges on Thursday following an early morning arrest, and was freed on a $5 million bond. While the 32-year-old has earned a rare level of infamy for his brazenness in business and his personal life, what he was charged with had nothing to do with skyrocketing drug prices. He is accused of repeatedly losing money for investors and lying to them about it, illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors in another. “Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said at a press conference.

Evan Greebel, a New York lawyer, who is alleged in the federal indictment to have helped Shkreli in his schemes, was also arrested and charged. Like Shkreli, he pleaded not guilty, and he was freed on a $1 million bond. Both men and their lawyers declined to comment after their court appearance.

Read the full text of the indictment here In the federal indictment and a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission, authorities say Shkreli began losing money and lying to investors from the time he began managing money. In his mid-20s, he got nine investors to place $3 million with him and at one point he had only $331. Securities fraud is hardly unheard of on Wall Streeet and the amounts involved here are nowhere near on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But Shkreli’s case has drawn such attention because of his defiant price-gouging and his own up-by-the-bootstraps history. The son of immigrants from Albania and Croatia who did janitorial work and raised him and his brothers in working-class Brooklyn, Shkreli seemed at first to embody the American dream and then to mock it. After dropping out of an elite Manhattan high school, he worked as an intern for Jim Cramer’s hedge fund as a 17-year-old and quickly impressed with his ability to call stocks. He created hedge funds, taught himself biology and, after earning a BA at Baruch College in New York City, began hedge funds investing in biotech.