Israel Plays Down Reports of Spying by U.S.
Israeli officials said on Saturday they were not surprised by allegations the United States and Britain had spied on the country’s leaders and played down the importance of any information its allies may have gleaned.
Leaked documents from former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden published on Friday showed the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ had in 2009 targeted an email address listed as belonging to the Israeli prime minister and monitored emails of senior defence officials.
“Our working assumption is that not only Arab states but also world powers, including friendly ones, try to follow us,” Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israel’s Channel 2 television.
Israel therefore takes the necessary precautions, he said, and secret information is never transmitted over “regular phones and email systems”.
The office of Ehud Olmert, who at the time was Israel’s prime minister, said in a statement that the reports, if accurate, referred to a public email address.
“The chances that security or intelligence damage was caused from the breaking in to this email address were minuscule,” the statement said.
Steinitz emphasized the close intelligence ties between Israel and the two countries.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
