Israeli Spyware Sold To Iran 164
Hugh Pickens writes "Bloomberg reports that Israeli trade, customs and defense officials say they didn't know that systems for performing 'deep- packet inspection' into Internet traffic, sold under the brand name NetEnforcer, had gone to a country whose leaders have called for the destruction of the Jewish state. Allot Communications Ltd., an Israel-based firm which reported $57 million in sales last year, sold its systems to a Randers, a Denmark-based technology distributor where workers at that company, RanTek A/S, repackaged the gear and shipped it to Iran. The sales skirted a strict Israeli ban that prohibits 'trading with the enemy,' including any shipments that reach Iran, Syria and Lebanon. Although Allot officials say they had no knowledge of their equipment going to Iran and are looking into RanTek's sales, three former sales employees for Allot say it was well known inside the Israeli company that the equipment was headed for Iran. 'Israel considers Iran quite possibly its greatest threat, and so the Israeli government would come down very strong against any company that exported to Iran,' says Ira Hoffman. 'Iran is also considered by the U.S. as one of its most strategic threats.' Israeli lawmaker Nachman Shai has called for a parliamentary investigation, and the country's Defense Ministry has begun to examine the report."
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Not even a sniffer. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been using Allot's equipment for nearly 10 years now, from a lowly NetEnforcer 800 (with a throughput of only 200Mbps and I'm not even sure about that) to an array of SG-Sigma's (each capable of handling 120Gbps) and none of those had any sniffing capability. I really with it had, it would've saved me quite a lot of work.
Oh, it can tell you that A amount of traffic is going from IP B to IP C using protocol D (and here's where the DPI lies, in its ability to identify L7 protocols) and allows you to rate-limit, based on various criteria, said traffic, but it just can't sniff it. There's no way a NetEnforcer be able to allert the authorities about the anti-islamic message you've just posted on a blog, believing you were anonymous.
Some NetEnforcers could steer traffic based on definable criteria, say all HTTP traffic between private users and GMail, to a third-party equipment capable of sniffing that traffic, but that's as close as the NE comes to being a sniffer.
Re:Iran never called for Israel's destruction (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that the 'wiped off the map' quote is a dishonest distortion. /videoplay?docid=-7506561148101946170 .
I am certain though that Ahmadinejad has made very crude statements about Israel. Only, these statements are for public consumption only and often the the louder the statements, the less they represent what is actually going on. Take the 'wiped off the map' statement. This is a reference to an older quote by Khomeini, but in Khomeini's days Iran was an ally of Israel. The alliance was broken off after the 1990 gulf war, because with Iraq gone and the USSR gone Israel had to change its strategy and Iran became a regional competitor. It's then that Israel started to float the story about Iran working on a bomb, and Netanyahu was on the first row then, so he's fully aware of the background. A good introduction can be had by viewing a Trita Parsi speech on the treacherous triangle such as this one http://video.google.com/ [google.com]
As for their nuclear weapons program, well, in one word I'd describe it as nonexistant. A good source for that would be Flynt Everett - Hillary Mann at raceforiran.com as well as the american experts that matter - for example the NIE.
If you check iranian officials, they want passive nuclear capability: having a general level of technological development such that there is a credible threat that if they one day the situation becomes that pressing that they have to start working on a bomb, then they would be successful in a reasonable time. Every developed country has this capability, and many countries go further. Japan has an official policy of threshold capability. That means everything is in place so they can make a bomb in the shortest possible time, in this case 2 months.
There are good reasons to believe Iran is telling the truth about this, because , while there can always be some research, such as before 2002, they have a lot of reasons not to go further. There is the religuous , of fundamentalist reason if you want, that nuclear bombs are haram. This is the reason Iran refused to use chemical weapons in the war with Iraq. There is the reason that Iran would become totally isolated. There is the reason that they have a regional advantage they would lose if they triggered proliferation and everyone would get a bomb.
It is interesting that when you press that issue it turns out that for western and Israeli officials the nuance doesn't matter. Whether they're trying to make a bomb or are just technologically advanced enough so they could if they wanted, it doesn't matter. In both cases Iran is a player. Even Hillary Clinton has said such a thing (but I lost the reference.)
Not all Israelis support adversarial activities. (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are only some of the reasons many Israelis disagree with the typical policies of the Israeli government:
Some Israelis think that further violence toward Iran will cause trouble for Israel. Partly that is because there is the idea that encouraging violence against 1.6 billion Muslims [wikipedia.org] is self-defeating. There are only an estimated 14 million (not billion) practicing Jews in the entire world. [wikipedia.org]
Some of those who control the U.S. government want to build an oil pipeline through Iran to get oil from the "Stan" countries to the ocean where it can be shipped easily. That idea would be financially profitable only if U.S. taxpayers paid for security. The U.S. government is, in some ways, VERY corrupt.
Remember that the U.S. government supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's war with Iran so that U.S. companies could sell weapons to Iraq, and with the idea of the enormous profits that would come from building the pipeline through Iran.
Also, remember that the U.S. government has interfered with the politics in Iran since before before 1953, when the U.S. agency known as the CIA arranged the removal of a democratically elected president, President Mossadegh. The U.S. government arranged that the Shah have complete power. See for example, Politics, Power, and US Policy in Iran, 1950-1953 (PDF file, Harvard University). [harvard.edu] Quote:
Opposition in Iran to the violent regime of the Shah caused support for Muslim clerics who took over management of the government. Iranians say that clerics have usually not been good business and government managers. The unthinking violence of the U.S. government toward Iran has caused Iranians to be very afraid of what the U.S. government might do in the future.
One reason for the Iranian government to develop nuclear materials is to try to protect Iran against U.S. government violence. Another reason is that all governments need to give attention to sources of energy that do not cause global warming.
Some with influence in the U.S. government wanted to build an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. That is one of the reasons the U.S. government spends taxpayer money there, but it seems that getting control of Afghanistan will not happen soon, so there is renewed interest in violence toward Iran.
The U.S. government's support for violence toward Arab and Muslim nations, partly as a way for a few to make money, is seen by some as caused by Jewish manipulation of the U.S. government. There is support by some Jews in the U.S. to get U.S. taxpayers to pay for the security of Israel.
There are only 5,874,300 Jews in Israel [jewishvirtuallibrary.org]. There are approximately 5,275,000 Jews in the United States. [wikipedia.org] In some ways, the U.S. is as much o
Re:Iran never called for Israel's destruction (Score:1, Interesting)
It's sad to see people go to such lengths trying to explain away Iran's covert nuclear weapon program.
Every single intelligence service in the world is in agreement that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. All, that is, except Russia and China. Of course Russia is selling billions of dollar's worth of weapons to Iran (and Iraq before that) and China is heavily dependent on Iranian oil.
Even ignoring this fact, why in the world would Iran need nuclear energy? They have enough oil to meet domestic demand for over 100 years (!!). It makes absolutely no sense for them to go nuclear for any reason other than a weapons program. Furthermore, why did they hide it all these years? They are allowed to develop nuclear energy so long are transparent about its development *ahead of time*. Why would they risk all this cloak and dagger behavior if they weren't hiding anything?
If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck.
Re:Oops! (Score:4, Interesting)
The irony is delicious. It would be as if we had sold Stinger missiles to Mujahedin or something like that.
You didn't sell them, you gave them to the Mujahedin. I will never understand why everybody is so worked up over those damn Stingers. The black arms market is awash with various types of Russian MANPADs ranging from Chinese/Paki/Egyptian made knockoffs of the SA-7/16/18 to cutting edge SA-24s looted from Libyan arsenals and that last missile in particular poses a much more serious danger in the hands of terrorists than a bunch of dusty 1980s vintage Stingers that probably won't even work any more. Any Reagan era Stingers are now time expired (IIRC the shelf life is about 10 years) and if they still exist they have been stored for 20 plus years under suboptimal conditions in mud brick huts in the Pakistani/Afghan hinterland which is not exactly the best way to extend their shelf life.
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