The USA got rid of their established foreign media departments in the early 90s, due to lack of interest by readers.
I don't think it's unusual the Sharon scandals aren't published here. It's not like we discuss the scandals in other countries.
But what is unusual, why was there a supression around the Israeli "art students" that conducted espionage in the USA? These were engineers pretending to be art students - more than 200 of them visited several cities in the USA, including no less than Silicon Valley, where we have the skillsets to identify an engineer from an art student.
Their targets were military sensitive areas and companies that sell into military firms. We had two of them visit my company, which was rather interesting for me and my employees to say the least.
To have more than 200 engineers sniffing around our hightech military firms, is rather huge, in my opinion. And given how the govt has this incident so hushed, am somewhat less trustful of the way our government handles protecting this country's IP, especially in the area of communications and security.
No one disputes these 'art' students were here illegally, conducting some type of operation in the USA. They were all deported by INS. What is not disclosed is the reason why they were here, which I believe is being intentionally being suppressed due to mixed interests - some helpful, some not.
My belief is the engineers were sincerely trying to help out our country's intelligence community by aggressively conducting espionage in the USA prior to 9/11. The USA detected higher levels of chatter prior to 9/11 according to Rice in a CNN article. I suspect Israel probably did too. Israeli has a solid reputation for some of the best espionage hightech skillsets in the world. Why not get help from experts?
I suspect USA laws, prevent an adequate level of protection, so possibly some of the USA's work is outsourced to other countries? Or maybe Israel was simply trying to be proactively helpful. However, they also appeared to have a dual reason for being here, due to the types of places they visited and I personally consider it strange computers were turned on at night after their visit with our company. One employee at my firm found it strange they were asking for # of phones we had in our company's headquarters and they aggressively picked up the main phone in an attempt to use our phone to call out to a van that he said was located outside of the building. There were other strange things with their visit, but that's enough.
While I would be thankful if they were helping our country out for any preventive reason, I sometimes wonder if our govt had allowed them to double dip into conducting espionage on USA hightech firms as an exchange for free assistance. The reason why I wonder this, is because the government is so hushed, hushed about the Israeli art students activities, in a way that's in complete contrast to some other incidences. Very strange.
Salon covered the Israeli art students in more detail than other newspapers:
salon.com
But still no answer from the govt as to what these engineers were doing in Silicon Valley visiting hightech firms, pretending to be art students.
Huge contrast to other incidents.
Regards,
Amy J |
