In an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on June 15th, Sheriff David Hathaway said Israel accesses classified information about US citizens; restrictions that apply to US federal law enforcement don’t apply to Israel…
Thanks to AIPAC, when Israeli spying is discovered it’s brushed aside and covered up…
‘Here in my county, an Israeli company has built 60 spy towers that collect not only video information, but electromagnetic information, radio spectrum radar information. And Israel owns the feed…’
Below is the interview that was broadcast on the podcast “Judging Freedom.” (Bios of Napolitano and Hathaway are below.)
Napolitano: Does the prohibition on the CIA of engaging in law enforcement and spying on Americans in America not stop them, or do they just not give a damn about the federal laws, in this case, their own charter and the law which created them, which was insisted upon by the president who signed them into existence, Harry Truman.
Hathaway: Well, unfortunately, post 9/11, the federal agencies were scolded and said, hey, you need to cooperate. You need to know what each other is doing. So what that has had is a very hegemonic influence over US law enforcement and the military. And they’ve created these things like fusion centers, where all telecommunication intercepts come together, both what they call the light side and the dark side.
Hathaway: That’s the terminology in the Intel community. And of course, DEA is a member of the intelligence community. And I myself had a top secret SCI clearance. So that’s the clearance above top secret to receive these communication intercepts. And unfortunately, not only the CIA, but the Mossad. Israel is allowed unfettered access to this information at these fusion centers. Whenever you’re read into a top secret program or a skiff or an SCI program, you are told that it’s need to know, need to know. The only people that can get this type of information that those that have a need to know.
But with the Israelis, this doesn’t apply. They are able to siphon off the raw data and use it for themselves. They’re considered friends and allies. And for some reason, that restriction that applies within the federal law enforcement community doesn’t apply to this foreign government.
Napolitano: All right. What is dark side and what is light side? Phrases you just used.
Hathaway: Yeah. This is common terminology in these telecommunication fusion centers. And there’s one in Northern Virginia that I’ve worked at. And light side means anything that was obtained through a legal judicial warrant. What law enforcement call T-3 affidavit. So this is a legal law enforcement intercept that is used ostensibly for going to court to, you know, as a last resort to track a, a criminal or criminal suspect.
So it’s vetted by a judge. Now, the dark side operations are the things that are not vetted by a judge, just military. A lot of it is NSA. And of course, NSA is military, primarily run out of Fort Meade, Maryland. But the operators are military employees, and then they’re CIA data as well. So the dark side means it wasn’t obtained through a regular judicial warrant.
Some of it was obtained through FISA mass surveillance orders. And this comes together at these fusion centers. And the Mossad has unfettered access to that raw data. But that is piecemealed out to different law enforcement.
Napolitano: And by what authority or whose command or permission does Mossad have unfettered access to all the surveillance, whether pursuant to warrant or warrantless? How did that happen?
Hathaway: Well, it just kind of it’s it’s been going on for so long that now there’s attempts to make that official, to put that into statute, to say that they’re basically part of our military. They have access to what we have in the way of weapons development, pure procurement, information intelligence. But it has happened. I think it’s largely because of the AIPAC control over Congress that Congress doesn’t do their oversight duties that they should do.
And when I worked overseas, also had a lot of contact with Israeli agents coming and spying on us, spying on our activities. And they would usually be handled quietly because Israel was considered once again a friend and ally. So usually these cases weren’t prosecuted when I discovered them and my colleagues discovered them, they were just kind of brushed aside and dismissed quietly.
Napolitano: All right, a couple more background questions before we get to specifics. There’s MI6, the British spying agency, the British foreign spying agency spy in the US.
Hathaway: If if—they probably do, to an extent. But every intelligence threat I have ever dealt with in my career in the federal government, holding a top secret SCI clearance was always the Israelis. When I was a member of the “C Wig” in the foreign environment, that’s the counterintelligence working group that every embassy has. Whenever we discovered a surveillance threat or a spy threat, it was always the Israelis.
So, you know, MI six sits formally on, on boards, you know, along with other US law enforcement agencies, and it exists as a formal relationship. But the raw, down and dirty spying from this country that pretends that they’re our friends is, from my experience, was exclusively with the Israelis.
Napolitano: Okay. When we emailed you in the past two days to ask you if you could comment on the stories in the press about Israel spying on the white House and Mar-A-Lago and the State Department. You responded by saying, yes, of course you would. And you were familiar with it. And then you told us that they regularly spy on law enforcement.
Why would the Israeli government, a foreign spying agency like the Mossad, spy on the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department or the NYPD or the LAPD or the Chicago PD or some small town PD?
Hathaway: Well, you know, I hate to say, but they don’t look at us as equals. Just like Netanyahu said recently, you got to have the skill of saying no to the US, saying no to the US president. You know, they they don’t want the gravy train to stop. But like in my foreign assignments, decades working in Latin America, like we discovered, for example, an Israeli stingray device made by Phantom Technologies attached to the exterior wall of of an embassy compound with a directional Yagi antenna sending the cell phone data to the Israeli embassy.
So that type of device mimics a cell tower, and it scoops up all, all cell phone activity in the area. So that’s one example. Like we had another, this is another C Wig incident that we dealt with. We had a foreign national working in an embassy—that was an Israeli foreign national—worked in the ID department that was spiriting both printed material and electronic material out of the embassy.
Both of these things were handled quietly in order to not embarrass the Israeli government, to not affect the relationship with Israel. Here in my county that I work at, this is a test platform for Elbit Systems, an Israeli company that has built 60 spy towers that collect not only video information, but electromagnetic information, radio spectrum radar information. And Israel owns the feed.
This Israeli company, Elbit Systems owns the feed. And then US agencies can pay to receive that feed. Like CBP, homeland security pays to receive that feed off site. I’ve never seen the feed, both—when I was the head of DEA in this same area, the same part of Arizona, and as the sheriff. So they collect the information. And, you know, it’s hard for me to assign anything other than nefarious purposes for that to just kind of see what we’re doing, see what we’re talking about.
Judge Napolitano, host of the podcast Judging Freedom, is the author of nine books on the US Constitution, is a graduate of Princeton, was the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the State of New Jersey and was formerly a commentator on Fox News.
Sheriff David Hathaway worked as a Special Agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), working in Bolivia, Paraguay, Missouri, and California before becoming the head of the DEA office in Nogales, Arizona. He has been Sheriff of Santa Cruz County Arizona since 2020.
The full June 15th Judging Freedom program is here.
