US and British intelligence cracked the codes of Israeli drones operating in the Middle East and monitored their surveillance feeds for almost 20 years, according to documents leaked by a US whistle-blower and published in international media on Friday.
Reports by the German magazine Der Spiegel and the investigative Web site the Intercept said the details emerged from documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who leaked millions of documents about US government surveillance in 2013.
The reports said that US intelligence agencies were able to watch information that the Israeli drones and other aircraft broadcast back to their handlers.
The project, codenamed “Anarchist,” has operated since 1998 and was based near the highest point in Cyprus.
Israel was the focus of the program, but it also hacked into systems in Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Syria, the reports said.
In one instance in 2008, an NSA internal newsletter boasted of the Anarchist program successfully collecting video from the cockpit of an Israeli F-16 warplane, the Intercept report said.
It said the hacking granted intelligence agencies a “virtual seat in the cockpit” as Israeli aircraft hit targets.
It also showed footage of what it said appeared to be armed drones. Israel neither denies nor confirms use of weaponized drones.
There was no official comment on the reports In Israel.
However, Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water Resources Yuval Steinitz, who previously held the post of minister of intelligence and atomic energy, said: “We are not surprised; we know that the Americans spy on every country in the world and on us as well, on their friends.”
“It is nevertheless disappointing, because among other reasons, we haven’t been spying or collecting intelligence or cracking codes in the United States for decades,” he told the Israeli Defense Forces’ Army Radio.
“We don’t comment on intelligence matters,” the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office said.
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