Unit 8200

Under an agreement signed in 2009, the National Security Agency provides Israel’s signals intelligence corps with unevaluated intelligence: raw transcripts, voice recordings and metadata, before American analysts have removed information about American citizens. The memorandum contains no legally binding restrictions on what Israel does with it.

The document was published by The Guardian in September 2013, from the material Edward Snowden took. It is not disputed.

What the unit is

Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s signals intelligence arm and its largest single unit, the closest counterpart Israel has to the NSA. It handles interception, cryptanalysis, counterintelligence, cyber operations and surveillance, and it is sometimes called the Israeli SIGINT National Unit. It runs collection across the Middle East and well beyond it, and shares product with the United States, Britain and Canada.

It is also a career pipeline. Alumni founded or lead a long list of technology companies including Check Point, NSO Group and Waze, along with dozens of cybersecurity firms, and hold security roles inside Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon. This is not a hidden arrangement. It is one of the openly celebrated features of the Israeli technology sector, and it means a steady flow of people move from a foreign military intelligence unit into positions of trust at companies holding enormous quantities of American data.

The letter

In September 2014, forty-three reservists and veterans of Unit 8200 published an open letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the IDF Chief of Staff and the head of Military Intelligence. Haaretz reported it first; The Guardian and the Washington Post followed.

Serving and former members of a signals intelligence unit do not usually describe their own methods in public, and the Brookings Institution noted at the time that this was the first occasion on which members of Israel’s SIGINT service had spoken out, as opposed to veterans of Mossad or the ground forces.

They wrote:

“We veterans of Unit 8200, reservists past and present, declare that we refuse to take part in activity against Palestinians and refuse to be tools to deepen the military control in the occupied territories.”

And, on how the collection actually worked:

“The Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence. While there are severe limitations on the surveillance of Israeli citizens, the Palestinians are not afforded this protection. Information that is collected and stored harms innocent people. It is used for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators and driving parts of Palestinian society against itself.”

Several signatories, interviewed anonymously, described gathering material that had nothing to do with militant activity: people’s sexual preferences, their medical problems, the kind of private information useful for applying pressure to someone who has done nothing.

The Israeli government’s response was to condemn the letter rather than examine it. Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon called it a “foolish and offensive attempt” to damage the unit. The IDF confirmed that signatories had been expelled. One of them said: “It seems the unit is trying to make the issues we raised go away simply by making us go away.”

Where the United States comes in

Two things connect this unit directly to American interests, and it is worth being exact about what each one does and does not establish.

The first is the 2009 memorandum. The NSA hands raw American communications to a foreign military intelligence service under an arrangement with no binding limits on use. That is a documented American decision with documented terms, and as far as is publicly known it remains in force.

The second is the alumni network flowing into American technology companies. That is a fact about the industry, openly acknowledged, and it is not evidence of anything improper by any individual.

Neither of these proves collection against Americans. What they establish is an architecture in which such collection would be operationally straightforward, sitting alongside the NSA’s own internal assessment, documented elsewhere in this archive, that Israel runs aggressive intelligence operations against United States government, military and economic targets. The unit named in those documents as the NSA’s operational counterpart is this one. No American government statement has ever addressed Unit 8200’s activities against American targets.

What came after

Nothing changed inside the unit. The signatories were expelled and the collection continued.

NSO Group, founded by Unit 8200 alumni, was added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s Entity List in November 2021 for supplying spyware used against journalists, activists and officials, a case documented separately in this archive. American government devices were among those reportedly targeted by its product.

The 2009 raw intelligence sharing agreement remains in effect.

Why it matters

The 2014 letter is usually read as a story about Palestinian surveillance, and it is one. Its value here is narrower and colder. It is the only occasion on which members of this specific unit have described, publicly and in their own words, what the unit actually does with the material it collects: assemble personal, medical and behavioral information about people who are not suspected of anything, for use in coercion.

That is a documented description of method, given by the people who carried it out. The United States hands this same unit unfiltered American communications, on terms that impose no legal limit on their use, and has never publicly asked what happens to them.

Sources

• Open letter from 43 Unit 8200 reservists and veterans to Prime Minister Netanyahu, the IDF Chief of Staff and the head of Military Intelligence, September 12, 2014 — first reported by Haaretz (Gili Cohen); English reporting by The Guardian (Peter Beaumont, September 12, 2014) and the Washington Post (September 14, 2014)
• NSA-ISNU Raw Intelligence Sharing Memorandum, 2009 — published by The Guardian (Greenwald, Poitras, MacAskill), September 11, 2013
• ETH Zurich Center for Security Studies, “Unit 8200,” CSS Cyber Defense Report, December 2019
• NBC News, “Israel Axes Reservists Who Flagged Espionage and Surveillance of Palestinians,” 2014
• Brookings Institution, “Israeli Intelligence Veterans Refusal Letter,” Bruce Riedel, September 12, 2014
• U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Industry and Security, Entity List addition: NSO Group Technologies, November 3, 2021