In the mid-2000s, two Israeli spy companies (Narus and Verint) were caught in the centre of a huge scandal involving the wiretapping of virtually all US phone and internet mes-
sages. Their mass surveillance services were used by America’s two largest telecom companies, AT&T and Verizon.

These telecom giants, which together control 80% of the US market, were turning over all of their customers’ internet communications and phone call records to the US National Secu-
rity Agency (NSA). On hundreds of occasions, these data transfers were done without legal warrants or court orders.
This warrantless wiretapping operation was a gargantuan task requiring the collection, analysis and transfer of data relating to billions of messages per day. To accomplish this, AT&T employed the services of an Israeli spy firm called Narus, while Verizon used a different Israeli spy company, Verint Systems.

The technologies of both Verint and Narus have also been absorbed into the spy products of other companies. For example, Amdocs has integrated Narus software into its products,
while Verisign has incorporated systems from both Verint and Narus into its “NetDiscovery” service.