As for "nominally democratic" I'll ignore it in order to not bring the already devastated level of discourse here yet lower.
But, back the point, do you seriously believe the NSA will outsource its most sensitive operations to another country? HN is now moving from r/politics to r/conspiracy.
The evidence for this alleged act of Israel spying on the US is that an Israeli company developed software that was purchased and used by the government and phone companies. That's all. We don't even know what the software is named or what it does other than a vague description of it logging and copying network data; it could be a frontend to wireshark or netcat. Consider, how does Hacker News react when any other startup develops useful cutting-edge network management software and gets a big government deal? Now see how we react when an Israeli company does the exact same thing? This is a hate-the-Jews thread.
"One theory that’s been gaining traction as of late, on how the NSA got around those pesky little things called laws, is that they outsourced the project to Israel."
So basically a random conspiracy theory clickbait. Also the reference to 8200 here really shows the author has no fogey idea.
In short, Israeli intelligence out of necessity doesn't focus on PRISM like data-mining approaches.
The fact an Israeli company has people who served there is meaningless, it reflects nothing on what the company does nor the quality of its people.
It is not far-fetched to think that broad intelligence gathering will be used in the exact same way today. Communism may not be the big boogieman it once way, but there are still ideologies and causes that can get you branded as undesirable. For example, by being drug liberal.
I think it's naive to think that the information they are collecting will go unused. There aren't enough terrorist threats in there to act upon, so they will focus on the secondary threats which is people with the wrong opinions.
