<img class="gwt-Image" src="/photo/46932283.cms" />Information technology group <keyword id="43217" type="CITY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Tech-Mahindra">Tech Mahindra</keyword> is partnering with U.S.-<keyword id="6355882" type="COUNTRY" weightage="80" keywordseo="israel">Israel</keyword>i <keyword id="317833" type="COMPANY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Comverse">Comverse</keyword> Inc to set up a research and development centre in Israel.

	 
	The two companies did not disclose financial details.<o:p></o:p>

	Manish Vyas, president of Tech Mahindra's communications group, told Reuters the deal -- which would bring the Indian company hundreds of engineers -- will help the firm more than double its engineering business revenue within a few years. The company does about $400 million annually in engineering, about half of that is in telecoms.<o:p></o:p>

	"Engineering is a very large part of our business but we want to make it even bigger. We believe it can be a billion dollars annually in the next few years," he said. "Given the culture of <keyword id="107737" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="Entrepreneurship">entrepreneurship</keyword> in Israel we need to be here."<o:p></o:p>

	Under the "strategic relationship", Tech Mahindra will be responsible for R&amp;D and customer services while Comverse will be in charge of product management and sales.<o:p></o:p>

	The venture into Israel by Tech Mahindra, which is part of the $16.5 billion Mahindra conglomerate, is the latest sign of booming ties between the countries since Indian <keyword id="71" type="POSITION" weightage="80" keywordseo="Prime-Minister">Prime Minister</keyword> <keyword id="6354477" type="PERSON" weightage="80" keywordseo="Narendra-Modi">Narendra Modi</keyword> came to power last year.<o:p></o:p>

	Tech Mahindra Executive Vice Chairman <keyword id="82760" type="PERSON" weightage="80" keywordseo="Vineet-Nayyar">Vineet Nayyar</keyword> said the company's global activities will be concentrated in three countries - India, the United States and Israel.<o:p></o:p>

	Tech Mahindra, which employees over 98,000 people in 51 countries, will take on about 400 Comverse workers, up to 300 from Israel and the rest mainly from the United States, France, Japan, Bulgaria and India.<o:p></o:p>

	Comverse last year began a restructuring that included reducing its workforce by 14 percent.<o:p></o:p>

	"We hope to gain access to world class talent," Vyas said. "We have a big presence in Europe, India and the U.S. (But) Israel was missing from the global footprint in terms of talent."<o:p></o:p>

	About half of Tech Mahindra's business is in telecoms with the rest from banking, healthcare and manufacturing.<o:p></o:p>

	Tech Mahindra owns Israel's Leadcom, a provider of network services for telecom companies, after it bought Leadcom's parent Lightbridge Communications in February.<o:p></o:p>

	Leadcom has about 25 workers in Israel and Vyas said the company is still working out what the relationship will be between Leadcom and the Comverse staff.<o:p></o:p>

	He said Israel fits in nicely with the company's long-term strategy, which includes a programme that enable employees to start up their own businesses with equity from Tech Mahindra.<o:p></o:p>

	"Given the culture of entrepreneurship in Israel we need to be here," Vyas said.<o:p></o:p>

Move over Israeli engineers, this Indian company will become your worst nightmare

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/50062e3669beddb87700002d-400-300/nsa-infographic.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA" /><a href="http://www.aclu.org/national-security/nsa-unchained-infographic">ACLU</a></div></div></div>The <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-washington-post-backtracks-on-claim-tech-companies-participate-knowingly-in-the-nsas-data-collection-2013-6">newest information regarding the NSA domestic spying scandal</a> raises an important question: If America's tech giants didn't 'participate knowingly' in the dragnet of electronic communication, how does the NSA <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-impact-of-nsa-domestic-spying-2013-6">get all of their data</a>?
One theory: the NSA hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap the U.S. telecommunications network.
In April 2012 Wired's James Bamford - author of the book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Factory-NSA-Eavesdropping-America/dp/0307279391">The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America</a>" - reported that two companies with extensive links to Israel's intelligence service <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1">provided hardware and software to wiretap the U.S. telecommunications network</a> for the National Security Agency (NSA).
By doing so, this would imply, companies like Facebook and Google don't have to explicitly provide the NSA with access to their servers because major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AT&amp;T and Verizon already allows the U.S. signals intelligence agency to eavesdrop on all of their data anyway. 
From <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1">Bamford</a> (emphasis ours):
"According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, <a href="http://verint.com/" title="Verint">Verint</a>, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon...
At AT&amp;T the wiretapping rooms are <a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908">powered by software and hardware from Narus</a>, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/05/att_whistleblow/" title="AT&amp;T Whistleblower: How I Learned of Internet Spy Room">AT&amp;T whistleblower Mark Klein</a> in 2004."
Klein, an engineer, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html">discovered the "secret room" at AT&amp;T central office in San Francisco</a>, through which the NSA actively "*vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&amp;T" through the wiretapping rooms, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-collecting-phone-records-of-americans-2013-6">emphasizing</a> that "much of the data sent through AT&amp;T to the NSA was purely domestic."
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein's assertions, <a href="https://www.eff.org/document/drake-declaration-support-plaintiffs-motion">testifying</a> that while the NSA is using <a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914">Israeli-made NARUS hardware</a> to "<a href="https://www.eff.org/document/drake-declaration-support-plaintiffs-motion">seize and save</a> all personal electronic communications."
Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s. Both provide <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/10/15/311567/index.htm">monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations</a>, promoting claims that their equipment can access and retain large amounts of information on a vast number of targets.
From <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1">Robert Poe of Wired</a>:
Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps. 
"*Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of <a href="http://www.narus.com/">Narus</a>, a Mountain View, California company, <a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914">said</a>. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."
With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.
And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves.
This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image"><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51b1f18eecad04a70f000005-3000-1500/nsa-7.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA" width="800" />AP/Rick BowmerAn aerial view of the NSA's $2 billion Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah, where the signals intelligence agency can intercept, store, and analyze reams of foreign and domestic communications. It's expected to open in October.</div></div>
Meanwhile projects like the agency's <a href="http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/">$2 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah</a> - which can collect and analyze "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte">yottobytes</a>" of information- to sift through domestic internet traffic.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image"><img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/51b1efc86bb3f7480b00000c-3000-1500/nsa-6.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA" width="800" />AP/Rick BowmerEquipment for cooling data mining equipment at the NSA's data center in Bluffdale, Utah</div></div>
In 2007 a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200 (i.e. Israel's NSA) <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/07/israel-military-unit-ventures-biz-cx_gk_0208israel.html">told Forbes</a> that the technology of Comverse (i.e. the company that owns Verint) is based on Unit 8200 technology.
One of the founders of Verint, Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, is a former Israeli intelligence officer. 
A co-founder and former chairmen of Narus, Ori Cohen, <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/10/15/311567/index.htm">told Fortune</a> in 2001 that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. 
In 2011 another former chief of Unit 8200 <a href="http://rpdefense.over-blog.com/article-une-unite-d-elite-qui-a-pour-but-de-developper-les-prouesses-technologiques-de-tsahal-85544009.html">acknowledged to the Israeli paper Haartez</a> that high-tech firms around the world employ both Unit 8200 equipment and its veteran personnel.
From Bamford <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1">Wired</a> (emphasis ours):
"Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years... Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street." Referred to only as "Brigadier General B," he added, "This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally <keyword id="6359526" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Military">military</keyword> technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans."
The NSA began eavesdropping on the international communications of Americans after President Bush <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?_r=1">secretly authorized</a> the practice in 2002 - without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying - to search for evidence of terrorist activity.
The newest revelations <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-millions-americans">confirm</a> that the practices employed during the secret program, code-named <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1" title="The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)">Stellar Wind</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/obamas-fbi-chief-backed-nsa-wiretapping-2013-5">hasn't stopped under President Obama</a>.
From <a href="http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/7040">the Pulitzer-Prize winning 2005 story</a> by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times:
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
Last year the ACLU <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-how-the-nsa-intercepts-the-electronic-communications-of-americans-2012-5">published this infographic</a>, which is the best way to visualize what bugging the telecommunications grid provides the NSA:
<div class="KonaFilter image-container click-to-enlarge"><div class="image"><a title_source="ACLU" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4fbd210d69bedddf40000007-960/fisainfographic3.jpg"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4fbd210d69bedddf40000007-1459-4832/fisainfographic3.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA infographic" width="800" /></a><a href="http://www.aclu.org/files/pages/fisainfographic3.pdf">ACLU</a></div></div>
*emphasis added by the author of this article

DID YOU KNOW?: Two Secretive Israeli Companies Reportedly Bugged The US Telecommunications Grid For The NSA

<div class="image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/50062e3669beddb87700002d-400-300/nsa-infographic.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA" /><a href="http://www.aclu.org/national-security/nsa-unchained-infographic">ACLU</a></div></div></div>The <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-washington-post-backtracks-on-claim-tech-companies-participate-knowingly-in-the-nsas-data-collection-2013-6">newest information regarding the NSA domestic spying scandal</a> raises an important question: If America's tech giants didn't 'participate knowingly' in the dragnet of electronic communication, how does the NSA <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/the-impact-of-nsa-domestic-spying-2013-6">get all of their data</a>?
One theory: the NSA hired two secretive Israeli companies to wiretap the U.S. telecommunications network.
In April 2012 Wired's James Bamford — author of the book "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Factory-NSA-Eavesdropping-America/dp/0307279391">The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America</a>" — reported that two companies with extensive links to Israel's intelligence service <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1">provided hardware and software to wiretap the U.S. telecommunications network</a> for the National Security Agency (NSA).
By doing so, this would imply, companies like Facebook and Google don't have to explicitly provide the NSA with access to their servers because major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as AT&amp;T and Verizon already allows the U.S. signals intelligence agency to eavesdrop on all of their data anyway. 
From <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1">Bamford</a> (emphasis ours):
"According to a former Verizon employee briefed on the program, <a href="http://verint.com/" title="Verint">Verint</a>, owned by Comverse Technology, taps the communication lines at Verizon...
At AT&amp;T the wiretapping rooms are <a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908">powered by software and hardware from Narus</a>, now owned by Boeing, a discovery made by <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/05/att_whistleblow/" title="AT&amp;T Whistleblower: How I Learned of Internet Spy Room">AT&amp;T whistleblower Mark Klein</a> in 2004."
Klein, an engineer, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/07/AR2007110700006.html">discovered the "secret room" at AT&amp;T central office in San Francisco</a>, through which the NSA actively "*vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&amp;T" through the wiretapping rooms, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-collecting-phone-records-of-americans-2013-6">emphasizing</a> that "much of the data sent through AT&amp;T to the NSA was purely domestic."
NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein's assertions, <a href="https://www.eff.org/document/drake-declaration-support-plaintiffs-motion">testifying</a> that while the NSA is using <a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914">Israeli-made NARUS hardware</a> to "<a href="https://www.eff.org/document/drake-declaration-support-plaintiffs-motion">seize and save</a> all personal electronic communications."
Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s. Both provide <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/10/15/311567/index.htm">monitoring and intercept capabilities to service providers and government organizations</a>, promoting claims that their equipment can access and retain large amounts of information on a vast number of targets.
From <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1">Robert Poe of Wired</a>:
Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps. 
"*Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of <a href="http://www.narus.com/">Narus</a>, a Mountain View, California company, <a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70914">said</a>. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."
With a telecom wiretap the NSA only needs companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple to passively participate while the agency to intercepts, stores, and analyzes their communication data. The indirect nature of the agreement would provide tech giants with plausible deniability.
And having a foreign contractor bug the telecom grid would mean that the NSA gained access to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the U.S. without technically doing it themselves.
This would provide the NSA, whose official mission is to spy on foreign communications, with plausible deniability regarding domestic snooping.
<div class="image-container" style="width:620px"><div class="image"><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/51b1f18eecad04a70f000005-3000-1500/nsa-7.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA" width="620" />AP/Rick BowmerAn aerial view of the NSA's $2 billion Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah, where the signals intelligence agency can intercept, store, and analyze reams of foreign and domestic communications. It's expected to open in October.</div></div>
Meanwhile projects like the agency's <a href="http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/">$2 billion data center in Bluffdale, Utah</a> — which can collect and analyze "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yottabyte">yottobytes</a>" of information— to sift through domestic internet traffic.
<div class="image-container" style="width:620px"><div class="image"><img src="http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/51b1efc86bb3f7480b00000c-3000-1500/nsa-6.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA" width="620" />AP/Rick BowmerEquipment for cooling data mining equipment at the NSA's data center in Bluffdale, Utah</div></div>
In 2007 a former commander of the highly secret Unit 8200 (i.e. Israel’s NSA) <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2007/02/07/israel-military-unit-ventures-biz-cx_gk_0208israel.html">told Forbes</a> that the technology of Comverse (i.e. the company that owns Verint) is based on Unit 8200 technology.
One of the founders of Verint, Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, is a former Israeli intelligence officer. 
A co-founder and former chairmen of Narus, Ori Cohen, <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2001/10/15/311567/index.htm">told Fortune</a> in 2001 that his partners have done technology work for Israeli intelligence. 
In 2011 another former chief of Unit 8200 <a href="http://rpdefense.over-blog.com/article-une-unite-d-elite-qui-a-pour-but-de-developper-les-prouesses-technologiques-de-tsahal-85544009.html">acknowledged to the Israeli paper Haartez</a> that high-tech firms around the world employ both Unit 8200 equipment and its veteran personnel.
From Bamford <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/all/1">Wired</a> (emphasis ours):
“Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years... Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental: Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally <keyword id="6359526" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Military">military</keyword> technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.”
The NSA began eavesdropping on the international communications of Americans after President Bush <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?_r=1">secretly authorized</a> the practice in 2002 — without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying — to search for evidence of terrorist activity.
The newest revelations <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-millions-americans">confirm</a> that the practices employed during the secret program, code-named <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1" title="The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)">Stellar Wind</a>, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/obamas-fbi-chief-backed-nsa-wiretapping-2013-5">hasn't stopped under President Obama</a>.
From <a href="http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/7040">the Pulitzer-Prize winning 2005 story</a> by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times:
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
Last year the ACLU <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-how-the-nsa-intercepts-the-electronic-communications-of-americans-2012-5">published this infographic</a>, which is the best way to visualize what bugging the telecommunications grid provides the NSA:
<div class="image-container click-to-enlarge"><div class="image"><a title_source="ACLU" title_caption="" class="zoomin" href="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4fbd210d69bedddf40000007-960/fisainfographic3.jpg"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/4fbd210d69bedddf40000007-1459-4832/fisainfographic3.jpg" border="0" alt="NSA infographic" width="620" /></a><a href="http://www.aclu.org/files/pages/fisainfographic3.pdf">ACLU</a></div></div>
*emphasis added by the author of this article

You Searched For "Comverse" and got 3 results

Move over Israeli engineers, this Indian company will become your worst nightmare

Reuters

DID YOU KNOW?: Two Secretive Israeli Companies Reportedly Bugged The US Telecommunications Grid For The NSA

Michael Kelley

DID YOU KNOW?: Two Secretive Israeli Companies Reportedly Bugged The US Telecommunications Grid For The NSA

Michael Kelley