An Akamai Technologies Inc employee was charged with trying to give confidential company information to an undercover FBI agent he thought worked for a foreign country, probably Israel, US prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Elliot Doxer, 42, worked in Akamai's finance department in Massachusetts and was charged with one count of wire fraud for providing customers lists, contract details and employee information. He sought $3,000 in return, prosecutors said.
In June 2006, Doxer e-mailed a foreign country's consulate in Boston with his offer to help. Court papers indicated the country was Israel because at one point he identified himself as a Jewish American who wanted "to help our homeland and our war against our enemies."
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to confirm or deny that it was Israel.
A year later, an undercover FBI agent posing as a representative of the foreign country contacted Doxer to see if he still wanted to help and after he agreed, the agent provided instructions on how to communicate with him and told Doxer where to deliver the information.
You have to read a few paragraphs down before you realize that his offer was ignored by "Country X", no information was transferred to "Country X" and that "Country X" cooperated with the FBI in busting him.
But it will only be a few hours before the first misrepresentations of the story hit the Israel-hater crowd. The obvious initial implication is that all American Jews are fifth columnists; then we will see other stories that will try to make it sound like Israel is recruiting American spies, and then the intellectual sounding ones will start saying that Israel is burrowing deep into the Internet as Akamai is a client of many major organizations and governments.
Not to mention the conspiracy theories that follow in coming weeks when the haters realize that Akamai was co-founded by Danny Lewin, a former member of the Sayeret Matkal special operations unit of the IDF who had his throat slashed by the 9/11 terrorists as he apparently tried to thwart the hijacking of the first plane, American Airlines Flight 11.
It's coming.
By the way, this strongly indicates that the US monitors all of the emails to Israeli diplomats in the US. Not that this is surprising, or the least bit unethical, but imagine the outcry that would follow if the roles were reversed. After all, doesn't this prove that the US is spying on Israel?