Page 39 - index

the documents were "the kind that any intelligence agency would be delighted to get its hands
iii
on."

iv
After completing her military service in June 2007, it is reported that in September 2008 Kamm
provided Uri Blau, an investigative journalist at the Haaretz newspaper, who specialized in
military affairs, the USB thumb drive containing the downloaded classified documents and told
v
him “I hope you’ll know what to do with this.”
After reviewing the classified documents, Blau proceeded to publish two articles in Ha’aretz in
November and December 2008, respectively, detailing the secret IDF meetings in which
targeted killings were authorized for operations that were supposed to be arrest-based – but not
deliberate killing – raids of Palestinian suspects. One of the articles also included a photo of the
actual IDF documents Kamm had provided him.

Although, in accordance with Israeli law, Blau had submitted the articles to the office of the
newspaper’s military censor, which cleared them for publication, following the articles’
publication, in early 2009, the IDF’s investigators initiated an inquiry into the documents’
leakage. After obtaining their respective phone records, and determining they had been in
contact, Kamm was interrogated by the General Security Service of Israel (GSS – also known
as Shin Bet), and reportedly confessed to leaking the documents, which is considered an act of
treason since under Israeli law providing classified documents to a journalist is as treasonous as
vi
providing them to a terrorist group or foreign government.
Following a period of house arrest, in December 2009 Kamm was subsequently arrested and
indicted on two counts of “serious espionage” – one for “gathering” and the other for “divulging”
vii
classified information, “with the intent to damage the security of the state.” Kamm was
subsequently sentenced to four and a half years imprisonment on charges of leaking classified
material, and, as part of her plea deal, was early released from prison in late January 2014.

Profiling the Characteristics of “Insiders” in IT Threats

Similar to the radicalization processes that drive what are considered homegrown Western
individuals into extremism and terrorism, risky insiders in IT, such as Kamm, Manning and
Snowden – who are mostly lone wolves (although Manning and Snowden reportedly were linked
to some degree with extremist hacktivist groups) – are radicalized by their own version of
extremist ideologies.

In fact, just as Islamist “jihadism” became the new ideological fad in the 1980s to replace the
previous far-left radicalism for those disaffected in the 1960s and 1970s, this new IT-based
extremist ideology promotes the notion that all information, ranging from the most secret and
proprietary to fee-based subscriptions to information carriers such as newspapers and music
companies – should be free and accessible to everyone.

As demonstrated by the cases of Kamm, Manning and Snowden, such “radicalized” individuals
feel an overwhelming disgruntlement and anger towards their governments and their national

39 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – November 2014 Edition
Copyright © Cyber Defense Magazine, All rights reserved worldwide