US monitored high-priority Israeli military targets

The revelation came in a comprehensive overview of thousands of NSA internal documents, mostly dating from 2007 to 2012, which were taken by Snowden and shared with the Times by the Guardian.

The Times report lists Israel as an example of an ally which the NSA both spied on and shared intelligence information with.

"The documents describe collaboration with the Israel Sigint National Unit, which gets raw NSA eavesdropping material and provides it in return, but they also mention the agency’s tracking of \’high priority Israeli military targets,\’ including drone aircraft and the Black Sparrow missile system," the Times reported.

The Guardian reported in September that a document provided by Snowden revealed that the NSA shares "raw intelligence data" with Israel, without first removing information about US citizens.

The document that Snowden reportedly provided is a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart the Israeli Sigint National Unit (ISNU) "pertaining to the protection of US persons."

The MOU discloses that Israel receives raw signal intelligence ("raw Sigint") from the US which includes unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, and voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.

\’Minimization\’ is the process that an intelligence agency carries out to safeguard the privacy of its citizens prior to sharing information with a foreign agency, according to the report.

Israel receives such "unminimized raw signet" according to the MOU and is required by it to handle the information according to US law but according to the Guardian the document does not back up these rules by any legal obligations on Israel.

An NSA spokesperson did not deny to the Guardian that personal information of US citizens was included in raw intelligence data shared with the Israelis, but he insisted that the shared intelligence "complied with all rules governing privacy."