The arrest by the FBI of Elliot Doxer, a financial employee of the Cambridge-based Akamai Technologies, Inc. for trying to sell company secrets to officials of the Israeli Consulate in Boston has once again raised the profile of the firm that was also at the center of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
As is usually the case with Israeli espionage cases, the Justice Department documents filed in the case merely refer to Israel as “Country X.” The Justice Department reportedly said “Country X,” cooperated in the investigation of Doxer. However, the Justice Department does not indicate when “Country X’s” cooperation began. The US Attorney’s Office in Boston claims that Israeli consular officials cooperated with U.S. officials before accepting Doxer’s offer, but it does not indicate when the cooperation actually began — upon initital contact by Doxer or after a period of time subsequent to initial contact.
Doxer was only charged with a single count of wire fraud. The Justice Department is not alleging any wrongdoing by Israel.
Lewin founded Akamai while he was an MIT graduate student. He founded the firm in 1998 with MIT mathematics professor Frank Thomas Leighton. After 9/11, Akamai provided “free of charge” its web services to numerous government agencies that had problems handling spikes in Internet traffic. It is not known whether the information Doxer offered the Israelis included the list of government agencies receiving the post-9/11 free web services and what those services entailed. Nor has the FBI indicated whether e-mail, confidential or otherwise, sent to government agencies by witnesses to the events of 9/11 was retained by Akamai.
In 2006, retired Army Colonel Fran Trentley, the chief information officer for the White House Communications Agency and who supported Presidential travel missions, joined Akamai as Director of Operations and Delivery for the firm’s public sector business services.