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The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call In the Bahamas
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes "The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country's cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the 'full-take audio' of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month."
.. what will the Bahama government/people do - will they sue the US for the presumable crime of breaking into their phone system?
In what court would they do this? You can't sue the US government in a US court without the permission of the US government, and the US will just ignore the ruling of just about any other court.
And yes, many (most?) other countries work the same way...
Anyone at NSA who is participating in this is committing an act of war against a sovereign nation without any declaration of war.
-jcr
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the united states does that like every other week. Noticed Ukraine lately? We started that. Everyone seems to forget there was a fucking US backed coup before Russia stepped in. It's not like they randomly decided to invade.
First off, the incident took place prior to 2007 when the Army was supplying the many of aircraft for the DEA to use in the operations there. Prior to 2007 the DEA only had 3 Jayhawks and 1 other helicopter for it's OPBAT operations, everything else was supplied by the Army.
This is the helicopter I saw: http://www.forthoodsentinel.co... - in this configuration. Armaments were not equipped though. It's rather hard to mistake the thin/relatively small profile of an Apache compared to the Blackhawks.
As to the nature of the mission, I cannot say exactly what they were doing that day, all I know is that they were flying below the tree line directly over the beach, facing in-land and strafing north. For all I know they were cruising for boobs. I suspect though, knowing the local geography/topography, that because of the density of the forest/jungle they were trying to see under the canopy as much as possible to identify grow ops that were not visible via satellite. This would be particularly effective in Eleuthera because the island is one long strip for the most part with very little change in elevation. Between the density of the bush and the number of poison wood trees, grows would likely need to be near a road - in the area where I was when I saw it there is only 1 road, right near the beach for about a 30km stretch http://goo.gl/maps/FSM9G
There are a mess of cables in the area, http://www.submarinecablemap.c... and I suppose they could but by "right by the bahamas" you're actually talking 1,000-2,000km of cable (depending on whether you went to Jamaica or directly to Caracas). The Bahamas largest project is around 3,500km which hooks up 20 islands and Haiti. Adding an extra 1/3rd to the length/cost just to avoid the US? Political/tourist implications aside, from a financial perspective it doesn't make sense. You have to remember that outside of Nassau/Freeport it's very much a 3rd world country - last I was there the entire island would lose power at least once every couple weeks.