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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."
Had they done this with Cayman Islands they could have possible nabbed some real criminals, and probably made the world a better/safer place.
Surely there is a branch of al-quaeda there to have that kind of surveillance. When they will start to send the killer drones?
"The U.S. Department of Treasury estimated that in 2011 the Caribbean Banking Centers, which include Bahamas ...held almost $2 trillion dollars in United States debt." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I bet there were some pretty juicy tidbits swept up in that massive dragnet. I certainly believe that tax evaders are a lot more of an actual threat to the US than the terrorism "boogeyman". So where are our prosecutions on this crap?
The answer is that there never will be. All this mass-surveillance will never actually be used to our benefit, only as a means enforcing the status quo for the powers that be.
Anyone at NSA who is participating in this is committing an act of war against a sovereign nation without any declaration of war.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Except that getting caught at it is a major embarrassment and is going to destroy the relationships with Bahamas and most likely erode even further that of other countries. And given the breach of trust involved in this specific instance, is going to have a negative effect in the war against terror and drug cooperation. Not to mention that indiscriminate eavesdropping in an entire population is both overkill an unnecessary for gathering relevant intelligence of any kind.
I'm still much less troubled about NSA surveillance than about what what a forced sale of the clippers means for privacy. And what Brendan Eich's ousting means for free speech. I wish Hitchens were still alive, just to see what his take would be on the current trend of popular suppression.
It is certainly legal, and proper for popular opinion to move against unpopular ideas in the private arena, so long as government holds itself apart from this censure... but it does not feel good. it does not feel right.
The NSA can wire-tap the crap out of me, because I don't think they'd do something so capricious as out me to the public. And the public doesn't work through proper channels. Judge, jury, executioner through mob rule.
Orwell would weep, punishing people for what they think.
Everyone who's anyone is using electronic eavesdropping to supplement their Country's intelligence agenda.
If the United States took the high ground and refused to engage this, it would be to the detriment of the West, likely including the Country you've posted from.
This technology is already out there for everyone to exploit.... Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get back in.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The problem is in some parts of the world is the domestic cost of telco interconnects. It can be cheaper to connect domestic calls via an international peering loop that goes way out past a few other nations and their shared facilities. Kind of hard to re build a decades of contracts and local hardware thats all about reducing costs.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"