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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.
Under what theory of international law? This behavior is clearly bad and is the sort of thing a country has a right to be pissed off about, but there's no coherent, conventional theory that makes this an act of war. The situation is bad enough without exaggerating.
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.
And how exactly? Are the evil Internet terrorists going to hack us? Wait I know, maybe some evil foreign spy agency will steal trade secrets from our businesses... oh wait.
This technology is already out there for everyone to exploit
"But Johny also did it" is the kind of excuse I'd expect from a first grader. Just because someone else engages in something morally questionable doesn't make it ok for you to do it.
Just stop. This isn't about "defending" anything, but American financial interests. If you honestly believe there is some higher purpose behind the US spying efforts, then you are either extremely naive, or suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance.