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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?
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.
Oh no, can't have them monitor the Cayman islands...they would net about 90% of our congress, senate and 3/4 of the power brokers in DC...can't have that ya know ;)
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.
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.
Based on the number of proportional font memos with a blacked out second country name, it shouldn't be too hard to narrow down the other country (in addition to the Bahamas) for which "full retrieval" was possible.
I mean, it's not Laos, and it's not Nagorno-Karabakh, but with a known font, you could narrow it down pretty quickly based on the redacted images.
Here:
https://prod01-cdn00.cdn.first...
And here:
https://prod01-cdn02.cdn.first...
As if a country like the Bahamas can do anything like that. The US is the only country they could hook into for internet infrastructure without running a cable to South America or Mexico.
The US also flies unmarked helos in Bahamas airspace - the DEA would do low level flights up and down the island of Eleuthera looking for crops and attempting to follow drug mules. The mules would drop the drugs off on the south end of the island, transfer from boat to a truck, drive up to the north end of the island and dump them on another boat to get around satellite surveillance. It's scary seeing an unmarked Apache 30 feet off the deck fly over as you're laying on the beach.
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"
Try and think of what "intercepting data off a network" is really about into todays digitally connected world.
Thats every private call, legal documents as a fax or junk crypto, every electronic court document, banking records protected with international junk crypto, local contracts been discussed between gov departments before been offered, international contracts been discussed between gov departments, the expensive needs of education, science wrt to costly upgrades, mil and police needs, health, energy policy, food exports, trade with other nations.... Any nation thats opened itself up to that kind of constant "intercepting" is really sinking into colony status with every act, law, deal, contract been seen and fully understood by a few other nations (5++ other nations).
International tenders become a costly joke with a full understanding of the gov position, needs and price range.
A digital banana republic, as Argentina had the the English Octopus over rail. Once another nation is in your domestic infrastructure they get to understand and shape policy.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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.
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.