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WikiLeaks: NSA Recording All Telephone Calls In Afghanistan
On Monday, The Intercept reported that the NSA is recording the content of every cell phone call in the Bahamas. At the time of publication, The Intercept said there was another country in which the NSA was doing this, but declined to name it because of "specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence." Now, reader Advocatus Diaboli points out that WikiLeaks has spilled the beans: the country being fully monitored by the NSA is Afghanistan. Julian Assange wrote,
"Such censorship strips a nation of its right to self-determination on a matter which affects its whole population. An ongoing crime of mass espionage is being committed against the victim state and its population. By denying an entire population the knowledge of its own victimization, this act of censorship denies each individual in that country the opportunity to seek an effective remedy, whether in international courts, or elsewhere. Pre-notification to the perpetrating authorities also permits the erasure of evidence which could be used in a successful criminal prosecution, civil claim, or other investigations. ... We do not believe it is the place of media to 'aid and abet' a state in escaping detection and prosecution for a serious crime against a population. Consequently WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is Afghanistan."
After all, we were at war there. I am wondering as we get to what is being promised as the biggest story of the Snowden documents, what the final scoop will be.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Now they have to hire thousands of Afghan translators. It will give all the liberal arts graduates something to do.
I'm sorry, but there is just no source that is possibly less reliable than this. The asshole has no credibility.
What the hell else are they supposed to do with acres and acres of servers?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The only democracy that the U.S. ever intended to bring to Afghanistan and Iraq was of the "You can choose pro-U.S. candidate number 1, or pro-U.S. candidate number 2" variety.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
More importantly it just goes to show how useless all this phone recording is, as it still hasn't resulted in an overwhelming victory.
Not as long as you might think. The technology needed for this level of data collection is only a few decades old at best. 20-30 years ago even tracing a call in an industrialized nation could be a laborious task and collection like this was just undoable.
There seems to always be the obligatory "didn't we all know this already" comment in these NSA discussions. Every time it can be found. I'm tired of it.
No, we didn't know. Beginning with the revelations by Edward Snowden, people's eyes have constantly opened more and more to the things that are happening behind the scenes. Some of it is crazy Orwellian crap that many of us couldn't make up in their wildest dreams.
When you listen to what people say and then fire a rocket at their car based on that, it is censorship.
All 15 of them? Wow!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
When you listen to what people say and then fire a rocket at their car based on that, it is censorship.
Just to play devils' advocate: if you heard people's last minute plans to mount a suicide attack at a market or checkpoint, and you only have a short time to lob a spitfire at them to prevent that, is that censorship?
I mean, I get the general gist of what you mean, but you need to be more articulate and precise, and provide a much better context to your argument.
The "censorship" in question is the decision not to publish the name of the nation in question:
"By denying an entire population the knowledge of its own victimization, this act of censorship denies each individual in that country the opportunity to seek an effective remedy, whether in international courts, or elsewhere."
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
This part of the Snowden leaks is the part I have a problem with. This is EXACTLY what the NSA is supposed to be doing. Making this part public record does do damage to the US and is part of being a traitor. I have zero problems with Snowden leaking information about the NSA spying on Americans, not because it effects me, but because it's a violation of the Constitution and the NSA does NOT have that authority, regardless of what laws Congress passes. If the SCOTUS wasn't such pussies they would have taken this on years ago and stopped it, but instead they are 100% complicit in this as well. If Snowden has a problem with these actions from the NSA, why did he take a job there in the first place?
When you listen to them talking politics, and then bomb the wedding down the street instead... that's US Intelligence.
Leave me out of this! They are nothing like me.
"Even Prophets don't know everything"
I do not mean to imply that they didn't deserve it, or that I would not have done the same.
I was just pointing out that we as Americans like to consider ourselves morally superior to our counterparts, but in reality we engage in a lot of the same practices.
Sometimes it is cheaper to blow up a school than send in people to determine if there are terrorists there.
Sometimes it is cheaper to have the CIA poison someone who has a different opinion than it is to debate them.
Sometimes it is cheaper to have a motorcyclist throw explosives on the outside of a nuclear scientist's car than it is to try to get the country to stop its program.
Sometimes it is cheaper to execute a cleric rather than have trials to determine guilt.
We are not much different than the people that attack us based on our ideas, we just have a lot more money than they do. It is too easy to dehumanize others and not care about collateral damage when we fight our wars.
That isn't the problem. Joe Everyman expected them to be doing this, but don't know why it's A Bad Thing. All they see is "It's to stop the terr'rists / perverts / commies!" and don't see how it can be abused, not by those in power now, but those in the future.
20 years from now, when the bigots finally get a real right-wing guy in power, they'll look back at all this data and say "Ok, fella's; Find me everyone who ever talked to a brown guy and revoke their passport."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Agreed, but one thing is spy on targets predefined and authorized over some kind of court that demands reports. This thing we could even imagine. Another thing is to record everything single call disregarding who is in the call. Bulk record.
Yes, because clearly the best way to win over the population there that doesn't support terrorism is to subject them to things we would ourselves find objectionable.
Like most activists, the jump to assumptions, impose their version of their world view, and not try to take a look at the other angle, or try to understand why.
Usually your political opponent is not waking up in the morning going, what Evil can I do today, like in a TV Cartoon. In real life your opponent weighs the seriousness problems differently then you do, and feels particular trade-offs are more acceptable then you do.
The NSA mission is to use intelligence to find threats to the United States Interests. They see the threat of not getting intelligence more dangerous then the privacy of others. If they were pro-privacy organization then they wouldn't be able to function, as their jobs is to get secrets. Now if you see this, you realize that other then vilifying the NSA, you need to take a step back and work with their bosses to come up new regulations to prevent them from going too far.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Sounds like you just logically disproved the existence of "self censorship". Or maybe you don't consider it to be a kind of censorship, despite its suggestive name...
You seem to be under the illusion that the US and the other "5 Eyes" countries were not collecting metadata and recording conversations pre-2001. This is an inaccurate belief on your part.
They can't find a Boing 777.
So here's the deal with that - If the recording serves a security purpose, how did the Indian consulate get attacked while we were watching?
Why didn't we intervene? And why haven't we produced recordings of the coordinators?
"most probable cause of why we have not seen more 9/11's in the last 10 years."
Doubtful at best, and the chance of an actual 9/11 style attack (with planes) will never again occur. Heck, it didn't even work by the four plane that same morning.
However, I do agree that the monitoring they are doing is exactly what we set them up to do in the first place. Nobody ever wants to be spied on, but everybody wants to spy. When the magical pixie horse utopia arrives and there are no wars or conflicts and everybody loves everybody else (or hates but avoids everyone else in a back cabin miles from the nearest other living thing, for libertarians) we won't need to spy. Until then, I still feel the NSA is operating in the best interest of the US as a whole.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
in order to win hearts and minds, one must know what secrets lie within them. Our series of sponsored elections in iraq failed ultimately because we assumed our liberation theology was a mutually shared concern. Hamid Karzai's relations with NATO countries is strong, especially with the United States seeing as during the elections we sponsored, he was the candidate we placed the most effort behind to win. we labelled the opposition "terrorists" and regardless of how moderate their islamic platform was, branded them outlaws and sentenced them to summary execution by drone. The fact that the NSA is monitoring the entire country is reason enough to assume the united states does not have enough confidence in the afghani people to rest assured they will continue to vote for one of "our" guys. We can have democracy in Afghanistan, so long as its the democracy we select. religious or islamic candidates are flatly forbidden regardless of how conservative or progressive they may be as we fear a nationalist element to their political aspirations that would preclude us from installing military bases at will, or outsourcing the country to make tshirts and sweatpants as we did in cambodia and viet nam once the democracy we wanted was had.
If you think this is morally wrong, it is. In american elections we're routinely given to elect fundamentalist christian leaders without so much as questioning the idea they believe in say, the death penalty as is biblically prescribed. We elect leaders at all levels of government in part based on their religion, as would islamic citizens.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Probably not. The NSA is not allowed to spy on Americans.
Most of us can live with the fact that our security and secret agencies sustain our way of life, maintain our security and liberties, preserve our freedoms and protect our and values by denying others (often in far flung lands) of the same as long as we are not forced to confront the morality of that reality or explain to those whose rights, freedoms and liberties the preservation of our own tramples upon why they are not worthy of the very values, liberties and freedoms that we are willing to go to such lengths to protect and preserve?
The activities of spy agencies of every country are conducted in secret for a reason. Often we, the tax payers in whose name those agencies conduct their business, do not want to know the price that some innocent person in some part of the world that we barely know of may have paid for the preservation of our own way of life. We would much rather believe that they deserved to have their rights trampled upon, their liberties denied, their freedom curtailed and yes, if necessary, their life snuffed out; so we grasp at the justifications that our security agencies give us to help us sleep at night: Afghanistan is a cesspool of terrorists... they want to destroy our way of life... etc, etc.
So, it seems that the NSA is monitoring every cell phone call in the Bahamas, Afghanistan and probably every other country that uses US made telecommunication equipment. This revelation should not be a surprise, and we, the tax payer that pays for this should, be relieved to see confirmation that our spy agencies are using our tax dollars to detect threats to our freedoms, liberties, and general way of life before they materialise on our shores...
Our feigned disapproval comes not from finding out the details of what our spy agency has been up to in our name, but rather from the internal conflict that we all must confront at discovering the true price of our way of life.
Here is a reality check for all of us: our freedom, liberties and way of life often come at at the cost of denying someone else of their freedom, liberty and sometimes their life. So, instead of pretending to be surprised at the discovery of what the NSA has been up to in Afghanistan, we should instead seek to bestow upon the people of Afghanistan the very same freedom, liberties and values that we treasure and hold dear, so that hopefully one day, they too can attain the same levels of property that we enjoy and drive out the terrorists who not only threaten us, but threaten them and their ability to prosper as well.
I think I see your confusion, you seem to be under the impression that all of this is actually helping US National Security. Don't get me wrong its easy to see how you would feel that way, the media here in the US is obviously quite cozy with the government. I wouldn't call it propaganda so much as a mutual agreement, you (media) keep from overly questioning us & we (gov) won't shut you out of press conferences, imbedded reporting, etc. However virtually all evidence points to the opposite, we have more terrorists & more animosity towards the US than we had a decade or so ago. What the NSA & our defense agencies in general HAVE been doing is making sure the defense contractors have a VERY lucrative contracts providing supplies, surveillance equipment, bombs & drones, and through their actions have been ensuring that we will have to continue to pay them for decades more because at the very least we are creating as many terrorists as we kill with every attack.
We were at war with Afghanistan, and it used to be run by a totalitarian regime. Monitoring their phones for a decade or two as part of attempting to transition them to democracy doesn't seem unreasonable. We did the same in Germany after WWII, and also limited German democracy in some ways.
Given that Afganistan is a military theatre of war, I don't think that it's actually legally an issue that they're monitoring all communications, as those communications are almost certainly being used to conduct warfare.
And perhaps if actually listening to the conversations helps to not detain innocent people because one can actually know what they're talking about, as opposed to the metadata approach where anyone talking to someone associated with opponents is grabbed, then it might not be a bad thing, again, within the scope of a theatre of war.
In the "us versus them" argument, this is a legitimate differentiation between us and them. As opposed to treating us as them as the metadata approach used domestically.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The wing-wing in the US is fairly good at not being overtly racist. They'e be more likely to target their efforts religiously: Trawl the archives to make a list of everyone who ever insulted God and get them on an employment blacklist. Much as happened during the red scare, when suspected communists faced similar semi-official sanctions, but made possible on a much larger scale by automation.
No, don't be silly.
GCHQ does that in Cheltenham and Bude.
I record all calls at my company. http://www.digital-loggers.com.... Cheap and simple... SIP is even easier.
To extrapolate this is being done to entire countries isn't much of s stretch of the imagination.
I believe that's a general human trait, and not specifically American.
Everywhere is a "Theatre of war" these days, between the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, etc., etc., etc.
However, while the "war" in Afghanistan is long over, enough people are still running around killing other people, it's hardly surprising that all 5 Afghan telephone circuits would be tapped. With, I have no doubt, complicit approval of the Afghan government.
Officially, the Afghan government would have to protest this gross invasion of their national sovreignity as a matter of face, irrespective of the practical benefits. However, considering what the NSA has done on their own home soil, I guess it actually should be a status symbol. They get treated just like a First World nation!
Not as long as you might think. The technology needed for this level of data collection is only a few decades old at best. 20-30 years ago even tracing a call in an industrialized nation could be a laborious task and collection like this was just undoable.
And in another 40-50 years, if the Taliban can be kept at bay, Afghanistan might even be able to move up to the status of "industrialized nation".
The British Mandate and the Balfour Declaration had far more influence upon the nationalities, peoples, and borders of the Middle East than did any influence of the United States.
The NSA mission is to use intelligence to find threats to the United States Interests. They see the threat of not getting intelligence more dangerous then the privacy of others. If they were pro-privacy organization then they wouldn't be able to function, as their jobs is to get secrets. Now if you see this, you realize that other then vilifying the NSA, you need to take a step back and work with their bosses to come up new regulations to prevent them from going too far.
Not only do we need to come up with new regulations, we need a way to hold the NSA to those limits, a system of checks and balances if you will.
No, I do not consider the FISA courts to be an adequate system of checks and balances on the NSA. Imagine a baseball game where one of the team's managers was allowed to pull the umpire into their dugout to dispute a call in secret, and when that happened the call invariably went their way, but the other team was not allowed to do the same or even listen in on the discussion. I think there's be quite a few managers from the other teams getting ejected from games for arguing with the umpires over the unfairness of this policy.
Or much as a number of vocal left-wing people just did to a certain Brendan Eich....
How inconceivable would it be to use this same technology to hunt down every other marriage rights / anti-gay advocate, and backed by a more authoritarian government this time? Really, Every [insert opposing view] here is vulnerable.
The government should restrict itself (or be restricted) in favor of the people's freedoms.
Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.
The struggle is real.
It would be different if these facts were out in the open to be debated by the populous. They are instead hidden, even from the ones making the laws (Clapper). Thats the real irony here. They rob everyone else of their privacy, but yet demand their own secrets hidden behinds claims of state secrets. Since they will not tell us about it, we the tax payers are forced to pay for them to rob us of our own privacy. What a effing joke.
Thank you! There isn't a country in the world that doesn't invade privacy of civilians in other countries and spy on them. We should stand proud that we are better at it than anyone else. Ok .. maybe not as good about hiding it. The only problem I have with this is that some idiot made the information public.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Just curiosity... The bandwidth required to do this should be enormous, how did they implement it? Are the trunk switches compromised and they locally record every conversation, and later send it to the USA? Did they install dedicated fibers to do this? TFA lacks any details.
Thanks.
What is your outrage level to the fact that the Chinese are monitoring all telephone traffic in the US?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
When you listen to them planning to kill you, and you fire a rocket at their car, it is war.
And I guess they're planning to "kill you" (whoever it might be) because...
"they hate you for your freedoms"
Right?
But notice how they were framed.
Can we stop the bullshit and quit pretending like releasing this information isdangerous?
The delay is what's dangerous. The longer the information is kept under wraps and the less willing they are to take the hard shots, the more FUCKED UP BULLSHIT will be perpetrated by these government organizations.
That interpretation of a wife's duty is not terribly uncommon. Some even argue that I Corinthians 7:5 is a biblical mandate to both the husband and wife to never deny their partner sex. If that's the case, the most chaste wives are also the most sinful. Ahhh the irony.
Of course on the opposite side of the spectrum are those wackos that think all sex is rape, and that all porn stars are being taken advantage of.
How much storage would be required to store all those conversations for a month? Any guesses?
"Microsoft Tech Support" scams
If they could just drop a few hellfire missiles on those goddamn Pakled feebs, I'd be willing to give them a little bit more slack on the leash.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
While it is very probably true, where is the proof that Wikileaks is right about it being Afghanistan? Show me ole' JA isn't just pulling this out of his ass to get a little limelight back from an honorable man that *has* vetted documentation.
Oh noes, a murder is murdering people, which is what murderers do!!! How terrible that a murderer murdered someone!!!
You know, just because it's 'expected', that doesn't make it okay. Spying on innocent people is wrong regardless of what the NSA's job is or what country those people live in. The NSA should be focusing on actual enemies, and not sapping up data en masse merely because some people could be enemies. And no, "Other countries do it too!" is no excuse, and has never been an excuse.
Anyone who says otherwise is an authoritarian piece of trash.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
It's a theatre of war regardless of a declared war, as Congress, NATO, and the United Nations have all gotten involved.
Unless you also don't want to call Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, and Yugoslavia wars too.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
A while back there was an internal report by the DoD giving estimates of how long a US occupation would take before Afghanistan could be rebuilt into a stable industrialized nation. It estimated a 30 year minimum, with 40 or 50 not being out of range. Naturally this was not politically very attractive, but yeah, that is about the timescale it would take.
Sounds like you just logically disproved the existence of "self censorship".
> Censorship is when the authority prevents someone from saying something
I don't think so.
Government censorship = government is the authority preventing it.
Network censorship = the TV network is the authority preventing it from going on-air.
Self censorship = your own higher principles or prudence is the authority preventing you from saying something.
> Or maybe you don't consider it to be a kind of censorship, despite its suggestive name...
Where "self censorship" is defined as being just what the words imply - the self choosing what one wishes to say or not say, I don't really classify that as censorship. At least, most intelligent discussion about censorship wouldn't include a free person making up their own mind as to what they want to say or not say. You COULD call it self-censorship if I decide not to call you a fathead, but that dilutes the meaning of the word so much that censorship becomes a _good_ thing.
Self censorship, as defined above, should not be confused with "soft censorship". We said censorship is when the authority prevents publication. Soft censorship, therefore, would be when the authority uses "soft" methods to prevent publication. If a government prevents the publication by "strongly suggesting" that it not be published, that is still the government preventing publication. They aren't excused because they used veiled threats as opposed to explicit threats.
They probably wouldn't be produced publicly, but the real security that comes from this will be the NSAs ability to terrorize people with their capabilities.
That isn't the problem. Joe Everyman expected them to be doing this, but don't know why it's A Bad Thing. All they see is "It's to stop the terr'rists / perverts / commies!" and don't see how it can be abused, not by those in power now, but those in the future.
20 years from now, when the bigots finally get a real right-wing guy in power, they'll look back at all this data and say "Ok, fella's; Find me everyone who ever talked to a brown guy and revoke their passport."
Why is it a bad thing that an organization tasked as the primary conductor of electronic surveillance of other nations is conducting electronic surveillance of other countries? And why is it a surprise? You are right: everyone expected them to do this, and they should. It's their job. If you read their charter, this is plainly clear in the first page. And that goes back to 1952, over 60 years ago.
Don't get me wrong, I think the NSA has gone too far with regard to American citizens. But spying on other nations? Who else SHOULD they spy on...they're a spy agency, for fuck's sake. Why is everyone acting like it's news that spies are spying? There are absolutely zero prohibitions with regard to this in our country...not in the Constitution, not in law, not even in policy. And when you really look at the complaints of other nations, it boils down to objections over how damned good the NSA is at it, since the complaining nations either have their own capabilities or are so primitive *cough, Afghanistan, cough* that they couldn't even dream of attempting it at this time, but are hardly squeaky-clean in their behavior in other areas.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The 2nd SOMALGET country was first leaked by defense contractor resume. Hinted at, in any case. Defense Contractors put all the illegal shit they do in their resumes to get more jobs doing those things.
Christopher Soghoian's tweet on the subject.
Erica A's resume
Erica A spent December 2012 to October 2013 in Afghanistan, is an expert in "Somalget Retro GUI" and is available for hire immediately.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Or maybe when the soviets propped up a government in relatively progressive Afghanistan of yore, a state that was in the Soviet sphere of influence anyway, America shouldn't have interfered and we wouldn't have these bigoted religious zealots running about blowing shit up across the globe! Something about reaping what one sows and all that...
Saint Assgunge(*) seems to be confusing "censorship" with "snooping". Those calls aren't being arbitrarily shut down by a govt agency.
It's a given that the NSA is snooping what it can - that's its job.
The shock comes from how easily it (and other intel agencies) are able to hoover up _everything_ (once you can snoop everything, the stuff that stands out for further targetting is encrypted conversations). If the NSA is doing it you can be pretty much assured everyone else is doing it too.
One of the more surprising things is how useless all that snooping is proving to be. Given the DEA is getting a feed, if it was more useful than random chance, the enormous wholesale(**) illegal drug trade would have been shut down already simply by following the money.
If intelligence agencies were properly accountable for their actions, most of their employees would be out on their ear as utterly useless and unemployable in the outside world.
FWIW it used to be said that the most effective form of espionage involved sitting in the reading room of public libraries, collating reports from local newspapers. It's still pretty much true.
(*)wikileaks == useful. Assange =- egotistical prick who's conflated his own importance. Best to discard him and find someone else to carry the flag.
(**) for all the publicity, seizures amount to less than 0.1% of overall traffic. There are hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of tons of illegal narcotics being shipped around the globe annually in order to account for known addiction statistics.
Oh yeah! Captain Obvious did it again uncovering hidden secrets surrounded by secrecy!! Together with his sidekick Lieutenant Danger and his faithful dog Spot. In this episode the secret identity if Liutenant Danger (Julian Asange) is discovered by the evil Dr. Quake (Dr Doom was on holiday).
-- 29A the number of the Beast
So, it was you all the time, wasn't it?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
I can't understand the reason for tapping all the telephone calls in Afghanistan.
I believe that's a general human trait, and not specifically American.
Bingo.
I do not mean to imply that they didn't deserve it, or that I would not have done the same. I was just pointing out that we as Americans like to consider ourselves morally superior to our counterparts, but in reality we engage in a lot of the same practices.
You need to travel more. You will find that this is true of every nation and culture.
Sometimes it is cheaper to blow up a school than send in people to determine if there are terrorists there. Sometimes it is cheaper to have the CIA poison someone who has a different opinion than it is to debate them. Sometimes it is cheaper to have a motorcyclist throw explosives on the outside of a nuclear scientist's car than it is to try to get the country to stop its program. Sometimes it is cheaper to execute a cleric rather than have trials to determine guilt. We are not much different than the people that attack us based on our ideas, we just have a lot more money than they do. It is too easy to dehumanize others and not care about collateral damage when we fight our wars.
Welcome to human civilization, and the modus operandi that has been in place since we started gathering in permanent, sedentary villages.