{"id":186066,"date":"2014-05-21T21:53:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-22T02:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/05\/21\/why-yes-the-nsa-is-a-tool-of-the-oligarchy-why-do-you-ask\/"},"modified":"2014-05-21T21:53:00","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T02:53:00","slug":"why-yes-the-nsa-is-a-tool-of-the-oligarchy-why-do-you-ask","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/05\/21\/why-yes-the-nsa-is-a-tool-of-the-oligarchy-why-do-you-ask\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Yes, the NSA is a Tool of the Oligarchy, Why do You Ask?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ryan Devereaux take another dive in lake Snowden, and discover that the NSA intercepts every single mobile phone call made in the Bahamas<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/span>

<\/span>According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system \u2013 code-named SOMALGET \u2013 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\u2019s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the \u201cfull-take audio\u201d of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas \u2013 and to replay those calls for up to a month.<\/span>

<\/span>SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called \u201cmetadata\u201d \u2013 information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls \u2013 SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.<\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>In addition, the program is a serious \u2013 and perhaps illegal \u2013 abuse of the access to international phone networks that other countries willingly grant the United States for legitimate law-enforcement surveillance. If the NSA is using the Drug Enforcement Administration\u2019s relationship to the Bahamas as a cover for secretly recording the entire country\u2019s mobile phone calls, it could imperil the longstanding tradition of international law enforcement cooperation that the United States enjoys with its allies.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cIt\u2019s surprising, the short-sightedness of the government,\u201d says Michael German, a fellow at New York University\u2019s Brennan Center for Justice who spent 16 years as an FBI agent conducting undercover investigations. \u201cThat they couldn\u2019t see how exploiting a lawful mechanism to such a degree that you might lose that justifiable access \u2013 that\u2019s where the intelligence community is acting in a way that harms its long-term interests, and clearly the long-term national security interests of the United States.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Once again, we see why intelligence agencies, particularly those in SIGINT, can never<\/b> do decide woh to target, because they will take it all, damn the consequences.<\/p>\n

When you let them run their own agendas, they are a clear and present danger to our national security interests.<\/p>\n

One critique though, they buried the f%$#ing lede:<\/p>\n

But the NSA documents don\u2019t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions \u2013 including numerous Western banks \u2013 that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who \u201carranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments\u201d through the U.S. Postal Service.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They captured every cell phone call in a jurisdiction known for money laundering by tax evaders, organized criminals, arms dealers, and other illegal activity, and they are only going after people who are mailing pot to people who are mailing baggies of pot back home<\/b>.<\/p>\n

Think about it for a moment.<\/p>\n

Spend billions on these capabilities, and then choose<\/b> not to go after transnational criminals and tax dodgers .<\/p>\n

Your tax dollars at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ryan Devereaux take another dive in lake Snowden, and discover that the NSA intercepts every single mobile phone call made in the Bahamas: 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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1253,971,1067,970,1013,1062,1102,1025],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-caribbean","category-civil-rights","category-communications","category-corruption","category-drugs","category-espionage","category-intelligence","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186066"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}