Posted on 05/19/2014 7:29:24 PM PDT by Moseley
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.
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 “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at firstlook.org ...
Excuse will be war on drugs, but the real benefit is that you are safe from Bahamian aggression. There will be no surprise attacks on West Palm Beach or Fort Lauderdale, elderly Jews can sleep in peace.
SOMALGET recorded! Check that--they'll all get recorded.
I have no problem with anything the Nsa does off the shores of the usa. That is their mission. However anyone involved in doing the same thing in the USA should be prosecuted and jailed if found guilty.
To record the full audio of every cell phone conversation would require a tremendous amount of bandwidth. Just nailing 14000 conversations at once would seriously tax the entire bandwidth of the Bahamas, a far cry less than the half million cell phones on the island.
Unless there's some uber secret NSA headquarters on the Bahamas with a fiber line directly into the cell phone provider?
(Yes, they could record at lower quality, but reencoding the data would tax a pretty good sized server farm, and I'm pretty sure we would have heard about any great big server farm going in the Bahamas that didn't involve online gaming...)
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-09-06/
Dilbert hacks the NSA to restore lost company databases.
The only reason for the NSA to care about the Bahamas is to go after wealthy people not paying taxes.
The 3rd largest city in the Bahamas has only 1 stoplight
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