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Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Intercept
Posted: May 26th, 2014
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/05/19/data-p...
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. SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which ... 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. The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.
Note: For more on the realities of intelligence agency operations, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
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