Written by: Anon Watcher
Have you ever heard of SOMALGET? No? Maybe you’ve heard of MYSTIC? Still shaking your head? Well perhaps after reading this, you’ll shake your head for other reasons.
Today, if you were to travel to the Bahamas, be it for work or vacation, and you use a cellphone, then it is almost guaranteed that your phone has been tapped by the NSA. SOMALGET is part of a surveillance program implemented in a secret system to access the country’s cell telephone network.
SOMALGET was legally granted to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. However, it left a ‘backdoor’ open into the phone network, allowing the NSA to intercept and record calls made to, from and within the Bahamas. These calls can be accessed for thirty days, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
SOMALGET not only provides the NSA with metadata, but the content of the calls. The NSA justifies their surveillance on a state of less than 320,000 under the umbrella of “international traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers,” because of its close proximity to Florida. [1]
According to local laws in Bahama, the NSA’s actions are considered illegal. But resources in the Bahamas are minimal. They simply don’t have the ability to fight the corporation on this matter. The governments of past and current insist consent was never given to the NSA for this spying.
Freelancer, Nimrod Kamer, went to the Bahamas to investigate these allegations.
What Kamer found, and caught on his videos during his investigation was the Bahamian Minister for Financial Services, Ryan Pinder, was very comfortable with the situation. When Kamer mentioned that the surveillance could also be part of an “economic” agenda, Pinder responded “The US is surveilling the whole world…it may not be BTC (Bahamas Telecom Company)…I’m not too bothered by it.” [2] [3]
Bahamian Foreign Minister, Fred Mitchell also had something to say on the matter before a local parliament in May, saying that the US had “opened a back door to the country’s cellular network enabling it to covertly record and store the full take audio of every mobile phone call…” When Mitchell asked for the United States to provide an explanation, no public result was given. [4]
SOMALGET can be considered as a section of a larger, more broader surveillance program called MYSTIC. MYSTIC works on the same premise, by monitoring telecommunications in several countries across the world, according to Assange.[5] Reportedly, the combined populations of data being monitored and collected, moves across approximately 250 million people, with the NSA “seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere.” (Carlos-Perez, 2014)
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Sources:
[1] Juan Carlos Perez –IDG News Service (20 May 2014) “Report: The NSA records all cellphone calls in the Bahamas.” http://www.cio.com.au/article/545523/report_nsa_records_all_cellphone_calls_bahamas/ CIO (Retrieved 3 September 2014)
[2] “Anti-privacy Paradise: NSA’s offshore pleasure islands (ft Nimrod Kamer, Part 1)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_GBw1Eescs YouTube (Retrieved 4 September 2014)
[3] “Anti-privacy Paradise: NSA’s offshore pleasure islands (ft Nimrod Kamer, Part 2)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5sZ34GOPR8 YouTube (Retrieved 4 September 2014)
[4] (2 August 2014) “Surveillance paradise: How one man spied on NSA in Bahamas” http://rt.com/news/177580-bahamas-nsa-surveillance-kamer/ RT (Retrieved 2 September 2014)
[5] Loek Essers – IDG News Service “Assange names country targeted by NSA’s MYSTIC mass phone tapping program.” (23 May 2014) http://bit.ly/1sHoZtK (Retrieved 2 September 2014)
Embattled citizens of the USA it is your Tax Dollars the NSA is squandering for their fetish to protect the 1% Kabbalistic-Zionism Corporate structure that destroy your Jobs, your financial independence, your Education, your Medical and Social Services. You are a proud and upright nation….how did it come to this. They are planning to kill you, your children and grandchildren using the Police and Home Guard with FEMA infrastructure http://beforeitsnews.com/u-s-politics/2013/11/fema-camp-alert-november-7-2013-video-2452828.html As David Rockefeller is on record saying “We now just need a crisis to have the New World Order accepted” hence the soliciting of a Military conflict with Russia which can downsize the world population from 7 Billion to their first target of 3 Billion…and the FEMA Camps along with the more than 1 Billion bullets will have a big role to play in the North American Culling ….and you financed it all. NOW….withhold your Money and your support for all security structures….release all personal date of the people that serve in these structures to their communities, churches, schools so that they cannot become faceless and unaccountable to their communities which they are obliged to protect and then clean-up The Hill, Wall St and the FED from Toxic Zionist Capitalism and confiscate the estates and imprison the 300 vassal families of the Pindar
Who is actually watching out the ENTIRE American spy organizations?
They are complete morons that are more afraid of their own shadows.
To Lukas van der Westhuizen September 5, 2014 at 7:24 who wrote “Embattled citizens of the USA it is your Tax Dollars the NSA is squandering..”
Thank you well done article. Intelligent, well researched, readable and understandable. Find a way to be heard more so. Keep writing if that is what you can do.
I am an older person. To help folks as yourself be heard outside the mainstream acceptable media, it has been my recent goal to join up and support with annual memberships, familiarize my self with the hope of the hackers to keep freedom of information flowing. In my age group not your usual anon member. There are more seniors as myself if you can reach us. It will be a struggle because most of us don’t use computers often and unfortunately still use common media for our world views.
It is my concern that they will be or are infiltrated with “uni-polar” authority soldiers. It is important to protect those as yourself who can communicate your views. Very encouraging.
Again, this new gen of hackers are so different from the 50’s gen who unwittingly for the most part not all, were brainwashed, dumbed down, consumers consuming for the sake of consuming.
Thank you for the mental disciplines required to do what you do. Supporting your outlets is the only way I know to help you on the front lines.
Always good chit