While the President and U.S. Congress are working overtime to take away some of the powers of the NSA in this country, the agency is still up to its old tricks elsewhere. Edward Snowden has provided more documents that shed light on an operation by the NSA that has the agency intercepting, recording and archiving audio from nearly every cell phone call made on the island nation of the Bahamas.
This particular surveillance operation is known as SOMALGET and has been undertaken without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. The NSA has apparently not broken any laws, though clearly the agency is walking the line as it has done in the past in other countries. This time, the NSA is working jointly with the U.S. DEA that allowed it to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network.
The program allows the NSA to record and store “full take audio” of every mobile call made to and from the Bahamas. The agency can replay those calls as often as it likes for up to a month. SOMALGET is actually part of a bigger operation named MYSTIC. This program has the agency spying on cellular phone calls in a number of other countries too, including Mexico, Kenya and the Philippines.
According to the documents released by Snowden, the NSA has gathered data on more than 250 million people using this program. The problem is that once again, the agency seems to be spying on one of the US’ closest allies and is running the risk of making these allies into enemies.
The report is another black on the United States government which continues to have a problem keeping the NSA under control. If the agency hasn’t gone rogue than the White House has an even bigger problem because other international leaders will begin to believe they simply cannot trust anything the U.S. government says or does.
Edited by Alisen Downey