The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas
firstlook.org
firstlook.org
Given that one is a mostly domestic agency and the other is supposed to focus primarily on Foreign Intelligence, this incestual relationship sets up many troubling opportunities for abuse.
Absolutely needs to be stopped.
1. (literally) To leave a reservation to which one was restricted.
2. (US, politics) To break with one's party or group, usually temporarily.
3. (by extension) To engage in disruptive activity outside normal bounds.
Why would this term even be seen as negative in an HN context? It sounds like every startup founder/rebellious techy would want to "go off the reservation."
So I'm quite confused by what the intended pejorative was supposed to be.
If you want a brief, brutal look at what "the reservation" really means, see this short film from Aeon called "Honor the Treaties". You'll see exactly why the casual acceptance of reservations as places where anyone "truly" belongs is so problematic.
http://aeon.co/film/the-real-legacy-of-manifest-destiny/
Getting back to the expression, it should be avoided for the same reason that you'd avoid analogies to slave plantations or concentration camps that imply these institutions were benign, defensible things. It's far better to use the phrase "way out of line", which conveys the same meaning, but without the unthinking disregard for genocide, theft of land, and institutionalized deceit that underpin most reservations. For the people who live on reservations, or are connected to those who do, the term is loaded with a lot of bitterness, futility, alienation, and despair. Not to put too fine a point on it, but suicide rates among young people who grow up on reservations are double what they are anywhere else in America.
As an aside, the Navajo reservation is an interesting exception to this rule in that it encompasses the territory on which the Navajo have lived for more than 10,000 years, and not some crappy godforsaken piece of land to which they were forcibly relocated. So there's a bit more pride in that case. But a history of dismissal and segregation means there's still an unbelievable amount of poverty. As time goes by they look more and more like wounds that never heal.
I didn't get that intention from the definitions found on the interwebs. Slang dictionary [1]:
> used to slam people who are thinking differently than what their group considers acceptable.
I believe what you are saying is true, its not a phrase I would use but...why do all of these dictionaries get the phrase so wrong as to mean something positive?
[1] http://onlineslangdictionary.com/meaning-definition-of/off-t...
You can also see why having circumstances reduced to a handful of godforsaken reservations was - and remains - a profound trauma. Indeed, the fact that most people have no idea why the terms causes pain is, itself, a source of ongoing pain since is so clearly signals how thoroughly Native suffering has been airbrushed from American history.
We can agree that the VCs are the white traders, then, yes? Let's talk about equity.
How exactly is "off the reservation" not offensive in the way that several commonly used idioms are now considered offensive, such as "that is retarded", "that is gay", "you Jewed the price down", "I got gypped"?
>are not offensive.
Right, literally nobody takes offense to "off the reservation" because you of course don't mean Native Americans. Are you seriously saying that slightly racist terms are only ever offensive in literal contexts?
http://psychologybenefits.org/2014/02/07/anti-lgbt-microaggr...
I can't even tell if you're referring to "retarded" or "gay" here.
Take away that reality and "that's gay" becomes an idiom lost in time.
You can pretend it's the PC police, or if you want to be the kind of person who isn't insensitive towards some subcultures you could try to avoid the phrase. There are plenty of alternatives.
On a related note, they're not okay with "Redskins" either.
It's useful for them to be aware of idiom that might cause trouble. That's not telling people to avoid it. It is just giving them extra information.
The real reason for avoiding "off the reservation" is that it is an Americanism that doesn't have much use in other English speaking nations.
Edit: Anyone able to inform me how "FYI" could be offensive?
You are being trolled.
That kind of thing makes it astonishing that government agencies still consider blacking-out a sensible mechanism.
Then putting the list of 206 sovereign states from Wikipedia in Times Roman (which seems to match the font used), and finding countries that are 1.28 to 1.29 times longer than "Bahamas", I get the following list of countries:
Bangladesh
Cape Verde
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Madagascar
Montenegro
San Marino
Somaliland
Afghanistan
El Salvador
Ivory Coast
Philippines
Saint Lucia
Switzerland
Transnistria
For example, although the US might be very interested in Bangladesh and Kazakhstan, I think it's unlikely that those countries would permit the DEA to tap their phone or cellular network even for drug interdiction.
We can also rule out the Philippines because it was already separately mentioned when talking about the redacted country: "targeted communications in the Caribbean, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and the unnamed country."
What an excellent observation. So, yes, looking at this image:
https://prod01-cdn00.cdn.firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/20...
it does look like El Salvador and Ivory Coast would have been split on two lines (unless their word processor somehow avoids separating such phrases).
We are left with Afghanistan as the most likely candidate, agreeing with the original guess.
But it would be kind of ironic to have bank secrecy, but then let the NSA listen in to your citizens phone conversations.
So maybe it is Afgahnistan afterall.
Maybe, but Switzerland is a very small country and it's not even part of the EU, which makes it easier for the US gov't to do whatever they want in that country. So, while they would be outraged, they wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
Look at Austria which is very similar to Switzerland in many aspects: They already know that they're 100% under US surveillance and no changes are planned whatsoever (plus, they're even a EU member state).
EDIT: Looks like we're about to find out... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7772181
In Geneva, the very first meeting of the Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Research Network (CCIRN) was in May 1988. This committee was the first attempt to harmonize the inter-regional operation of the emerging world-wide research network.
The second meeting took place in October 1988 at a summer resort in Western Virginia, sad and grey this particular autumn. The Americans turned up in force. Bill Bostwick, from the Department of Energy was the Chairman, Barry Leiner from the Department of Defense and Vint Cerf were present. The European representatives were thin on the ground: a German and British representative plus Francois Flückiger.
In 1991, 80% of the internet capacity in Europe for international traffic was installed at CERN, in building 513.
From 1985 to 1988, as CERN's first official "TCP/IP Co-ordinator", Segal was responsible for coordinating the introduction of the Internet protocols within CERN.
This router was one of two installed at CERN in 1987; they are thought to have been the first Cisco routers in Switzerland and possibly the first in Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ciscosystemsrouteratcern....
Translation:
As part of "Mystic" apparently the NSA monitored not only
all communications in Iraq, but also in Austria. The
basis for this was a secret treaty, by which the
government knew about it, writes an Austrian magazine.
[...]
So, if you can vote in the upcoming EU parliament elections, consider voting against those 2 main parties that have always been in power.
keeping that in mind, the only ones who end up in the dragnet are small-time stupid smugglers and your average innocent citizen. the value of the former at the expense of the latter is likely inconsequential.
neither side, funding the act or trying to stop it
Contractors, infrastructure, PR, salaries, promotions, training. That has been put into place.
Well it was there to spy on the Soviets. Then it was kind of sitting there waiting for a problem. And the problem was found. Terrorism. Drugs. Could be something else tomorrow. As long as Joe Smith in SIGINT department 15 gets his salary paid, he doesn't care. As long as L3 or whoever gets to build another data center they don't care. They will all collectively find some reason to justify it, but underneath, quite often is just making more money keeping busy.
They made the mistake though (mistake from their point of view), that one of the characteristics they look for in people they hire is patriotism. That can very very dangerous if eventually those people are forced to do un-patriotic things (or things they can't brainwash them into thinking they are patriotic). You end up with Binney and Snowden then.
All organisms want to survive (political, economic, etc). Now if the NSA could just deem cancer a threat to the national security of the country then they could put their super computer power to good use.
http://leaksource.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/booz-allen-map...
It is missing Clapper. He came from Booz.
This happens with other agencies as well. FDA is full of future and past heads from agro-businesses and pharma companies. FCC is full of people from cable and satellite companies and so on.
This is capitalism at work. Achieve success by whatever means possible. The easiest means is the get in the position to re-write rules and police yourself.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories but this kind-of points to the NSA working for the DEA working for the prison corporations.
For the Bahamas, you could clearly do either, but for the Philippines, sending back all content would be seriously difficult. Which is why it looks like they just do metadata from the bigger countries.
For the unnamed full-data country, I'd probably bet on the Caymans. Antigua or another small Caribbean nation would be a possibility.
I assume there is another entire program for actual jihadi communications (Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.) under different cover and pretense; the other countries in MYSTIC appear to be DEA LI based.
32kbits is 4KB/s ~ .24 MB/minute ... turns out to be on the order of 6TB a day on the high end.
This 9U server can hold all of the Bahamas voice traffic for 30 days.
http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/systems-raid-nas-...
The calls never have to leave the island and they probably have a nice spotify/splunk style web page for playing back conversations.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/03/19/backblaze-storage-pod-4...
45 drives * 6TB drives = 270TB of storage in one chassis (more than a month's worth of recordings). How much does it cost to get a whole rack colo'd in the Bahamas?
As you mentioned, if you have the horsepower, you can do speech to text right on the box. Plenty of space for ElasticSearch as well.
To think that the NSA is wholly reliant on already laid carrier cable is naive.
It would be interesting to speculate on the method by which they lay their cables to protect them from detection.... meaning, do they now have means to bury the cables as opposed to surface-lay.
I think you are right that NSA has their own cables laid, unlikely to get sabotaged too.
My bet is on the latter.
Think about it they have more money to spend than anyone; corporation or government.
"lawful intercepts." As opposed to what the NSA does with them later.
Hopefully the Bahamas won't indict anyone from the NSA, as we just did with China. /s
Still missing today's revelation though.
Today's revelation is that the NSA records and stores 100% of the phone calls made in the Bahamas.
The Post's revelation was that the NSA records and stores 100% of the phone calls made in an unnamed country.
These two countries are distinct. Read the actual article we're discussing.
I'll quote:
> In March, The Washington Post revealed that the NSA had developed the capability to record and store an entire nation’s phone traffic for 30 days.
(...)
> The Intercept has confirmed that as of 2013, the NSA was actively using MYSTIC to gather cell-phone metadata in five countries, and was intercepting voice data in two of them. Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.
And so with the lawful directives of the FBI. And so with the CIA. Etc. etc.
Unless either of you have had any contact with any non-U.S. citizen potentially under scrutiny, or had any contact with anyone who may have had any contact with a non-U.S. citizen under scrutiny.
This is the new law, the old law allowed three hops (so append "or had any contact with anyone who had any contact with anyone who had any contact with a non-U.S. citizen who may be under scrutiny")
edit: Unless your or your mother are non-U.S. citizens who may be under scrutiny yourselves, in which case they may have listened to you and your mother on the phone. But if you've got nothing to hide, what are you worried about?
I'm slightly miffed because they got Matt Taibbi to leave Rolling Stone.[1] And I'm still waiting for his first piece with FLM. Man must be wading neck-deep in documents and politics to keep him from writing.
[1]: https://firstlook.org/2014/02/19/matt-taibbi-lead-first-look...
"Have someone else start your car for you for the next few days"
"I had only worked with them for eight months. My deal with The Guardian was I write whatever I want, and I post it directly to the Internet, and you don’t interfere in any way in what I’m writing. So I had barely worked with any Guardian editors at all, let alone on a story of this size."
[1] http://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/14/right_out_of_a_spy_mov...
Here's a quote from a recent interview he gave to the Guardian:
> The move [to create his own journalistic enterprise] was audacious and bold, but when I raise it with him he's in a surprisingly reflective mood. He's had some feelings, if not of regret, then perhaps of a little guilt at having left the Guardian at a time when the NSA disclosures were still blazing. "I don't want to say betrayal, that's too strong, but a lack of loyalty ..."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/12/glenn-greenwald...
That's beside the point though. What matters are the disclosures. Not who makes them and not the newspaper where they appear. The disclosures are all that matter.
There was one at my local second-hand audio shop in a dusty corner. I bet they didn't know they were sitting on such a device.
They should have just depicted an analyst sitting there with headphones and a pencil (with manual sharpener on desk) writing furiously.
I guess the intended audience for this article is all 50y.o.+ and/or people who have worked in some recording facility's store room 10 years ago.