but i did tell them that i've been assiduously reading their work and those documents they disclose, and doing my best here to consider and react to them, even if only by linking to them via intercepted-language haiku, as is often all i have to offer at a given moment (as well as another small, habituated step in my own long practice), so i cannot simply fall silent here, particularly when such a shockingly comprehensive program as SOMALGET, getting all mobile calls in the Bahamas(!) and, ahem, several other countries, has been revealed there in what may be the Intercept's finest piece of long journalism to date, by Devereaux, Greenwald and Poitras. nice work!
i stayed up too late reading the documents and counting syllables, but alas had to paraphrase to produce
host countries are notand mix a bit to get
aware of [the] collection
using these systems
our covert missioni tried not to speculate too much on the identity of that redacted country; i did not follow up on the redaction flap on twitter until this evening, when i did read a couple silly and incomplete accounts written, it turns out, by detractors of both involved principals, and all their end of the political spectrum, and decided to look no further. i'm not sure i'm ready to be edified by a twitter debate on ethics, or by what other twitterers and bloggers make of it anyway; maybe Amy Goodman will have Slavoj Žižek and Reggie Watts come in to the studio to break it down for the donors someday soon. i hope so.
retrospective retrieval
is the provision
leaving the one country redacted may have the beneficial effect of allowing all the client states, who were not named, to twist and cringe and sweat it out and wonder "is it us?" and order a thorough inventory of data security by the corporate contractors hired by states to see to such things, for a while.
the story itself (read it yourself!) is that the spy agency exploited access points opened to representatives of the DEA by the Bahamas pursuant to routine drug (and human trafficing) interdiction cooperation, and now obtains full call records and content, which is then made available for law enforcement to plumb. and the story briefly alludes to the curious silence of the documents on the question of financial crimes in the Bahamas.
that silence is curious. for almost a year now (and longer!), we've been reading of the NSA's thorough penetration of networks, and focusing on telecoms and public internet properties. clearly this is where we the people enjoy a lot of our expressive associations and producing and collaborating in the production of papers and effects, the traditional objects of privacy protections; occasionally, there is talk of the erosion or deliberate salting of encryption standards leading to vulnerabilities in the security mechanisms of the websites of the banks with which we, as users, do business.
but several additional networks, living almost invisibly on and parallel to the Internet, immediately spring to mind at the mention of the telecom programs' silence on the question of financial data and misadventure. surely the NSA has not overlooked these networks, but they would almost certainly be pursued under different programs.
i wonder if such documents are among the Snowden trove, and remain, yet to be explosively reported. can you imagine the NSA shaing SIGINT with the SEC like they reportedly do with the DEA?