Kenya: U.S. Monitoring Every Phone Call Being Made in Kenya
BY LILIAN MUTEGI, 23 MAY 2014
Kenya is among the countries where phonecalls are being intercepted,
recorded and archived by US Government's National Security Agency (NSA)
according to online media reports.
The NSA is also intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of
virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas,
Philipines and Mexico.
A news website, The Intercept, reports that some documents leaked by NSA
whistleblower Edward Snowden, indicate that the surveillance is part of a
top-secret system - code-named SOMALGET - that was implemented without the
knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears
to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the US Drug
Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country's cellular
telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the "full-take
audio" of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas and to
replay those calls for up to a month.
SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept
has learned 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.
All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls
placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million
people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding
to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere.
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.
"The Bahamas is a stable democracy that shares democratic principles,
personal freedoms, and rule of law with the United States," the State
Department concluded in a crime and safety report published last year.
"There is little to no threat facing Americans from domestic (Bahamian)
terrorism, war, or civil unrest."
By targeting the Bahamas' entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally
collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not
been accused of any crime or terrorist activity. Nearly five million
Americans visit the country each year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep
homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Bill Gates, and Oprah
Winfrey.
In addition, the program is a serious - and perhaps illegal - abuse of the
access to international phone networks that other countries willingly grant
the United States for legitimate law-enforcement surveillance. If the NSA is
using the Drug Enforcement Administration's relationship to the Bahamas as a
cover for secretly recording the entire country's mobile phone calls, it
could imperil the longstanding tradition of international law enforcement
cooperation that the United States enjoys with its allies.
"It's surprising, the short-sightedness of the government," says Michael
German, a fellow at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice who
spent 16 years as an FBI agent conducting undercover investigations. "That
they couldn't see how exploiting a lawful mechanism to such a degree that
you might lose that justifiable access - that's where the intelligence
community is acting in a way that harms its long-term interests, and clearly
the long-term national security interests of the United States."
The NSA refused to comment on the program, but said in a statement that "the
implication that NSA's foreign intelligence collection is arbitrary and
unconstrained is false." The agency also insisted that it follows procedures
to "protect the privacy of U.S. persons" whose communications are
"incidentally collected."
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 Post reported that the capacity was a feature of MYSTIC, which it
described as a "voice interception program" that is fully operational in one
country and proposed for activation in six others. (The Post also referred
to NSA documents suggesting that MYSTIC was pulling metadata in some of
those countries.) Citing government requests, the paper declined to name any
of those countries.
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. The more expansive full-take recording capability has
been deployed in both the Bahamas and the unnamed country.
MYSTIC was established in 2009 by the NSA's Special Source Operations
division, which works with corporate partners to conduct surveillance.
Documents in the Snowden archive describe it as a "program for embedded
collection systems overtly installed on target networks, predominantly for
the collection and processing of wireless/mobile communications networks."
According to one NSA document, SOMALGET is "deployed against entire
networks" in the Bahamas and the second country, and processes "over 100
million call events per day."
SOMALGET's capabilities are further detailed in a May 2012 memo written by
an official in the NSA's International Crime and Narcotics division. The
memo hails the "great success" the NSA's drugs and crime unit has enjoyed
through its use of the program, and boasts about how "beneficial" the
collection and recording of every phone call in a given nation can be to
intelligence analysts.
Rather than simply making "tentative analytic conclusions derived from
metadata," the memo notes, analysts can follow up on hunches by going back
in time and listening to phone calls recorded during the previous month.
Such "retrospective retrieval" means that analysts can figure out what
targets were saying even when the calls occurred before the targets were
identified. "[W]e buffer certain calls that MAY be of foreign intelligence
value for a sufficient period to permit a well-informed decision on whether
to retrieve and return specific audio content," the NSA official reported.
One NSA document spells out that "the overt purpose" given for accessing
foreign telecommunications systems is "for legitimate commercial service for
the Telco's themselves." But the same document adds: "Our covert mission is
the provision of SIGINT," or signals intelligence.
The classified 2013 intelligence budget also describes MYSTIC as using
"partner-enabled" access to both cellular and landline phone networks. The
goal of the access, the budget says, is to "provide comprehensive metadata
access and content against targeted communications" in the Caribbean,
Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and the unnamed country. The budget adds
that in the Bahamas, Mexico, and the Philippines. The budget adds that in
the Bahamas, Mexico, and the Philippines, MYSTIC requires "contracted
services" for its "operational sustainment."
In Kenya, the U.S. works closely with local security forces in combating the
militant fundamentalist group Al-Shabab, based in neighboring Somalia. In
the Philippines, the U.S. continues to support a bloody shadow war against
Islamist extremists launched by the Bush administration in 2002. Last month,
President Barack Obama visited Manila to sign a military pact guaranteeing
that U.S. operations in Southeast Asia will continue and expand for at least
another decade.