So: Beyond a desire to bust island pot dealers, why would the NSA choose to apply a powerful collection tool such as SOMALGET against the Bahamas, which poses virtually no threat to the United States?
The answer may lie in a document that characterizes the Bahamas operation as a "test bed for system deployments, capabilities, and improvements" to SOMALGET. The country's small population -- fewer than 400,000 residents -- provides a manageable sample to try out the surveillance system's features. Since SOMALGET is also operational in one other country, the Bahamas may be used as a sort of guinea pig to beta-test improvements and alterations without impacting the system's operations elsewhere.
The use of Bahamas as a beta-test environment "guinea pig" for a rollout (or tweaking of an existing system) on a larger scale - the entire United States - makes sense in that the stopping "terrorism" justification for the NSA programs has always been hogwash. Former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden hit the target in an open letter to the Brazilian people per The Guardian:
"These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power."
That is the power to crush dissent and to enable criminality through subterfuge, to get the US taxpayer to fund their own enslavement and to use the data gleaned through mass unconstitutional surveillance conducted without probable cause through either blackmail or parallel construction or worse to silence critics once and forever. Another former NSA official turned whistleblower William Binney hits it dead on in an interview that he did with Nick Gillespie for Reason magazine:
Binney: That's the reason I've been coming out publicly-because where I see it going is toward a totalitarian state. I mean you've got the NSA doing all this collection of material on all of its citizens. That's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did. These are the people I worked for for 30 years.
Reason: A common feature in East Germany or in the Soviet Union was that you'd look out the window and you'd see your neighbor being hustled out and then nobody ever talked about them again. Is that really happening in the U.S., or is it likely to?
Binney: Well, they're using that data that the NSA is collecting to arrest people right now, through the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI. They're already doing that. And they don't have a warrant so they have to do a parallel construction to go out and find other material that would substitute for that.
Reason: Wait. So you're saying then that the DEA uses data that they gather from an intelligence agency-
Binney: From NSA.
Reason:-and then they can't say "we got this tip from NSA so we're arresting you," but they know that this person is doing this, that, and the other thing so then they go out and track them?
Binney: Actually, they go out and arrest them. In the article at Reuters they said, "We were told simply to go to this parking lot, wait for this truck to come in, and when it comes in and parks over there, go arrest them. Bring the drug dogs in and go find the drugs."
The political persecutions and frame-ups are a given, we have already seen what the government is willing to do with COINTELPRO. What remains to be disclosed is the probable involvement of the NSA in rigging the system for those with the juice by facilitating money laundering - the monitoring of financial transactions works both ways and the profits can be enormous. This is after all a gangster state anymore.
Finally in "Data Pirates of the Caribbean" there is a reference to that giant elephant in the living room of what exactly gives the NSA the authorization to go rogue in such a manner to avoid oversight and that is President Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12333:
SOMALGET operates under Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era rule establishing wide latitude for the NSA and other intelligence agencies to spy on other countries, as long as the attorney general is convinced the efforts are aimed at gathering foreign intelligence. In 2000, the NSA assured Congress that all electronic surveillance performed under 12333 "must be conducted in a manner that minimizes the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of information about unconsenting U.S. persons." In reality, many legal experts point out, the lack of judicial oversight or criminal penalties for violating the order render the guidelines meaningless.
The biggest missing piece to all of the NSA revelations of the past year as well as the ongoing dismantling of the US Constitution to strip citizens of protections and protect a corrupt political and financial elite is HOW LONG has such activity been taking place? If you use Executive Order 12333 as a marker then such activities would have had to have been on the radar since at least December of 1981. That would oddly coincide with a sordid affair that has been flushed down the memory hole which was the Reagan administration's involvement in the theft of INSLAW Corporation's highly advanced PROMIS software, a precursor of the programs in use today.
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