Offshoring warrantless surveillance - more bollocks from the conspiracy freaks

Dag Wilhelmsen is General Manager of the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency and is on a 4 day visit to Bulgaria to meet the Minister of Defence Vesselin Bliznakov and the State Commission on Information Security. Dag says of the NC3A "we provide, as a host nation as it's called, the capability to acquire a lot of NATO equipment and systems such as satellite communications, automated information systems, communication networks and deployable capabilities for NATO's operations."

In the light of the entry of Bulgaria to the EU in January announced last week it is important there is clarity of understanding between all NATO members.

His visit coincides with a curious e-mail Lord Patel has received regarding previous posts on US warrantless surveillance of domestic telephony / IP traffic in the US. The unkown but knowledgeable informant claims that the US outsource surveillance just as they do, imprisonment, torture and interrogation.

Data split off AT & T and other networks is ( the writer claims) squirted anywhere in the world for further analysis and this is undertaken by friendly folks who accept US military establishments, suitably equipped who take on staff on short term, highly deniable contracts who can be found strolling the streets on 4 week breaks on an island to the Eastern end of the Mediterranean well known for it's highly visible and well known mountain top communications gear.

They then disappear for 6 week stints - it is claimed - to the home of Ovid and a little further south and north of Greece .. where they might this week bump into Dag Wilhelmsen.

The writer was impelled to write (they say) after reading a post about CACI (suppliers of torturers to Abu Graigh and beyond) and their software skills in providing EU telcos to meet the forthcoming Data Directive.

So. get this crazy idea, data is split off domestic US telcos (well we know that), squirted to (say) Bulgaria and Romania, (i.e outside US legal jurisdiction) to be worked over by staff familiar with analytical software (but anonymised) used to handling massive data volumes (with security clearances of the highest order) , supplied by firms such as CACI (and many others ?) which might be tied in with NATO Command and Control agencies ? Preposterous nonsense, curiously this lunatic didn't involve a pitch for Viagra. Who on Earth would believe such crap ?

That's the trouble with the Internet, this sort of bollocks can circulate without the slightest shred of evidence. That Dag Wilhelmsen, the General Manager of the NATO Consultation, Command and Control Agency was evidently wasting his precious time in Bulgaria meeting the Minister of Defence Vesselin Bliznako. Let's trust he didn't waste any time (and NATO taxpayers money) going to the US installation at the Ravnets base outside the port / airport of Burgas on the Black Sea.