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The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, 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 U.S. 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.

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.

Consider the latest leak sourced to Edward Snowden from the perspective of his detractors. The National Security Agency's defenders would have us believe that Snowden is a thief and a criminal at best, and perhaps a traitorous Russian spy. In their telling, the NSA carries out its mission lawfully, honorably, and without unduly compromising the privacy of innocents. For that reason, they regard Snowden's actions as a wrongheaded slur campaign premised on lies and exaggerations. But their narrative now contradicts itself. The Washington Post's latest article drawing on Snowden's leaked cache of documents includes files "described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained" that "tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless."

I never thought I'd see this day: The founder of Lawfare has finally declared that a national-security-state employee perpetrated a huge civil-liberties violation! Remember this if he ever again claims that NSA critics can't point to a single serious abuse at the agency. Wittes himself now says there's been a serious abuse. The same logic applies to Keith Alexander, James Clapper, Michael Hayden, Stewart Baker, Edward Lucas, John Schindler, and every other anti-Snowden NSA defender. So long as they insist that Snowden is a narcissistic criminal and possible traitor, they have no choice but to admit that the NSA collected and stored intimate photos, emails, and chats belonging to totally innocent Americans and safeguarded them so poorly that a ne'er-do-well could copy them onto thumb drives. 

They have no choice but to admit that the NSA was so bad at judging who could be trusted with this sensitive data that a possible traitor could take it all to China and Russia. Yet these same people continue to insist that the NSA is deserving of our trust, that Americans should keep permitting it to collect and store massive amounts of sensitive data on innocents, and that adequate safeguards are in place to protect that data. To examine the entirety of their position is to see that it is farcical. Here's the reality. The NSA collects and stores the full content of extremely sensitive photographs, emails, chat transcripts, and other documents belong to Americans, itself a violation of the Constitution—but even if you disagree that it's illegal, there's no disputing the fact that the NSA has been proven incapable of safeguarding that data. There is not the chance the data could leak at sometime in the future. It has already been taken and given to reporters. The necessary reform is clear. Unable to safeguard this sensitive data, the NSA shouldn't be allowed to collect and store it.

Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who has become the face of reform for the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev and will be a key figure handling billions of dollars in Western financial aid, was at the center of insider deals and other questionable activities when she ran a $150 million U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund.Prior to taking Ukrainian citizenship and becoming Finance Minister last December, Jaresko was a former U.S. diplomat who served as chief executive officer of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which was created by Congress in the 1990s and overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) to help jumpstart an investment economy in Ukraine.

One of the consequences of the Iran Deal was the declaration by countless politicians that they were going to crack down on Iran’s sponsorship of terrorism. Even the White House signed on to this idea. Well now some of the backlash has officially begun: Congress is linking Iran with ISIS, even though Iran is fighting ISIS. [and ISIS is supported by the US, GR ed.] Few mainstream publications have picked up on the fact that in a response to the San Bernardino killings, the Congress last week passed legislation, which the president duly signed, that puts Iran in an axis of international-terrorist evil along with Syria, Iraq and Sudan. The legislation amends our country’s visa waiver program. Iranian dual nationals, as well as US citizens who have visited Iran, will need visas to get into the U.S. Reuters: Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Friday said it was “absurd” that Tehran should be included on the list. “No Iranian nor anybody who visited Iran had anything to do with the tragedies that have taken place in Paris or in San Bernardino or anywhere else,” he said in an interview with Middle East-focused website Al Monitor. Secretary of State John Kerry promptly met with Zarif, his Iranian counterpart, to assure him that the new law doesn’t undercut the Iran deal. But the Iranians say that the legislation is the result of pro-Israel lobbying. And even the State Department describes Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism.  

 Iranians say the bill reflects pro-Israel lobbying. Reuters: Iran said on Monday that Israeli lobbying was behind a new measure passed by the U.S. Congress that will prevent visa-free travel to the United States for people who have visited Iran or hold Iranian nationality. The measure, which President Barack Obama signed into law on Friday, also applies to Iraq, Syria and Sudan, and was introduced as a security measure after the Islamic State attacks in Paris and a similar attack in San Bernardino, California.

More from Reuters‘ description of the Israel lobby angle: Iran, a Shi’ite Muslim theocracy staunchly opposed to Sunni radicalism espoused by groups like Islamic State, says its inclusion on the list is intended to undermine a deal on its nuclear programme that Tehran reached with world powers, including the United States, in July, known as the JCPOA. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaberi Ansari said in a televised news conference that the U.S. measure had been passed “under pressure from the Zionist lobby and currents opposed to the JCPOA”. The administration wants to have it both ways on blaming Iran. Yesterday on National Public Radio, Adam Szubin, the counter-terrorism finance under secretary at the Treasury Department, also put Iran in the category of ISIS, as an international terror deliverer: if you are familiar with the model of how al-Qaida or groups like Hamas and even Hezbollah have financed themselves, they’ve typically been heavily reliant on foreign donations, whether from state sponsors like Iran or whether from wealthy what we call deep-pocket donors, often in the Gulf. But that financing model is not ISIL. When you have a group that’s raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a year from internal sources, we don’t have those same chokepoints to go after in terms of the foreign flows.

The International Monetary Fund agreed Monday to add the Chinese yuan to its reserve currency basket. The decision — which marks another step in China's global economic emergence — came after the IMF evaluated the Asian nation's standing as an exporter and the yuan's role as a "freely usable" currency. In a statement, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde noted the yuan's inclusion is a "clear representation of the reforms" taking place in China.

The addition of the yuan, or renminbi, will take effect next October. Lagarde and the United States had supported its inclusion in the basket, known as Special Drawing Rights (SDR). It will join the euro, yen, pound and dollar in the reserves basket. The yuan will have about an 11 percent weighting in the SDR.

The IMF said the yuan's inclusion will make the SDR more diverse and representative of the international community. The basket determines the currency mix countries like Greece receive when the IMF disburses financial aid. The decision to add the yuan will likely increase demand for the currency.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the release of an independent monitor’s review of HSBC’s internal cleanup after a landmark $1.92 billion settlement for laundering drug money and for sanctions violations. The U.S. Justice Department and the bank had claimed that disclosing the report could harm law enforcement efforts and provide criminals with a “road map” to holes in HSBC’s defenses against money laundering. But U.S. District Judge John Gleeson ruled that the court and the public had a right to know whether HSBC was living up to its agreement to improve internal controls and merited a deferral of prosecution by the government.

Gleeson also said it was “equally appropriate and desirable for the public to be interested and informed now in the progress” of the HSBC settlement. HSBC in 2012 reached a landmark settlement with the federal government, admitting that it had deliberately laundered funds for drug cartels and countries under trade sanctions. Prosecutors described the settlement as a “sword of Damocles” hanging over HSBC. Should the bank fail to improve, it would face prosecution for unbridled financial wrongdoing. A condition of the settlement was that the bank submit to extensive outside review of its reform efforts. The former New York State ethics chief Michael G. Cherkasky was appointed as the HSBC monitor in 2013. A leaked copy of his report recounted instances of U.S. bank managers bullying and shouting at compliance team members, and drew attention to the bank’s dealings with clients that had possible links to terrorism, according to Bloomberg.

Wells Fargo WFC -9.22%Wells FargoWFC$58.16$-5.91(-9.22%)As of 02/06/2018, 01:01am EST is facing far more than a fine for its fake accounts scandal, in which employees at the lender's branches across the country opened over a million fraudulent checking and credit card accounts to hit their numbers. Late on Friday, the Federal Reserve decided to restrict growth at America's third-largest bank by assets until its risk and governance is improved. The order, which also called for a revamp of Wells Fargo's board of directors, sent the bank reeling in early trading Monday. Wells Fargo shares plunged 9% lower in Monday trading, erasing most of its gains over the past 12 months. For its top shareholder, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, the Fed-inspired stock slide meant its Wells Fargo holdings lost over $2.7 billion in value. "We cannot tolerate pervasive and persistent misconduct at any bank and the consumers harmed by Wells Fargo expect that robust and comprehensive reforms will be put in place to make certain that the abuses do not occur again," said chair Janet L. Yellen on Friday. The order was her last as head of the Federal Reserve. On Monday, successor Jerome Powell was sworn in. Added Yellen, "the enforcement action we are taking today will ensure that Wells Fargo will not expand until it is able to do so safely and with the protections needed to manage all of its risks and protect its customers." In September 2016, Wells Fargo paid a $185 million fine to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the agency found branch bankers had opened well over a million fake accounts, which generated millions of dollars in fees to the lender. When the scandal, which occurred over almost a decade, was first revealed, Wells Fargo and its board didn't immediately overhaul their leadership, or sanction top executives in the divisions where fake accounts were created. Only after significant public outcry, in addition to a widening scope of the scandal, did Wells Fargo begin a revamp, firing CEO John Stumpf and clawing back bonuses for numerous executives. Backer Warren Buffett later said in an appearance on CNBC the bank and its leadership had misjudged the severity of the problem.

In addition to harsh words, the Fed is ordering a sanction of almost unprecedented severity. It will restrict the bank's growth until its governance and risk management improve, though it will allow Wells to continue current operations from taking deposits to offering loans.

Three Wells Fargo long-standing board directors, John Chen, Lloyd Dean and Enrique Hernandez, will likely retire at the firm's annual meeting as part of the Fed's additional order for a refreshment of four board directors. Analysts did not brush off the Fed's move, as they have large fines coming out of the crisis.