Here's a critical article at abu muqawma that gave me a forehead-slapping moment - "I can't believe we're not doing this..."
Kip believes the US military has been way behind in understanding the power and uses of text messaging. SMS offers the ability to do everything from effective information operations, to paying Iraqi or Afghan police in ways that are more difficult to corrupt (if you're interested in this, look into the CelPay disarmament program in Democratic Republic of Congo), to secure and simple communications between members of a third world army, to tips hotlines where insurgent movement can be reported at little risk to the informant.
Damn, this is so obvious even I assumed it was being done. We need both to be using SMS ourselves proactively in Iraq and Afghanistan, but compromising the SMS gateways so we can keep tabs on traffic there (assuming the OK of the local governments).
Someone kick someone at the Pentagon for me on this, will you?
The 'gateways' are already compromised at the source though. Isn't that what (one side of) the whole FISA debate is? Cell tower -> satellite -> USA -> satellite -> Cell tower. We've historically been listening into that 'USA' step during a foreign-to-foreign message.
But the deadline passing means we revert to a previous interpretation that makes this a 'domestic' phone call/message which requires a FISA warrant.
I seriously doubt that Afghani SMS traffic passes through US-based wires ... anyone with more telecom info care to enlighten us?
A.L.
AsiaCell, Atheer, Korak, MobiTel, and Osracom all run SMS out of Iraq. Most of them are just running Txt, but a few like Osracom are offering the entire spectrum or services from Text to Binary.
If gabriel is right (and I have no reason to doubt that he is) it is quite possible the U.S. Intelligence infrastructure is for once ahead of the curve.
Unless it's a DOD thing, in which case, CIA U R PWND AGN