{"id":20967,"date":"2013-08-08T19:49:39","date_gmt":"2013-08-09T03:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=20967"},"modified":"2013-08-08T19:49:39","modified_gmt":"2013-08-09T03:49:39","slug":"cabbie-is-nsa-surveillances-big-get","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/08\/cabbie-is-nsa-surveillances-big-get\/","title":{"rendered":"Cabbie Is NSA Surveillance&#8217;s Big Get"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Desperate to drum up some sort of evidence of the NSA&#8217;s effectiveness in tracking down terrorists by collecting phone records from literally every single American, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/world\/national-security\/nsa-cites-case-as-success-of-phone-data-collection-program\/2013\/08\/08\/fc915e5a-feda-11e2-96a8-d3b921c0924a_print.html\">officials have tapped a relatively minor case of an immigrant cab driver <\/a>arrested for sending money to Somalia as proof of how important the program is. <\/p>\n<p>Basaly Moalin, a San Diego cab driver who managed to get asylum after being wounded in tribal fighting in Somalia, was arrested for providing $8,500 to a top leader in his tribe, who was also considered a member of al-Shabaab. The FBI conceded at the time that the money wasn&#8217;t about ideological support but rather an attempt to promote his own status within his tribe. <\/p>\n<p>Moalin was under constant surveillance from 2003 until his arrest in 2010, charged with &#8220;aiding terrorism,&#8221; and is still awaiting sentencing. <\/p>\n<p>So to sum it up, it took them seven solid years to arrest a cab driver whose crime amounts to sending a relatively small sum of money to a member of his tribe, in a country where his family still lives. And that&#8217;s the NSA&#8217;s big story to brag about. <\/p>\n<p>Officials even conceded that they could&#8217;ve just gotten a court order for Moalin&#8217;s phone records instead of collecting the phone records of every single human being on the planet, but argue that this way is just more convenient for them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Desperate to drum up some sort of evidence of the NSA&#8217;s effectiveness in tracking down terrorists by collecting phone records from literally every single American, officials have tapped a relatively minor case of an immigrant cab driver arrested for sending money to Somalia as proof of how important the program is. Basaly Moalin, a San [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-20967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20967"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20969,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20967\/revisions\/20969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20967"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=20967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}