The NSA doesn't use a bunch of SIM cards on wire racks.
If the NSA needs outbound phone numbers, they're more likely to set up a shell company and pretend to be an MVNO or a VOIP telco provider, a couple computers on a cheap cloud host masquerading as a phone provider is a lot easier to manage and hide than a setup like this. This is a pretty common kind of business so it's easy enough to blend in, and it isn't restricted to a single apartment or city.
If the NSA wants to eavesdrop on phone calls, they just set up a room inside the relevant phone provider [0].
I think this is more likely a gang operation or a foreign influence operation. Details are thin but it feels like a shady organized crime operation (think quasi-legal, probably advertising as bottom-rate VOIP numbers or text gateways) that got used at one point by a foreign influence operation to make threats and try to interfere in domestic politics.
Inside the US? Unlikely. This is physical hardware being shipped to the US, that sort of thing really lacks plausible deniability unlike rolling up phone records in foreign countries that happen to contain American tourist phone calls.
If these were found in a foreign country then maybe, but these would be far more likely to be some foreign intel service than the NSA.
Unless NSA is listening to the diplomats from other countries. Maybe this is a system to quietly force devices belonging to diplomats onto certain networks/nodes so they can be more easily intercepted. If someone wanted to simply shut down a network, a few basic white noise jammers could block frequencies far more easily/cheaply than a thousand sims.
The NSA doesn't use a bunch of SIM cards on wire racks.
If the NSA needs outbound phone numbers, they're more likely to set up a shell company and pretend to be an MVNO or a VOIP telco provider, a couple computers on a cheap cloud host masquerading as a phone provider is a lot easier to manage and hide than a setup like this. This is a pretty common kind of business so it's easy enough to blend in, and it isn't restricted to a single apartment or city.
If the NSA wants to eavesdrop on phone calls, they just set up a room inside the relevant phone provider [0].
I think this is more likely a gang operation or a foreign influence operation. Details are thin but it feels like a shady organized crime operation (think quasi-legal, probably advertising as bottom-rate VOIP numbers or text gateways) that got used at one point by a foreign influence operation to make threats and try to interfere in domestic politics.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Inside the US? Unlikely. This is physical hardware being shipped to the US, that sort of thing really lacks plausible deniability unlike rolling up phone records in foreign countries that happen to contain American tourist phone calls.
If these were found in a foreign country then maybe, but these would be far more likely to be some foreign intel service than the NSA.
Unless NSA is listening to the diplomats from other countries. Maybe this is a system to quietly force devices belonging to diplomats onto certain networks/nodes so they can be more easily intercepted. If someone wanted to simply shut down a network, a few basic white noise jammers could block frequencies far more easily/cheaply than a thousand sims.