NSA Provided £100m Funding For GCHQ Operations 143
cold fjord writes "The Telegraph reports, 'GCHQ has received at least £100 million from the U.S. to help fund intelligence gathering, raising questions over American influence on the British agencies. ... It also emerged that the intelligence agency wants the ability to "exploit any phone, anywhere, any time" and that some staff have raised concerns over the "morality and ethics" of their operational work. ... The agency has faced claims it was handed intelligence on individuals from the US gained from the Prism programme that collected telephone and web records. However, it has been cleared of any wrongdoing or attempts to circumvent British law by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, as well as by Mr Hague. The payments from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) are detailed in GCHQ's annual "investment portfolios", leaked by Mr Snowden to The Guardian. The NSA paid GCHQ £22.9million in 2009, £39.9million in 2010 and £34.7million in 2011/12. ...Another £15.5million went towards redevelopment projects at GCHQ's site in Bude, Cornwall, which intercepts communications from the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic. ... A Cabinet Office spokesman said: "In a 60-year alliance it is entirely unsurprising that there are joint projects in which resources and expertise are pooled, but the benefits flow in both directions."'"
dryriver also wrote in with news that several telecoms are collaborating with GHCQ (BT, Vodafone, and Verizon at least). From the article: "GCHQ has the ability to tap cables carrying both internet data and phone calls. By last year GCHQ was handling 600m 'telephone events' each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time. ... Documents seen by the Guardian suggest some telecoms companies allowed GCHQ to access cables which they did not themselves own or operate, but only operated a landing station for. Such practices could raise alarm among other cable providers who do not co-operate with GCHQ programmes that their facilities are being used by the intelligence agency."
Re:Is this really true? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fourth Amendment (Score:4, Insightful)
An important thing to point out, it is not just the government that broke the law, more importantly it is the political party and specific individual politicians who broke the law. This is all about politics and monitoring your politics and via that monitoring controlling politics (the corporate party).
This enables 'individual' politicians to take actions against citizens and their families when those citizens in any way threaten the power base of those 'individual' politicians. Effectively support a third party, find your self on a no fly list or even worse the let you fly but will they radiate and sexually assault you and your family every time you or they fly. Want a job, forget it, you are now considered a security threat and are only allowed access to minimum wage jobs. Any attempt to gain social welfare, you and your family are tagged as permanently requiring extended further investigation prior to any support being provided.
That's the kids stuff of course, the more serious is the bogus warrant and search based purely on circumstantial digital data. The swat soldier assault where you and your family are threatened at gun point, pets are shot, your family home is trashed and of course there is every chance you will not survive the event, all it's takes is one of those invaders to shout 'GUN' and, the rest will open fire, execute you and random members of your family. They will get off, because they felt threatened because someone shouted gun but of course no one will admit to it (maybe it was the neighbours TV).
Seriously people need to wake up to themselves because it is already that bad. This is the current reality and this is what is already happening.
Re:Fourth Amendment (Score:5, Insightful)
I think what he was driving at, is that in order for the NSA to get information it is barred from getting by the 4th, it farms that out to GB and is delighted when GCHQ gifts them that info. I'm sure the reverse is true as well. It's a scam basically, to undermine human rights.
Just like the 3d party doctrine in the US. You know, if out of necessity you share info with a 3d party, you somehow have absolutely no expectation of privacy. The SCOTUS has conflated "perfect impenetrable secrecy", with "expectation of privacy" and has thus eviscerated the 4th amendment. One slip up, one necessary transaction -- that's it, your privacy means shit. And of course, the Feds won't play by their own rules -- you know, they should have no expectation of privacy in the info Snowden leaked because they shared it with a third party (Booz Allen Hamilton). But to expect them to play by the rules us serfs have to live under ... now that's unreasonable. Right? Right?
Re:Mutual aid (Score:5, Insightful)
It has been known for some time that the various intelligence agencies of the Anglosphere cooperated on various projects. Common enemies make for common cause. The annual support doesn't appear to be that significant - equivalent to about 10-15% the cost of a Eurofighter Typhoon per year.
My goodness, so your justification of a hideous waste of money is to point to an even greater hideous waste of money?
You say that common enemies make for a common cause, but the truth is that the terrorist threat is so tiny as to barely exist. Only 52 people lost their lives in the 7/7 events that you point to, and you had to go back 8 years to find that many. Whilst tragic, the number of people dying from terrorism in western countries over the last 20 years is much, much less than those dying from any one of either the road toll, heart disease, or cancer over the same period. But the money allocated to defense keeps ballooning because department heads over-exaggerate the terrorist threat so that they can stampede politicians into letting them keep or expand their budget.
100 million pounds is significant because it is still over $US1 per taxpayer. Anyone who understands statistics or risk analysis can easily see how far the defense spend has grown beyond the point of diminishing returns. As far as I'm concerned, it is now actively causing the death of far more people than it saves, purely by virtue of the fact that the money could have been far better spent finding cures for diseases, building self-driving cars, or funding research into any number of technologies which would have actual societal benefits.
I know from your previous posts that you seem to think it is patriotic to support the actions of all the TLA organizations without question, but I disagree. In a democracy, it is of vital importance and far more patriotic to question this sort of rampant waste of taxpayer dollars.
Re:Fourth Amendment (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Fourth Amendment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mutual aid (Score:4, Insightful)
Only 52 people lost their lives in the 7/7 events that you point to, and you had to go back 8 years to find that many.
People do not understand how tiny that is. It is a massive tragedy for those involved (as so many other deaths are), but what people refuse to accept is that by wasting money they are effectively causing far more death and tragedy because the money could be spent elsewhere.
But the scale is beyone minute. The best numbers I could get from the office of national statistics was a mortality rate of 1000 for men and 600 for women, per 100,000 in that year. In London alone the expected death rate on that day alonw was 219 people, so the terrorist attack was not even dominant in the city it happened in. In the UK overall the numberis more like 1315.
To reiterate, the terrorist attack accounted for 1/5 of the daily deaths in the city it happened in for that one day alone.
It's a tragedy, sure, but so are many other things.
Over twice as many cyclists have died in London in that time. If 1% of the London (never mine UK wide) terrorist budget had been diverted to something more sane, then actual measureable lives could easily have been saved.