Snowden Docs: Brits Hacked Accounts of Belgian IT Admins 126
An anonymous reader writes "British secret service GCHQ is willing to penetrate the networks of telecoms firms to subsequently use them for spying. German magazine DER SPIEGEL reports GCHQ hacked the machines of Belcacom staff to later use their GRX routers for targeted man-in-the-middle-attacks on people's phones. Belgacom is the biggest telecom in Belgium, and is partly state-owned. DER SPIEGEL publishes three original slides from a GCHQ presentation. They specifically mention targeting 'engineers/systems administrators.'"
Re:All this for waffles. (Score:3, Informative)
They dont. Belgians arent bullies who try to intimidate everyone.
Yeah, well except that minor unpleasantness in the late 19th century where their King was responsible for the murder and genocide of between 2 and 15 million people in the Congo. [wikipedia.org]
The Royal House of Belgium was imposed on the Belgians by the English and the Germans, who were affraid of too much French influence in the country.
Leopold I van Saxen-Coburg was born in Coburg (Bavaria, Germany), he was the uncle of Queen Victoria (who was also part of the Saxe-Coburg family, they changed their name into Windsor to sound less German).
Congo was the _personal property_ of his son, Leopold II. After the outrage on how he treated the Africans, he "donated" it to the Belgian state as a colony. As a Belgian colony, Congo was not worse of than any other colony at the time (which is bad enough).
a King who seems- by all accounts- to have been the forerunner of Adolph Hitler
Leopold II did not want to exterminate the Africans (unlike Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews, Gypsies, gays and the mentally ill); he just wanted to make as much profit as possible. His way to make profit was cruel; but as much as I (an anonymous Belgian) hate him, comparing him to Hitler is trivializing the holocaust.