British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged To Play In NSA's Data Pools 43
Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes "Britain's electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters, has long presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency's massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. But according to a top-secret document in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA's vast troves of private communications and sought 'unsupervised access' to its data as recently as last year – essentially begging to feast at the NSA's table while insisting that it only nibbles on the occasional crumb."
Nibbling on Occasional Crumb (Score:2, Funny)
We now know the chief's mustache is from the NSA's chocolate pie... or perhaps a dirty Sanchez.
Re:Britain is but a client state of Uncle Sam (Score:5, Interesting)
The "Great" in Great Britain never meant great as in supa-dupa.
It derives from the French "Grande" as in "big", referring to the Island of Britain as the larger part or Brittany, with the smaller part being Brittany in the North of France. This goes back to the Norman conquests, where the French though they owned it, but once they got there, the locals quickly absorbed them into the borg and they decided they were British after all.
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>I'm pretty sure your historical facts are slightly wrong
That's why I work in tech.
Re:Britain is but a client state of Uncle Sam (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not cognate with the French word, it's simply a translation of the meaning. "Great" in English means "large or immense".
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Given that the "large" meaning seems to be older, I am going to give that one priority when interpreting sentences from now on. Especially where leadership is concerned.
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Sorry, Starbucks has the trademark for using the word 'Grande' in that sense.
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It derives from the French "Grande" as in "big", referring to the Island of Britain as the larger part or Brittany
'Great' became part of the official title when Scotland joined Britain (being England and Wales) in 1707. Before that it was only occasionally used, when it was necessary to distinguish Britain from Brittany, mostly in Latin or French. So 'derives' is not correct IMHO.
The suspence is killing them (Score:1, Offtopic)
They want to find out if the NSA knows who Grace Murdoch's father is.
Re:Going over my head, perhaps, but..... (Score:5, Interesting)
The NSA had the computers and total control over sealed parts of shared US/UK bases. The GCHQ had the global locations and very
The Falklands, UK role in former Yugoslavia showed an even more clear lack of good UK crypto use or true UK global reach.
At any point in time the NSA could shut out or totally turn off the GCHQ product stream depending on US policy or political mood.
The UK likes to talk of its special relationship and joint facilities but knows a lot of other nations are now on the special US helper list (for NSA locations, "shared" sites) and other nations expect nothing back from the NSA unlike the UK.
The UK will always recall Diego Garcia in the 1970's and UK only efforts in Cyprus (and many other UK only regions) as been sticking points with the USA.
The result is a lack of sharing in both directions been used as a tool. NSA/GCHQ sites, Polaris, Super Antelope and Diego Garcia all showed the very real limits to US/UK relations in the past.
Now the UK is left with the result of the past budgets cuts from the 1960-80's and is totally dependant on the USA and NSA in many key ways. The US can offer all to the UK, some or none. The UK has its own sites for Ireland, and the Middle East but lacks its own NSA like total global reach.
The upper levels of the UK gov have also gotten a taste for the NSA product over decades. What this new news shows is a new hint at the decades old dance between the NSA, US gov and a UK addiction to total information awareness with limited funds.
So for years you had the useful sock puppets talking of the Anglosphere and that "special relationship" forged in past wars been about total trust and sharing.
Reality is much more complex per US political decade, UK budget related cuts and is very much controlled by the USA.
The UK faces losing a world wide database of realtime calls, voice prints, faxes, emails, networking and banking intel via the US and having to fall back on UK only efforts.
With only UK sites for Ireland, the Middle East and help from New Zealand, Australia, Canada it would be "dramatic" form the UK perspective after enjoying the global NSA efforts and long term storage.
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One very interesting source of accounts on US/UK spy relations can be found in the novels of John LeCarrre. Especially the earlier ones, the Smiley trilogy for instance. It's fiction of course, but very well-informed, and written by a former spook.
Re:Going over my head, perhaps, but..... (Score:5, Informative)
Sure but GCHQ is only part of the intelligence picture, MI6 is one of the single greatest HUMINT organisations in the world, putting the CIA to shame, and second only to perhaps the likes of Israel's Mossad.
Britain's immigrant built cultural links with countries like Pakistan and previous laissez faire attitude to middle eastern and asian terrorist organisers living in exile has allowed it to build up impressive intelligence assets that many countries could only dream of. The equation changed slightly since al qaeda affiliates decided to bite the hand that fed it, but it's far from over. There's a reason groups like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is based in London and comes up with perhaps the most accurate analysis of casualties in the world in the conflict there. Although the likes of Mossad's tradecraft skills tend to outweigh those of MI6, the network of activists, and agents MI6 has contacts with and links to is pretty much unparalleled.
This isn't to say the CIA hasn't made massive in-roads since 9/11, and didn't have areas of expertise before (like in Afghanistan, vs. the soviets - but guess who helped get the CIA in touch with the jihadis back then in Pakistan in the first place?).
The foundations of MI6 and it's broad and pretty much unrivalled network can be put down to the idea that whilst Britain's empire involved a break up with other nations, it still made sure it never lost contact on the ground.
Britain still has a lot of value to the US, the US would be far more prone to internal terrorist attacks without human intelligence from MI5, and MI6 through their broad network of contact with activists living in the UK. Part the reason that the Boston bombings were a succesful attack is because Chechnya is one of the few areas where Britain doesn't have such substantial ability to cooperate.
Regarding GCHQ specifically though, the UK is a major global telecommunications hub, for the NSA programmes to be effective it needs support from major hubs in every continent. The UK is their European partner, they'd struggle to find another with both the willingness, resources, and telecommunications links. To have the European aspect of their global spying program go dark would be a massively crippling blow to the whole programme so even there there is still some hefty leverage.
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I'm a bit baffled by your post. I actually agree the UK has a major problem with nationalism - hence the rise in the UKIP vote, but I'm struggling to see how David Cameron can be framed particularly as a nationalist or a racist, and I'm not sure what wars your referring to, when is the last time we had a war? the short skirmish in Libya? We've been pulling out of and scaling down military intervention drastically in recent years - what you accuse him of is more a trait of two prime ministers past - Tony Bla
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"Cameron is clearly a xenophobe for allowing xenophobic elements in his party."
This just highlights your ignorance of politics. A leader (thankfully) of a party doesn't have full reign to do everything he wants without question, he's accountable to his party and it's members. Whilst as I said there are some far right members of his party, that doesn't mean all of them are. The Tory party has long been in a battle between the more liberal, and the far right, people like Cameron and Osborne have been pushing
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Um, my girlfriend and her family are Canadian, as are many of our friends. I seem to know more about it than you which should be embarassing.
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"British people are generally awesome even if intolerant brutes like Cameron exist (who's seems to be having an identity crisis and takes it out on immigrants)."
When you understand the politics that have been almost tearing apart the Conservatives for years you begin to understand that identity crisis. The problem is that it's a party sharply divided by the right/extreme right old guard, and the younger, more modern minded centre-right liberal conservatives. There isn't enough strength behind Cameron's youn
"Secretly Begged" (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't that pretty much the same as talking to yourself?
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The UK enjoyed breaking most European powers codes in the 1920-30's and its political class became addicted to the insider knowledge cross referencing a world of diplomatic and military communications.
During WW2 ENIGMA offered the UK even more near the end of the war- almost realtime communications in plain text.
After WW2 the UK still had the code skills and bases around the world. The UK could also ensure many of the
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Britain's breaking of the ENIGMA code in WW2 would not have been as timely as it was without the 2 Polish scientists who figured it out first and rushed to get the information to England just before the Germans invaded Poland. They also lucked out and were able to retrieve one of the ENIGMA machines off a German sub they sunk before the German captain and crew could destroy it. Like most scientific discoveries it was a case of standing on the shoulders of those before them that made the advances possible. A
Mloody Burber! (Score:1)
Sit in your ass munching chairs, ye bastard foes who much my dirty shits.
If you're technology is paramount to doing good, ye bastards wouldn't be in some dark alley of some special hidden agency spending our taxes without any accountability?! Would ye be so kind as to put on public record how many times you read peoples' emails and didn't find anything? How many times ye did find something? Now, if ye be reading this message, I ponder the great expense of wasting so much of the tax dollars that could have b
So much for the Special Relationship (Score:1)
When British Politicians want to feel good about the UK's place in the world, they talk about the special relationship. It's a bit of wordage for home consumption that
they use to say 'We're America's most important ally.'
It's nonsense. That visiting US politicians are politely hectored into saying it, much to the glee of this or that foreign minister, is proof of bugger all. The UK is treated like a large unsinkable aircraft carrier parked off of Europe. That Israel has NoForn access to the NSA treasure tro