New Snowden Docs Show GCHQ Paid Telcos For Cable Taps 90
Advocatus Diaboli sends word of a new release of documents made available by Edward Snowden. The documents show British intelligence agency GCHQ had a deep partnership with telecommunications company Cable & Wireless (acquired later by Vodafone). The company allowed GCHQ to tap submarine cables around the world, and was paid millions of British pounds as compensation. The relationship was so extensive that a GCHQ employee was assigned to work full time at Cable & Wireless (referred to by the code name “Gerontic” in NSA documents) to manage cable-tap projects in February of 2009. By July of 2009, Cable & Wireless provided access to 29 out of the 63 cables on the list, accounting for nearly 70 percent of the data capacity available to surveillance programs. ... As of July of 2009, relationships with three telecom companies provided access to 592 10-gigabit-per-second pipes on the cables collectively and 69 10-gbps “egress” pipes through which data could be pulled back. The July 2009 documents included a shopping list for additional cable access—GCHQ sought to more than triple its reach, upping access to 1,693 10-gigabit connections and increasing egress capacity to 390. The documents revealed a much shorter list of "cables we do not currently have good access [to]."
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Thank you for your valued insight, Mr. US Government Agent.
Re: Oh no! (Score:1)
This ain't US government agent, but a useful idiot, someone who believes the crap he/she's been fed by the establishment in his country. The same kind of behaviour keeps Putin's approval rating in the new USSR at 60% despite the rampant corruption, international isolation and deteriorating home economy.
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I'm surprised no one has blamed Snowden for the rise of ISIS and their ability to now avoid identification on-line...
Sarcasm?
Islamic State using leaked Snowden info to evade U.S. intelligence [washingtontimes.com]
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It's just hyperbole.
Think like the DOJ telling Apple that children will now die as a result of their encryption. Is there a ring of truth to it? Maybe, but at the end of the day it's a load of crap because the days where Club Fed can ask for and receive whatever laws it wants have just gone bye-bye, and that upsets them.
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Insightful)
He no longer has the documents. These releases are being made by the journalists in charge of combing over the full dump he gave them before left. It's a giant trove of mostly useless or boring unconnected data, and they're sifting through it trying to find gems like these and piece them together.
The data rate (Score:4, Insightful)
Collect it all is back in the news.
A select few nations and their friends have total mastery over much of the telco networks. What if the other nations of interest stop using telco networks or just provide well created disinformation?
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Well well. This explains a lot.
http://cryptome.org/2014/07/ns... [cryptome.org]
Seems a lot of this functionality is deployed via tor.
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If you are found to be using encryption you become interesting. Create too much interest and your computer gets a visit?
The issue of international standards and tame academics can hold back more positive infrastructure changes.
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If you are found to be using encryption you become interesting. Create too much interest and your computer gets a visit?
So the reason to not use encryption is because someone may think you have something to hide? So your suggestion is that we should make sure our privacy is easily invaded so that it will not be targetted specifically at some later time?
Are you suggesting that I should not lock my home or car trunk because a would be theif would then suspect that I have valuables to hide inside?
Our private communications are valuable. Goverment agencies (theives) prove this when they pay millions of pounds to the telecomunica
Enemy (Score:5, Insightful)
Thie biggest enemy of citizens has been governments, for quite a while already.
And as always these governments point to the hardly exisiting threats of "terrorism" (but not theirs) and child abuse to lure naive idiots (the vast majority of citizens) into acquiescing these programs.
And oh, the civilians themselves pay for it all.
Nice.
Re: Enemy (Score:1)
The government is a terrorist organization. It scares me and uses violence.
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I never forget a poster I once saw.
"War is terror"
Re:Enemy (Score:5, Interesting)
Who's the actual target?
I once knew someone who was in military intelligence during the Cold War who had lots of good stories about where the intelligence to analyze came from. One good source was an undersea Soviet cable that the US had covertly tapped. Another was their predecessor to cell phones. They were analog and unencrypted, but they generally realized the risk and didn't use them anywhere near where there might be a listening post. However in issuing guidelines for their usage they apparently miscalculated on the fact that the signals also propagate up, believing that the low power transmissions would be too weak and distorted by the time they got to orbit to be demodulated. The US however had a satellite that could do precisely that.
The Soviets were also very good at covertly tapping US communications. They (and their Russian successors) also made good use of them in other ways. In the Chechen conflict, their leader Dzhokhar Dudaev stayed in communications with his contacts via short calls by satellite phone. The Russian solution to this was to create a system that would specifically recognize his phone, and mounted it to a HARM - the sort of missile normally used to take out radar transmitters, which homes in on a specific radio signal. It was the world's first - and only - "Anti-Dudaev Missile", and worked quite effectively.
So Vodafone owes compensation (Score:5, Insightful)
So Vodafone owes the compensation to the people spied on, particular the Europeans where we have the right to privacy and this is illegal. You can't legally be paid to break laws.
Germany might want to re-examine Vodafones takeover of a German ISP Kabel Deutschland on national security grounds, and this is also an illegal hidden subsidy to the companies involved in the spying. Something that brings it under EU trade domain. Vodafone had a competitive advantage by spying on Europeans and receiving this hidden funding, and thus it is a trade issue.
I don't expect the spooks to yield to the democratic controls gracefully. They have all this info on their political bosses and every reason to use it. UK in particular, Theresa May screams 'terrorist' when you try to make roaming across UK networks... why? Did Vodafone have a word with her and use a bit of leverage? Did GCHQ? Or are they already spying on the Vodafone network and cross mobile roaming would break that?
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So Vodafone owes the compensation to the people spied on, particular the Europeans where we have the right to privacy and this is illegal. You can't legally be paid to break laws.
They can just pass new laws retroactively making the practice legal in the instances where it involved national security, so the corporations that cooperated will no longer be on the hook. Worked for the USA.
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They can just pass new laws retroactively making the practice legal in the instances where it involved national security, so the corporations that cooperated will no longer be on the hook. Worked for the USA.
They might be able to get a law retroactively passed in the UK but what do you think GCHQ can do to scare the EU into submitting to its will? This is important because even if the UK gov't passed such a law making things nice and legal in the UK the practice would still fall foul of EU legislation.
Other EU countries will fall in line in support of the motion because:
1) They don't want to appear soft on terrorism.
2) They want to do the same thing to their own citizens.
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So Vodafone owes the compensation to the people spied on, particular the Europeans where we have the right to privacy and this is illegal. You can't legally be paid to break laws.
They can just pass new laws retroactively making the practice legal in the instances where it involved national security, so the corporations that cooperated will no longer be on the hook. Worked for the USA.
Why would the Germans do this?
Wasted millions (Score:2)
According to the report on the death of Private Lee Rigby, his death was not prevented because of failures by British intelligence services, but instead, because Facebook did not tell the UK intelligence services what was going to happen.
If they expect Facebook to police postings on Facebook and inform the UK authorities, why do they need to tap into the cables? It's all money wasted.
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Gah, I meant:
his death did not happen because of failures by British intelligence services, but instead, it happened because Facebook did not tell the UK intelligence services that it was going to happen.
Re: Wasted millions (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need NSA for ISIS, just common sense. Toppling two secular governments in a region with a lot of ethnic and religious tensions will not give you peace. Iraq, however, wasn't a learning experience enough for some.
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Dick Cheney in 1994 [cnn.com]
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Do you think the U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?
CHENEY: No.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Why not?
CHENEY: Because if we had gone to Baghdad we would have been all alone. There wouldn't have been anybody else with us. It would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world.
And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you could easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. Part of it the Syrians would like to have, the west. Part of eastern Iraq the Iranians would like to claim. Fought over for eight years.
In the north, you've got the Kurds. And if the Kurds spin loose and join with Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey. It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.
The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had, but for the 146 Americans killed in action and for the families it wasn't a cheap war. And the question for the president in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein was, how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? And our judgment was not very many, and I think we got it right.
Dick Cheney in 2007: "Look what's happened since then. We had 9/11."
paid millions of British pounds (Score:1)
What, should they be paid in bananas? I mean, what's the problem? If I'm going through the effort to help them tap into my line, I would want to be compensated also. Seems only fair.
And to all those people out there complaining about the government, and then turning around and reelecting the sons of bitches, I don't have any family safe words to say. I believe the proper British phrase is, Piss off!
Re: At least they paid (Score:1)
You got it wrong, highschool capitalist. Your parents paid and someone, not them, turned a profit. Now go to bed, school starts early tomorrow.
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All tea merchants are hereby ordered to give free tea to GCHQ stormtroopers. For the glory of the British Empire!!!eleven
Re:At least they paid (Score:4, Informative)
The GCHQ was getting a copy of international telegrams and telexes.
D-notice affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The tradition of looking at all international telegrams went back to WW1.
Now its all optical
Bandwidth (Score:2)
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In the past the NSA and GCHQ could only store so much information. The idea was to collect all, sort and remove as much data as possible very quickly.
The Dictionary system using keywords and predesignated phrases would try and find new people of interest.
Later the cost of storage was so low that it was more simple just to collect and store it all.
The ability to track a message end to end and store that result for long term computer
The ultimate big data challenge (Score:3)
Re: The ultimate big data challenge (Score:1)
It would be more interesting to understand their capacity for realtime communications analysis, interpretation and reporting.
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It depends how big their target list is. So all the world's politicians and their families cuts down the number and maximises the extortion benefit. Basically enabling them to completely subvert all the world's democracies and run them by remote control via all the corrupt politicians they have caught and not reported. After all it is becoming pretty obvious after recent disclosures that's what it really is all about.
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Controlling politicians is big business.
The expose The Franklin Cover Up [endthelie.com] by former Senator John Decamp exposes high ranking politicians, clergymen and businessmen using and abusing children (mostly boys) regularly and sadistically.
These abuses are often recorded and then used to compromise powerful individuals.
Pedophilia is literally the fabric that binds the system together - which is also why these sickos keep getting of
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That hinges on a false assumption: That you are a customer to begin with.
Remember: You are the product.
(offtopic: can we has rich text editor here, Slashdot? pretty please? or even better: Markdown?)
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They are allowed to collect foreign calls, catch up with the law please.
British Telecom BT amd Vodafone (Score:1)
Snowden? (Score:1)
Why is encryption not standard? (Score:2)
It's astonishing that all communication is not encrypted. If you are sharing information over a common carrier, you should expect that somebody is going to be grabbing and examining the bytes.
So, somehow, it is just not the norm to encrypt communication. One reason might be that during the eighties and nineties as the internet was going wide, ITAR and patents on systems like RSA made people and companies nervous and unwilling to go there; that was definitely a missed opportunity.
Perhaps another problem is
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There is an encrypted Whats App. Secondly it hasn't been common practice to encrypt all data on closed fiber systems thinking this sort of thing wasn't occurring. Seeing that the fiber interconnects are tapped complete encryption of all data is something that some companies are working on implementing.
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Then, once the masses hit the internet, they treat it like they did their phone
And (Score:1)
If telcos are compliant, so are corps like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.
more snowden releases, now! (Score:1)