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United Kingdom Communications Government Privacy The Internet

New Snowden Docs Show GCHQ Paid Telcos For Cable Taps 90

Posted by Soulskill from the hands-in-the-cookie-jar dept.
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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New Snowden Docs Show GCHQ Paid Telcos For Cable Taps More

New Snowden Docs Show GCHQ Paid Telcos For Cable Taps

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  • The data rate (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @12:35AM (#48464695) Journal
    Thats the interesting new part "1,693 10-gigabit connections and increasing egress capacity to 390"
    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?

    • Well well. This explains a lot.
      http://cryptome.org/2014/07/ns... [cryptome.org]

      Seems a lot of this functionality is deployed via tor.

  • Enemy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Vlijmen Fileer ( 120268 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @12:36AM (#48464703)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The government is a terrorist organization. It scares me and uses violence.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I never forget a poster I once saw.
        "War is terror"

    • Re:Enemy (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @06:10AM (#48465661) Homepage

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @12:38AM (#48464711)

    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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      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.

      • 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?

  • 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.

    • his death was not prevented because of failures by British intelligence services ....

      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.

  • 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!

  • It seems like a lot of the high bandwidth claims related to the NSA and other spooks indicate they want an iSCSI connection or other high speed, low-latency access to their sources to make for more efficient and cheaper connections. Why bother recording everything when that's already done by the telcos? My inner spook just wants a fast connection to data that is already on disk.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Why bother recording everything when that's already done by the telcos?
      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)

    by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @01:29AM (#48464841)
    It would be fascinating to know the infrastructure and methods used for storage and to process this volume of data. Presumably, they initially store everything, and then somehow process it to decide what is worth keeping as future potential blackmail material, or occasionally intelligence purposes. The scale of the task is mind boggling.

    • Re: The ultimate big data challenge (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      It would be more interesting to understand their capacity for realtime communications analysis, interpretation and reporting.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      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.

      • "...via all the corrupt politicians they have caught and not reported."

        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
  • Vodafone in the U.K. has always been doing this it is not news. My colleague used to work for "British Telecom" BT they have a complete floor dedicated to spying at BT. The BBC broadcasting house has a propaganda department run by the security services which is now run by the U.S. and funded by the U.S. under the name of "BBC World Service". They do all this silly security nonsense about secrecy and the company supplying air-conditioning systems and maintaining it climb all over their tapping systems and d
  • Besides being the subject of a lot of clickbait, exactly what has he accomplished?

  • 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

    • 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.

    • The problem with encryption is the keys. The person you call/email has to have the same encryption key or they can't hear/read your communications. The current solution is to have the cell company or isp handle the encryption for you. Meaning they have the keys and can listen/read everything, and they can pass those keys to the government just as easily. So you need end to end encryption or the NSA gets everything anyway- only then you have to securely hand the keys to everyone you want to phone/email.
    • You were on the right track with "80s and 90s", it's just an issue of things being done the legacy way. When the internet was developing, it could be reasonably assumed that anyone on the network was "legitimate" since it was highly specialized. Even so, secure data transmission was still done by physical delivery, phone, or fax. That's why none of the old-school protocols like email or FTP were developed with security features.

      Then, once the masses hit the internet, they treat it like they did their phone

  • And (Score:1)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    If telcos are compliant, so are corps like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.

  • what about releasing 10% of the cache at once?

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