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GCHQ Tapping UK Fiber-Optic Cables
An anonymous reader writes "According to The Guardian, the UK government is tapping fiber-optic cables that carry global communications and gathering vast amounts of data. The British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been sharing the data with its American counterpart, the NSA. 'The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate. ... The documents reveal that 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.'"
Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation
Christ, who names this stuff? That's worse than "Boundless Informant." Why don't they call these programs something friendly like "Shamrock" or "Blarney?"
Ladies and gentlemen, history will title this period "1983".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Terrorists: Ooga booga booga!
People: Oh, no! The terrorists are going to get us! Let's give away some of our rights to catch them!
Government: Trust us. We definitely won't abuse the power you've given us.
People: Yeah, there's no way you could abuse unchecked power; it's unthinkable.
People: Hey, you're abusing your power!
Government: National security.
People: Oh, okay.
this is what i dont understand...why is there a "need" for all of this. they arent stopping "terrorism" nor are they really using it in a way thats stopping any major crimes. dont get me wrong, i am weird and 100% opposed to all of this. but who are they protecting with all of this data mining?
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
Actually, the real question is this: Against such habits of secrecy, skirting any and all laws and regulations, avoiding public debate, and even not telling their own lords and masters what they're up to, fits only one remedy, that of immediate shutdown of the outfit and never ever letting such people near government anything again. How, as the world's internet population, are we going to manage that?
Ok, did i sound convincing? Of course our federal governments track our communications. They have since the beginning of 'civilized society', and its just the technology and volume have changed over the centuries.
http://servv89pn0aj.sn.sourcedns.com/~gbpprorg/guerrilla.net/
Time to bring this back to life...
As usual, the solution is to encrypt as much as possible. Your SSL traffic is safe, and those who use encrypted email are safe. The point is that you really shouldn't have to protect yourself from your own government. It sounds like they're no longer *your* government.
I am willing to bet that if Henry Stimpson knew the consequences of closing down the equivalent of the NSA in 1929, he would have sacrificed his "Gentlemen do not read each others mail" mantra in a heartbeat. In fact, he did just that in WW2 because he came to realize the value of intelligence gathering activities.
I personally hope that GCHQ and the NSA are gathering as much intelligence as possible. What is needed is a boundary on who that intelligence is passed on to and used, not how much is gathered.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
My god man - don't you know that questoning your govenment is what the terrorists want you to do?
You spy for a foreign power, that's treason and GCHQ are traitors. You're exposing Britain to political spying and commercial spying. You're exposing Europe to commercial and political spying.
CIA/NSA will use that data to ensure UK politicians do their bidding over the bidding of the voters. You made that possible.
CIA/NSA will use that data to ensure European politicians do their bidding over the bidding of the voters. You made that possible too. We have examples of it already in Wikileaks, with Holland.
RIPA did not give GCHQ the power to spy for the NSA. That's why they're demanding the snoopers charter. Trying to legalize what they're doing.
"The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) requires the tapping of defined targets to be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary. However, an obscure clause allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad."
So that means the NSA gets all the data it can't legally collect (but tries to anyway) from GCHQ and GCHQ gets all the data it legally can't intercept from NSA.
An illegal reacharound, sustained by secret laws that put a military man in charge.
It also means that GCHQ's loyalty is more aligned with General Keith Alexander, than with David Cameron. Those 40000 search rules the NSA provided? How many of them were against UK interests? How many of them spied on Brits for the benefit of the CIA? How many of them spied on Americans for the benefit of a rogue General?
Makes you proud to be British.
I don't know what all the fuss is about: Naturally, to be able to find any terrorist or child pornography related data you have to sieve through all of it.
It's even more bizarre that people are so surprised that a spying agency has been, well, spying!
No wonder Skynet will go insane and try to kill us all. Imagine listening to million of robo and spam calls daily. That's too much for any machine to handle/
GCHQ provides (for cash per transaction) intelligence including credit card user information and history, recorded phone calls, and all other forms of electronic communication of USA citizens to the NSA.
This is how NSA games the USA Constitution and blackmails Congress, the Executive and the Judiciary.
It also means the NSA (with GCHQ) is the largest holder of online porn in the World. It is a given that the porn NSA holds is sold to southeast Asia countries whereby it ends up in China, after 'goodwill' cash has exchanged hands.
All Capone would be laughing.
Well, now we know that all Internet communications are exposed down to the wire or fiber to deep packet inspection systems. Is the IETF working on any counter-measures against this? Like, some new kind of protocol to thwart our friendly feathered government snoop-dooper friends?
I was thinking of something that would leave IP packets alone, so that they could still be routed correctly through the existing Internet. But . . . scramble the IP fragmentation sequence somehow, so that only the sender and receiver would know the correct order of the packets to reassemble them in the right order correctly. This could makes things much more difficult for our deep packet inspector detector pals.
I haven't really given much thought to the idea, but when I am using Wireshark to debug problems, I always use the "follow TCP stream" option. The lack of that option would certainly make my life more difficult.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Check wikipedia for project Shamrock
"The Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA)[2] and its successor NSA were given direct access to daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. "
Except stupid ones, terrorist already encrypt Email and communication for years because everybody knows the governments listen internet!
1. Hoover set up a massive index of FBI files on american citizens in the WWI era, it was later shutdown by congress as a massive affront to American law and history
1.a. Nixon used the security apparatus to damage his political opponents. That is why we had the Church Committee to investigate past abuses of the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc, where gross nazi-style human rights abuses were revealed. That's why we have FISA courts and why USSID 18 was supposed to exist and be respected.
2. World War II was an Actual War where 60+ million people died after genocidal dictators started sending millions of troops, tanks, and airplanes into each others countries and murdering civilians by the hundred-thousand. We are not in world war ii.
3. Back in 1929 the biggest threat to global security was the financial system that crashed and left millions and millions homeless and unemployed, including a huge number of disgruntled german WWI veterans, whom Hitler was able to mold into the SA and later the SS. Spying on people wouldnt have stopped the abuses on wall street. In fact, wall street typically grows fat on these abuses because it has inside information and links with spy agencies.
4. the US was not ready for WWII, but it became ready quickly enough to turn the tide of the war. Having a massive standing army is not a pre-requisite to victory. Having the moral high ground and a strong economy, well, those are. And the US is rapidly losing both of those things.
In other words, if people are wanting the NSA to prevent the next WWII, they are coming from a very ignornat, and arrogant point of view of history. Do you want to prevent "an enemy of the US", or do you want to prevent totalitarianist ideology in general? Because that ideology could take over the US just as it took over Germany's Weimar Republic if the principles of the founders are not adhered to and respected.
If the government knows where your encrypted files went, they just go there to that place with a warrant on "National Security Grounds" from a FISA court and strong arm the recipient, who probably just wet his pants when these guys stormed into his office.
The NSA has already said it holds all encrypted traffic for a long time or forever in the assumption you might be doing something against them. That suggests we could overwhelm them with 100% encrypted web traffic. Unfortunately, the government would want to use our tax dollars to store EVERYTHING at that point.
The Israeli security guys who have spoken say that well trained observers and spies on the ground with their literal ears to the wall are the best source of relevant intelligence.
The UK has always tapped their cables since the dawn of the telegraph.. This isn't new, and certainly isn't news to anyone who studied history.
http://www.hawknest.com/
I've been working as telecoms contractor for the last 20 years. It's getting harder and to get any contracts lately because more and more jobs require some type of clearance. At the beginning I was wondering if this is some type of "job market protection"
Now I know the answer.
Government: "WE NEED THESE POWERS TO PROTECT YOU FROM TERORRISTS!"
No, shit like this makes me want to become a terrorist.
Oh, those slutty cables . . .
errr.... difference today is that G4S (Wackenhutt) bugs the poo out of Cheltenham staff accommodation.....
nearly forgot, remember SERCO? well, they have been bugging the poo out of most of London`s courthouse jails (they have a contract to provide "security". Dont see what the big deal is, MI6 are practically working for foreign-interests, Cheltenham has some good lads, but eventually the americans pull weight; whether it be privatising British Telecom, British Rail, British Gas, British Energy, Royal Mail, perhaps the NHS, HMPS, next up, Doctor Who will be working out of a tardis with the logo of a huge multinational. Belief has been buggered!
Did anyone see that RT segment called "Big Ears"? apparently, sometimes these big supra-national agencies just tap into another countries wiretapps! blast `em all!
i cant believe i didnt know about blarney. thanks
It was nothing more than wiretapping cables between Europe and Middle East. The minor side effect was to cut all traffic for days between europe and asia.
They will want to know everyones friends and contacts so they can systematically deal with any potential leaders of revolution. I expect they think they are going to save lives by preventing or snubbing a flare-up of civil unrest. But what they are really doing is protecting a very corrupt status quo that got us into this mess.
More ideas: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html
On self-replicating space habitats:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
The grad plans were about "Elysium" but for all. Contrast:
http://www.itsbetteruphere.com/
with, from me:
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/solarius/
Related attempts, but not very successful so far:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.openvirgle.net/
David Brin on the Transparent society:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_society
Related suggestions by me:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/dtd/The-need-for-FOSS-intelligence-tools-for-sensemaking-etc./76207-8319
A basic income would give more people more time for self-education and civic engagement and raising independent children. They would have more time to review all this data.
Alaska has a bit of a basic income. Brazil has something of one recently. Germany has been talking about one. The USA has a basic income for people over 65 called "Social Security", so it could just be extended to all from birth and replace things like public schooling and unemployment insurance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income_guarantee
Of course, two countries that implemented something of them, Lybia and Iran have experienced US attempts to destabilize them. See also "the Threat of a Good Example" by Noam Chomsky: ..."
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_Example.html
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria.
Still, once could argue a basic income just props up capitalism. I guess it depends how it is implemented and what people actually would do with their time.
See Marshall Brain's Manna for a fictional example with both a basic income and a transparent society.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
There are many reasons things change slowly. People are naturally resistant to change, since they know the old ways work somewhat at least in the past. New intellectual paradigms take a while to propagate. Some people are invested in the current system emotionally and financially, even as it crumbles or faces increasing catastrophic systemic risks. And so on.
Although, perhaps it is better to not know what "X" is now, if it will take decades to see it come into being, with so much needless suffering along the way? :-(
James P. Hogan's "Voyage From Yesteryear" is a good example of people not being willing to embrace "X" when it is staring them in the face.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
Another "X" is vitamin D and good nutrition to prevent or reverse much chronic disease.
https://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
But that's been know for thousands of years. It just gets forgotten now and then.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/62262-let-food-be-thy-medicine-and-medicine-be-thy-f
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Just send it in a mail. It doesn't matter where, just send a mail.