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.'"

Comments

Re:And so

[Kjella]

Nah, Orwell wasn't even close. He might have been close to predicting STASI in East Germany, but this would have been far, far into science fiction. In his story they might have had telescreens but it was always humans watching humans. Huge segments of the population were informers, everybody was aware the Party had eyes and ears everywhere. Ask yourself, how many of the US/UK population knew these programs even existed? I'm guessing thousands out of hundreds of millions. And if the power that be take one lesson away from this it's not going to be the one you want, it's that humans are a liability. They suffer from a conscience and believing in the constitution, also called espionage and treason. Which is why more of this is going to be automated with fewer in the "need to know".

I'm quite sure China has just the same kind of systems - if not better - to track dissidents, you say something bad about the regime on any media flags start going up around you. The computers will do what their masters instruct with utter dedication. The only good news for now is that you still need human thugs to do the dirty work of throwing people in jail, but we're making progress towards changing that. We already have bomb disposal robots, I'm guessing a team of SWAT robots isn't that far behind. And if it comes to actual civil war more and more weapons are "smart weapons" that won't work for the rebels, did a tank operator defect to the enemy? Throw the kill switch. The deck is getting more and more stacked against any insurrection against any regime for any reason.

Re:but why?

[AHuxley]

The UK interest in coded product goes back to the Soviet embassy codes before ww2.
After that code breaking effort political leaders in the UK have really asked "how can we help" and for "more" over every generation.
As US tech got cheaper more became "everything"
GCHQ has had its ups and downs trading the Empire ie land to the USA for NSA product.
The GCHQ was also very smart in staying out of the press, not going to court vs spies and some publishers (so did the NSA for a long time).
The bulk data interest could always be seen as with the first Intelsat (international satellite telephone calls) efforts at Goonhilly Downs -CSO Morwenstow,/GCHQ Bude got every keyword of interest in the late 1960's.
http://cryptome.org/jya/gchq-etf.htm international telephone calls to and from Ireland.
The finding of any keyword of interest on all phonelines was always the aim in the 1960-80's.
re protecting with all of this data mining - the gov, the celebrities, press, trade, disruptive technology, arms deals, diplomatic blackmail, dissidents, protesters, disarmament, peace protesters, bases, police corruption, local elections, trade unions - anything and anyone that could get traction in the community or be a worry to the establishment.
The file placed before a political leader becomes addictive and gets wide domestic budget cuts turned into expanded projects.
Major crimes where only been an issue in ~1990-2000 and seem to have stopped due to the ability of major crime networks to slowly stop using all electronic communications once the court cases start.
CIB3 (anti-corruption squad) and 'Operation Nigeria' also showed what could go wrong for the GCHQ. Corrupt police officers very quickly learn of huge new efforts wrt to "major crimes" and guess what - all electronic communications stop.
Better to let the perception of anonymity keep people talking.
The future is just like the NSA - a rewinding of anyones 'internet' life once they are discovered.
To keep that amount of data you have to collect it all, store and in the past filter for keywords/known links. Add in facial recognition, voice prints, cell tracking, spyware, drones.