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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.'"
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.
I don't mean to defend the program, but what makes you so certain it does not (and cannot) detect terrorist plots? That would be the stated purpose, anyway, and when a plot is detected and pre-empted, they wouldn't publicize how they did it, as doing so would give other terrorists information on how to avoid detection.
Binary thinking is an oversimplification -- it's perfectly possible for a program to be both an Orwellian privacy nightmare AND an effective tool for catching terrorists.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Reading history, you frequently come across periods where you wonder "How could people put up with this?" or "Why didnâ(TM)t they just do X" where X is the solution which was eventually reached 20 years later.
Looking at the modern world, I realise I'm living in just such a period. A pity I'm not longer "smart" enough to figure out what the current X should be. I guess I may have been a little too hard on all those "stupid" societies in the past.
Then again, maybe it's not wrong to think that they and we are just, actually stupid.
May the Maths Be with you!
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 the NSA keeps all the encrypted stuff, and then will keep it for 5 years after it is decrypted. What is more correct is to say that the encrypted stuff is temporarily safe until a flaw in the encryption scheme is discovered, or computing power is sufficient to make brute force attacks trivial.
This however exposes the lie inherent to the claim that it is to protect us from terrorism. 15 or 20 year old decrypted data will have no relevance to a terrorist attack happening tomorrow. It's only use may be as background material in a post-attack and post-aprehension trial (as if a fair trial would be allowed).
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good