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

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

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.

Re:Encryption

[anagama]

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).