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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.'"
Ladies and gentlemen, history will title this period "1983".
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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?
Why does everyone think this is bad
Not "everyone" thinks this is bad, but everyone with even a little bit of knowledge about history knows that giving the government such powers so they can catch the scary bogeyman will inevitably result in the government abusing said powers. Everyone else... well, they're under the delusion that government workers are perfect beings, apparently.