Slashdot Mirror
NSA Provided £100m Funding For GCHQ Operations
cold fjord writes "The Telegraph reports, 'GCHQ has received at least £100 million from the U.S. to help fund intelligence gathering, raising questions over American influence on the British agencies. ... It also emerged that the intelligence agency wants the ability to "exploit any phone, anywhere, any time" and that some staff have raised concerns over the "morality and ethics" of their operational work. ... The agency has faced claims it was handed intelligence on individuals from the US gained from the Prism programme that collected telephone and web records. However, it has been cleared of any wrongdoing or attempts to circumvent British law by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, as well as by Mr Hague. The payments from the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) are detailed in GCHQ's annual "investment portfolios", leaked by Mr Snowden to The Guardian. The NSA paid GCHQ £22.9million in 2009, £39.9million in 2010 and £34.7million in 2011/12. ...Another £15.5million went towards redevelopment projects at GCHQ's site in Bude, Cornwall, which intercepts communications from the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic. ... A Cabinet Office spokesman said: "In a 60-year alliance it is entirely unsurprising that there are joint projects in which resources and expertise are pooled, but the benefits flow in both directions."'"
dryriver also wrote in with news that several telecoms are collaborating with GHCQ (BT, Vodafone, and Verizon at least). From the article: "GCHQ has the ability to tap cables carrying both internet data and phone calls. 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. ... Documents seen by the Guardian suggest some telecoms companies allowed GCHQ to access cables which they did not themselves own or operate, but only operated a landing station for. Such practices could raise alarm among other cable providers who do not co-operate with GCHQ programmes that their facilities are being used by the intelligence agency."
....could have fed a lot. It's amazing what money is spent on.
If it is, it is a sickness inspired by fear mongering to sell this to the U.S. budget. Way over the line. They don't need new toys, they need counseling.
Stop doing bad things with my money! I want faster internet, not foreign cable taps!
They don't record any information about Americans, only foreigners.
A-a-and...the Slashdot "editors" are earning the scare quotes around their titles once again. The NSA has been all overs the new lately, and you'd pretty much have to be hiding under a barrel not to know what that stands for, yet the summary carefully explains what it means. But as for GCHQ? Nope. Nothing. After checking with Google, I was able to ascertain that it does not stand for Google Corporate HeadQuarters, which was my first guess. If I were a nice guy, I'd tell you what it does stand for, but that would be doing the "editors" jobs for them, and, unlike them, I'm not paid for this crap. :)
department funding dwindling, need to keep up the headcount?
just take this US contract. shovel them a few billion records. some friendly meetings
Lots of genies coming out of that bottle. And we probably still don't know 1% of it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It looks like Tony Blair wasn't the only lapdog Parliament had in the kennel.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The 4th amendment says that people have a right to be secure against unreasonable searches.
This simple prohibition has no context - the fact that someone else (a foreign government, a corporation, another citizen) gives the information to the government doesn't matter. It's still a violation, the fourth amendment makes no distinction for how the government gets the data.
The fact that the legislature passed a law saying that they can doesn't matter, and the fact that the executive branch says that they can doesn't matter either. The executive branch cannot and must not be the ones to judge the legality of their actions - that would be tyranny.
Determining whether something is legal is, and always has been, the purview of the judicial branch. In cases of ambiguity or differing interpretations, there is always the option of bringing it to the supreme court.
Many legal scholars count the government's actions as illegal, and a common-sense reading of the fourth amendment seems to agree.
I wish the people who keep repeating that the government hasn't broken any laws would shut up - they're giving tyranny a measure of respectability just by saying that. I also wish people who don't care about their own privacy would shut up - many people do care, and since you don't care there is nothing to be gained by arguing... or even voicing your position.
If you think what the government is doing is OK, please STFU and let people bring the issue to the supreme court. If you're correct, then it won't matter and you shouldn't object to raising the question. There's no honourable reason to argue against verification.
Between the two world wars the precursor to GCHQ, the Government Code & Cypher School, and various earlier organisations were tapped into international telegraph lines/carriers (e.g. in the UK and Malta) in order to obtain copies of diplomatic traffic. The British companies acquiesced to this with little coercion and the US companies took a little more convincing but eventually complied. There's nothing much new here, only the scale has changed.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
It has been known for some time that the various intelligence agencies of the Anglosphere cooperated on various projects. Common enemies make for common cause. The annual support doesn't appear to be that significant - equivalent to about 10-15% the cost of a Eurofighter Typhoon per year.
My goodness, so your justification of a hideous waste of money is to point to an even greater hideous waste of money?
You say that common enemies make for a common cause, but the truth is that the terrorist threat is so tiny as to barely exist. Only 52 people lost their lives in the 7/7 events that you point to, and you had to go back 8 years to find that many. Whilst tragic, the number of people dying from terrorism in western countries over the last 20 years is much, much less than those dying from any one of either the road toll, heart disease, or cancer over the same period. But the money allocated to defense keeps ballooning because department heads over-exaggerate the terrorist threat so that they can stampede politicians into letting them keep or expand their budget.
100 million pounds is significant because it is still over $US1 per taxpayer. Anyone who understands statistics or risk analysis can easily see how far the defense spend has grown beyond the point of diminishing returns. As far as I'm concerned, it is now actively causing the death of far more people than it saves, purely by virtue of the fact that the money could have been far better spent finding cures for diseases, building self-driving cars, or funding research into any number of technologies which would have actual societal benefits.
I know from your previous posts that you seem to think it is patriotic to support the actions of all the TLA organizations without question, but I disagree. In a democracy, it is of vital importance and far more patriotic to question this sort of rampant waste of taxpayer dollars.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
Did you read the summary? He was obviously referring to the fact that the US Government was paying GCHQ to get information for them, that they could not legally get themselves (under the constitution governing the US Government no less)
this is going to yield substantial amounts of lulz :3
"My goodness, so your justification of a hideous waste of money is to point to an even greater hideous waste of money?"
If you haven't yet noticed, "Cold Fjord" submits articles that allow him to subvert the original message. If you look back in his previous submissions, he can't resist turning the resulting discussion to his favor. MOST submitters simply submit an article then let it be. Not Cold Fjord--he is fully involved right from the time the article hits the front page.
Treat him like the Troll he is, and ignore him.
raising questions over American influence on the British agencies
I find it strange that this is a question that still need to be asked. Maybe that is because I'm living in Europe, but for years I have the feeling the American influence on Great Britain is big in everything. So big that I personally see the British politicians as some kind of American trojan horse within Europe.
Some europeans even joke that it isn't a country anymore, but the 51st state of the US. Really in all honesty, this article doesn't surprise me one bit.
Only 52 people lost their lives in the 7/7 events that you point to, and you had to go back 8 years to find that many.
People do not understand how tiny that is. It is a massive tragedy for those involved (as so many other deaths are), but what people refuse to accept is that by wasting money they are effectively causing far more death and tragedy because the money could be spent elsewhere.
But the scale is beyone minute. The best numbers I could get from the office of national statistics was a mortality rate of 1000 for men and 600 for women, per 100,000 in that year. In London alone the expected death rate on that day alonw was 219 people, so the terrorist attack was not even dominant in the city it happened in. In the UK overall the numberis more like 1315.
To reiterate, the terrorist attack accounted for 1/5 of the daily deaths in the city it happened in for that one day alone.
It's a tragedy, sure, but so are many other things.
Over twice as many cyclists have died in London in that time. If 1% of the London (never mine UK wide) terrorist budget had been diverted to something more sane, then actual measureable lives could easily have been saved.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It sounds to me like you didn't do a proper job of accounting for the actual risk. It appears that you didn't bother to gather lists of the planned or attempted attacks that were interrupted and develop estimates as to loss of life, limb, and property had they succeeded. You aren't properly accounting for the risk fi you don't. Those numbers are rather important since many of them would have been mass casualty events such as attacks on football stadiums that could have killed hundreds and wounded thousands from truck bombs. There is another insidious aspect of terrorism that you should account for as well, and that is the fact that successful terrorist campaigns will draw more recruits. More recruits coming to support a cause allow it to conduct further attacks. It can be a self-reinforcing phenomenon. There are certainly other affects as well. If you haven't account for those, you have it wrong.
It is also nonsense to confuse random accidents with willful human behavior.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Yeah I couldn't help noticing that pattern as well. I've been getting silly amounts of mod points lately -- how about we ensure these fjordisms wind up at +5 Funny? Show them for the joke they are.
[...] the fact that successful terrorist campaigns will draw more recruits.
Citation needed. But regardless, do you know what is even more successful in drawing more terrorist recruits? Murdering hundreds of innocent people in drone attacks [which is itself a terrorist attack, however you try to justify.]
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
The vast majority of those killed by drone strike are terrorists, not innocent people. No, a drone strike isn't terrorism.
Pakistani General: Actually, The Drones Are Awesome
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Yess, yess, we should spend moar moaar! Kill the terrorists, rip their heart, drink their bloood, tasty BLOOOD, hufff, huff, huff, .... huff ... (medication kicks in)
No, a drone strike isn't terrorism.
The relatives of all the hundreds of innocent people murdered in the strikes disagree, I presume. But you lack the empathy required for understanding that.
And to explain the situation in Pakistan, I'll give you an allegory. Imagine Rick Perry is the president of the USA, and extraterrestrial aliens invade and start bombing California. He says "yeah! kill them liberals, I mean, terrorists!!!". Btw, the aliens gave a lot of gold to Rick Perry.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Ah planned or attempted attacks.
Well, there was that one where they left a car bomb and it was towed away by the traffic wardens (already employed for other duties).
Or the suicide attempt where they drove a bomb filled car into an airport, missed everyone caught fire and were dealt with by the airport firefighters (already employed for other duties).
The thing is there have been a number of terrorist attacks foiled by either incompetence or by existing police work---the police and government love to brag when they foil an attack and so far none of the special forces seem to have done that much.
The thing is there wasn't a storm of attacks before all the special measures and there wasn't a storm of attacks either. In fact the risk was much greater in the 80s and 90s due to real terrorist threats and yet we're spending much more now.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. Every living person will die at some point. Comparing a single cause of death against all causes of death combined will result in a small number for most causes of death. In this case, you're comparing death rates for people who mostly had a long and healthy life behind them to a death cause that hit mostly people between 20 and 50 years old, and moreover that also involved 700 injuries. (I'd like to know how many of those 700 are actually people who were rendered severy crippled for the rest of their lives.)
It would be more fair to compare the numbers against deaths from accidents (e.g. traffic or work-related). For comparison, traffic deaths in Greater London were 204 in the year 2009; compared to that, the 52 deaths on 7/7 is not that small of a number.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
To reiterate, the terrorist attack accounted for 1/5 of the daily deaths in the city it happened in for that one day alone.
All true but unfortunately in 9/11, what started this whole ball rolling, it was the privileged class that died. It's worth spending any amount of money to protect them. At least according to that same privileged class. Whether the peons lose because of these changes is not relevant.
Now THAT's unreasonable searches - and it's not just metadata, it's going through your shit for no reason whatsoever.
Fix that actual, physical problem and then we can talk about whether someone marking the weight and destination of your baggage (meta-data) is a big deal.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It is also nonsense to confuse random accidents with willful human behavior.
In terms of assigning resources optimally to minimize the lives lost no actually, it's not.
Good fucking lord - they didn't break the law, they made a law that (may be) in violation of the constitution. For a group of fukcing nerds who scream and yell about the misuse of theft vs infringement when it comes to copyright and patent law, you're quite the knuckehead when it comes to the feds knowing you surf porn all the time.
If we criminally prosecuted every congressman and senator who had a law striken or modified as unconstitutional by the court there would be none left. Perhaps yu would recommend jail time for anyone who voted for a state amendment which turns out to violate the US constitution?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Snowden takes a leak in Russia, you get a fresh frosty piss for Obama. I hope he uses a coaster. I saw a picture of the bastard with his feet up on the historical oval office desk. His filthy damn shoes. GIVE THAT MAN A DRINK!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
they didn't break the law, they made a law that (may be) in violation of the constitution.
The constitution is the highest law of the land, and they broke it; that's illegal in my books.
If we criminally prosecuted every congressman and senator who had a law striken or modified as unconstitutional by the court there would be none left.
Good. That just shows you how deep the corruption runs. Throw 'em all in prison.
> You say this is already happening? That there are politicians in the US or UK that are using the intelligence services to target individual voters
Google Herbert Hoover. This year, we know the Obama administration used a federal agency, the IRS, to target citizens who disagree with him politically. Given that he's a) tracking all of your emails and phone calls while b) using federal agencies against voters, it seems quite likely he'd combine the two.
You subcontract your domestic surveillance to a foreign ally that you trust. And then you can spy on the ally in exchange, and "nobody" is spying domestically.
Yes the Constitution is the supreme law of the land in the US. As the Supreme Court said, a law violating the Constitution is null and void, without effect. If an act is made "legal" only by an unconstitutional "law", it is not made it legal at all, for that law is null and void. Acting under the color of a void law that contravenes the Constitution is acting illegally.
perhaps an analogy to make it more clear. I hereby give you permission to break into your neighbor's house. If you go ahead and break into your neighbor's house you have acted illegally because I do not have the power to grant you that permission. It is the same with an unconstitutional law - the legislature has no authority grant you permission to act under that law.
We should not put people in jail for trying to do the right thing, having an accident of some sort. Crime requires criminal intent, knowingly doing something wrong. Elected leaders take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. Not to be smart, not to make good decisions, but you make constitutional decisions. When an elected official KNOWINGLY violates the Constitution I would have no problem sending into jail.
Because there may be a legitimate disagreement as to the Constitutionality of a law, rarely could it be proven that they knowingly violated it. However I can think of one prosecutable instance. A certain state senator was also a law professor. I listened to the tape of him on the Senate floor warning that a certain bill was unconstitutional. He said he liked the bill, but it went to far and violated the Constitution. The bill needed to be scaled back he said, or the Supreme Court would surely strike it down. He went ahead and voted FOR the bill that he knew to be unconstitutional.
So he's a law professor and a senator. He should have a pretty good idea of what is Constitutional and what is not. He knows it's unconstitutional, but breaks his oath of office and votes for it anyway. I'm good to sentence him to six months in jail. That senator, Barack Obama, deserves jail time for willfully violating our constitutional rights, by his own admission.
The situation in Pakistan is that the government has limited control, if any, over the tribal areas. Al Qaida and the Taliban (both Afghan and Pakistani) have exploited this to set up shop there, often to the inconvenience to the locals. At times the locals themselves have attacked al Qaida members and the Taliban. The drone attacks focus on the terrorists, often while they are moving in vehicles. That tends to isolate them and means few other people are around. There are other methods of attack, and no doubt some innocents have been killed. But I doubt it is more than a minor fraction of the total killed. Speaking of empathy, have you any for the victims of the terrorists hiding in Pakistan? They regularly slip into Afghanistan to kill, maim, and intimidate. They are making attacks more frequently in Pakistan now. Do their victims have a voice? Those victims don't number in the hundreds, it is in the thousands and tens of thousands.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
That must be one remaining state Obama hadn't yet visited when he had been to "uh, 57 states so far". You know, when his "numeracy is a little off".
You seem to be missing quite a few planned attacks there. Also, I wouldn't look for the intelligence services to do much bragging. It isn't their way, they prefer to avoid their role being know when they can. That includes any assistance to the police doing the "bragging," and perhaps some of the happy "accidents" that have foiled some of the plots.
The last several heads of MI5 would seem to disagree with you about the risk. They think it is very high.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
You seem to be missing quite a few planned attacks there. Also, I wouldn't look for the intelligence services to do much bragging. It isn't their way, they prefer to avoid their role being know when they can. That includes any assistance to the police doing the "bragging," and perhaps some of the happy "accidents" that have foiled some of the plots.
Mate, you are full of it. Have a read of this:
Testifying before the Senate on Wednesday, National Security Agency Deputy Director John Inglis conceded that the bulk collection of phone records of millions of Americans under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act has been key in stopping only one terror plot — not the dozens officials had previously said.
That's right, after all the fear-mongering and hype about risk, after all the billions of dollars, after the complete and ongoing invasion of privacy, the NSA's S.215 surveillance program stopped one plot. Maybe.
This is the NSA deputy director testifying in front of congress, not some internet loudmouth.
So tell me again how all that money wouldn't be better off spent on trying to cure cancer.
Go peddle your fear somewhere else - tonight I'll lose more sleep over being struck by lightning than I will being afraid of the vanishingly few terrorists who are insane enough to suicide bomb, but competent enough to carry it out.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
The last several heads of MI5 would seem to disagree with you about the risk. They think it is very high.
Yeah and MI6 was convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We went to war over that, remember.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I am no psychologist, but the underlying problem seem to do with the human (or US) psychology to be (false) winners.
When people vote for a third party, they know its unlikely be the winner that time around. Unless enough gets pissed
and votes a "single" third party who wins atleast once, the two party system will be safe.
Add to that, many decent candidates seem to think that they can clean up one of the parties, hence never try under a different party label.
I'm 'backpeddling' on the NSA @ least in 1 respect I got wind of:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4046997&cid=44465451
The republicans BLOCKING the cybersecurity bill!
(Man - stupid, Stupid, STUPID! Even from a businessman's "pov" especially for reasons I noted there for reason of BUSINESS OWN BOTTOM-LINE 'raison d'etre': Profitability: Cyber insurance be damned, especially if the insurer finds out YOU as the business making the claim did NOT fully cover yourself vs. threats completely, opening the doors to liability suits, rightfully so, from customers affected potentially...).
Still against PRISM though - that much I feel is wrong & that its actual efficacy + "ROI" is questionable vs. potential for abuse/misuse.
I.E.-> Yes, I don't like the idea of "Big Brother" anymore than the next guy is why, & the fact some of what they said is "not 100% straight up" (from Clapper/Alexander, but then again, they have their hands tied too on things probably on WHAT can be said). Still - the "roi" on PRISM? Not good enough to 'spy' on US citizens (didn't stop boston bomber for example), & yes, the fact there exists a potential for misuse/abuse by "mortal men" via "absolute power corrupting absolutely",
* So YES - I still am, however, HIGHLY AGAINST the potential for misuse of both PRISM (not so much xKeyScorew anymore though - that's pretty much just a query tool & parser of data IF we've been told the straight up on that much though, per this -> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/01/xkeyscore_leak_challenged/ )
The cybersecurity bill being blocked though? HEY, not only does it leave the windows open, even when the front doors are triple locked, but it also cuts out jobs for geeks/nerds like us here too (yes, that's right, looking @ ALL sides - especially from "our own" as nerds/geeks into computing (I know that putting folks to work is ALWAYS a good thing & NOT IN SHIT MINIMUM WAGE JOBS either - ones with good pay for disposable income, that powers OTHERS lives via money flowing (can't have a healthy economy without it & all wealth in the hands of a FEW/1%, only)).
APK
P.S.=> You really, Really, REALLY have to "sift thru" this material, from any/all possible sources in the news (especially since, let's face it, "biased journalism sells more magazines" & those that own said organizations skew/twist things for their OWN agendas @ times too, sometimes QUITE bogusly - ala Rupert Murdoch for instance) to make better determinations of "what's-what" & on what specific grounds/accounts (What I posted above made me do a 180 on that much @ least, & yes, in FAVOR of the NSA/General Alexander, for once, in fact, on the CyberSecurity bill going through @ least)... apk
well they don't tend to deploy SAS unless there's a serious incident and its time for shooting and in the USA your so prissy about the armed forces doing things on home ground you end up with militarized police or (walts as the SAS or teh Seals would call them) see the recent armed "hot fuzz" style take down of those dangerous adult female university students who where suspected of buying *gasp* booze
I was not going to answer, but I think you should watch this video that was published today: http://youtu.be/0iPCzxRgAVY
As I said before, those actions only create more terrorists.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Oh, you're crazy was wrapped in creamy sanity for just a few lines:
"Crime requires criminal intent"
No, it doesn't. Crime merely requires that you violate the law, even if you didn't know the law existed. But, hey, thanks for playing.
A law is enforceable and viable from the moment it is ratified and signed. A law may be rescinded if it is found to violate the constitution, even to reverse application of the law back to the date of signature, but until that happens it is the law.
As for BHO, it's not his call as to whether it's constitutional or not, nor is it yours. He may form a learned opinion concerning it, and you can spew filth from your ass. Neither has any standing anywhere in the US, and both may ultimately be wrong. But there are only 9 people who decide whether the constitution has actually been violated, and their redress is to reverse the law in question.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Google "mens rea". It's a central concept of anglo-american law. The term we use today, mens rea, was first recorded by Augustine during the Roman empire.
You might wonder how this relates to "ignorance of the law is no excuse". Suppose you con someone out of $1,000. You may not know that what you did is called "fraud by inducement", but you know that you screwed then over. That's the difference. The fact that you don't know exactly which law makes it illegal is no excuse. You did have guilty intent, called mens rea.
On the other hand, a friend of mine shot at a dangerous animal and accidentally hit her husband. She knows that shooting people is illegal - it's not a question of ignorance of the law. She thought she was shooting at a dangerous animal, not at her husband. Their was no criminal intent, no mens rea. (She could however be charged with negligent discharge if she intentionally fired knowing that she was unsure of what she was aiming at.)
You then claim that the legistlators legal oath to uphold the Constitution is meaningless because they are imbeciles who are incapable of purposefully violating it. There, you've been wrong for only a hundred years or so. Another well known principle of US law is that laws are never meaningless. Any interpretation of a law which would have it mean nothing is invalid. Therefore the requirement that they uphold the Constitution must mean something. The plain wording is that they must not violate the Constitution. Therefore, they must use their own common sense to decide if what they are doing is legal or not.
To put it in even simpler terms, the Supreme Court is the ultimate judge of whether or not you're guilty of murder. Does that mean you can't avoid murdering someone, because you can't decide whether what you are about to do is murder? Of course you make your own decision first, then the court may have a look to see whether you decided correctly. Why would legistlators be any different? Why would they be allowed to break the law, including the Constitution? Sure, the courts may review their decisions just as the court may review your decision to stab someone. That doesn't exempt you, or them, from deciding whether or not to follow the law. If the court decides you broke the law on purpose, they may send you to prison. If the court decides that the NSA chief, or a senator, broke the law on purpose they should be subject to criminal penalties just as you and I are.
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