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.
Am I reading that right? It sounds like you want to feed starving children to other countries. Granted this will do a lot to feed others and to help take care of population growth, but how much sustenance can a starving child give? Really, we should start by eating the fat kids here in the U.S.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
It's ironic that the biggest threat to freedom in the US is the US government and the US citizens who keep voting in these types of people.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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. :)
Lots of genies coming out of that bottle. And we probably still don't know 1% of it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Fuck counseling. How about a few decades in that PMITA Federal prison system they built to house pot heads.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
To be fair to those US citizens I imagine it is hard to vote for someone who would not do this when it seems to be supported by both their political parties and their system, unlike most (any?) other modern democracy, has those two parties 'baked in' so setting up a third alternative is less of a viable alternative. A duopoly is really not much better than a monopoly.
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.
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.
And the fear mongering continues.
They've ordered the embassies closed all over the middle east, and warning American travelers to stay home for a month. Apparently the risk expires at the end of august. Terroristic must have gotten a hold of some explosives with short "best if used by" dates.
But hey, this justifies all the spying, right? We're all good, then? We can forget all this Snowden stuff, righr?
Too soon? Here, we'll have Ahmed throw a real grenade, go ahead, Ahmed, toss it at those mannequins over there, here, let me get that pin for you.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
If enough of the voting American people saw the problem and agreed to vote for a third party, perhaps a third party whose only platform was to change the laws to allow non-republicrats easier access to power in future, then that would be it.
What I am about to say I say often on here:
When you vote for the lesser of two evils, you are still voting to increase evil.
Many people dont get it, and will try to rationalize the most common excuse. The sad thing is that such excuses are so trivially destroyed by the obvious: Even if it were true that voting a 3rd party is "wasting" your vote, that is still not as bad as voting to increase evil.
In the end there can be no excuse for willingly and knowingly voting to increase evil. Really. No excuse at all.
"Voting 3rd party is wasting your vote" is the official platform of both of the major parties. No surprise there.
"His name was James Damore."
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
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.
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?