Slashdot Mirror
Snowden Docs: Brits Hacked Accounts of Belgian IT Admins
An anonymous reader writes "British secret service GCHQ is willing to penetrate the networks of telecoms firms to subsequently use them for spying. German magazine DER SPIEGEL reports GCHQ hacked the machines of Belcacom staff to later use their GRX routers for targeted man-in-the-middle-attacks on people's phones. Belgacom is the biggest telecom in Belgium, and is partly state-owned. DER SPIEGEL publishes three original slides from a GCHQ presentation. They specifically mention targeting 'engineers/systems administrators.'"
Any chance the GCHQ people will do time in Belgian jails?
Any chance the U.K. will get an astronomical fine?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
In response to the detention of Miranda, he said something along those lines:
the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/david-miranda-detained-uk-nsa
NSA (& associates) made that equation worthless when started to require to manufacturers to insert backdoors and timebombs into their products and spread privileged access over too much people.
So a single person or a group of them (either being insider, or finding how to access those backdoors deployed everywhere) with the right motivation can access most of world's critical information, including US one, and Snowden is a proof of that, the one that decided to go public, for good. What you don't know is how many in the past, present or future will abuse that privilege, or just will make a security mistake giving access to that information to the wrong people.
A couple of problems here. Firstly a lot of those stories refer to an event in 2008, and Der Spiegel claims GCHQ only got access to Belgacom in 2010. So their spying cannot have been relevant there.
Secondly, the evidence in those cases was the sort of thing that can be obtained using ordinary court orders or ordinary, limited and carefully controlled wiretaps. The people targeted went to the Afghan-Pakistani border for months and according to one article, some of them were already known criminals in Belgium even before then. Getting a tight, time limited court order for surveillance of these people within Belgium is easily possible - at no point would Britain hacking Belgium have been helpful in such a prosecution and indeed, would have been dangerous - if the evidence was obtained without a warrant and defence counsel found out, the case might have collapsed.
I strongly dislike this notion that the acts Snowden uncovered are all OK because occasionally, the authorities do manage to catch terrorists. Guess what? They also catch random serial killers, fraudsters, drunk drivers who do hit and runs, all kinds of other criminals .... just using the ordinary tools and strict supervision they are supposed to operate under. Where's the evidence that tightly specified, time limited court orders issued by open courts are insufficient? Can you point me to just one case of a terrorist who successfully blew himself up because a judge mistakenly denied a reasonable warrant request? I've not heard of such a thing, even though occasional mistakes would be expected and not by itself sufficient to conclude what the NSA/GCHQ does is necessary.