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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.'"
1. This is not a government spying on another government.
2. Economic espionage is illegal
3. Breaching trust like this will lead to all sorts of blowback when partners find out, it's hardly a good idea.
GCHQ has strayed well over the line from protecting British interests against our enemies to economic and political espionage. This op was probably ordered at the behest of some American service anyway (to whom GCHQ are in hoc to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars), who knows why or who it benefits, but it certainly isn't the people of the UK.
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
I could be way off base, but I bet this particular type of information was sought out from the leaks by Greenwald to dissuade GCHQ from behaving the way it did again...
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
in hoc to
Off-topic pedantry: the expression's in hock to, originating from a Dutch word for a kennel or lock-up or prison, informally used to describe someone in debt. Not related to Latin hoc, meaning "this", and common in phrases like post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this"), ad hoc ("for this [occasion]"), etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
We already know that something between 1984 and the NAZI regime was being built. Snowden just brought it to everyone's attention.
The best thing we can do is either unplug all together or create custom P2P networks that breaks from the standard networks. We need to use disruptive technologies like CB, Zigbee, enhanced versions GPG, faxs, face to face communication, hell even FIDOnet would offer a level of privacy you usually can't get today.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
There's no such thing as illegal to a government.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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.
They dont. Belgians arent bullies who try to intimidate everyone.
Yeah, well except that minor unpleasantness in the late 19th century where their King was responsible for the murder and genocide of between 2 and 15 million people in the Congo.
The Royal House of Belgium was imposed on the Belgians by the English and the Germans, who were affraid of too much French influence in the country.
Leopold I van Saxen-Coburg was born in Coburg (Bavaria, Germany), he was the uncle of Queen Victoria (who was also part of the Saxe-Coburg family, they changed their name into Windsor to sound less German).
Congo was the _personal property_ of his son, Leopold II. After the outrage on how he treated the Africans, he "donated" it to the Belgian state as a colony. As a Belgian colony, Congo was not worse of than any other colony at the time (which is bad enough).
a King who seems- by all accounts- to have been the forerunner of Adolph Hitler
Leopold II did not want to exterminate the Africans (unlike Hitler who wanted to exterminate all Jews, Gypsies, gays and the mentally ill); he just wanted to make as much profit as possible. His way to make profit was cruel; but as much as I (an anonymous Belgian) hate him, comparing him to Hitler is trivializing the holocaust.
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.
If you want to know more what each party is discussing with their national governments, can't think of a better place than hacking Belgian telecom.
This is why they did it.
Wearing pants should always be optional.