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.'"
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
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.