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Spy Expert Says Australia Operating As "Listening Post" For US Agencies
First time accepted submitter ozduo writes in with news about Australia's alleged involvement with the ongoing NSA spying program. "Intelligence expert Professor Des Ball says the Australian Signals Directorate — formerly known as the Defense Signals Directorate — is sharing information with the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA is the agency at the heart of whistleblower Edward Snowden's leaks, and has recently been accused of tapping into millions of phone calls of ordinary citizens in France, Germany and Spain. Mr Ball says Australia has been monitoring the Asia Pacific region for the US using local listening posts. 'You can't get into the information circuits and play information warfare successfully unless you're into the communications of the higher commands in [the] various countries in our neighborhood,' he told Lateline. Mr Ball says Australia has four key facilities that are part of the XKeyscore program, the NSA's controversial computer system that searches and analyses vast amounts of internet data. They include the jointly-run Pine Gap base near Alice Springs, a satellite station outside Geraldton in Western Australia, a facility at Shoal Bay, near Darwin, and a new center in Canberra."
"Intelligence expert Professor Des Ball says the Australian Signals Directorate â" formerly known as the Defense Signals Directorate â" is sharing information with the National Security Agency (NSA).
Let's rewrite that to be a bit more accurate and a bit less, er, leading:
One of America's closest allies and long-time member of ECHELON recently reminded the world that they haven't stopped sharing intelligence.
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How? I'm an Aussie, and this is no great unexpected revelation. Pine Gap is a joint Aus/US operated facility, and I'm pretty sure that nobody really thought that it was just a nice place meeeting place for American and Australians to swap recipes.
The fact that the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia have a very close relationship surprises exactly whom, these days? I mean, it goes back to WW2, if not before, and each country has its own reasons: the UK gets to exert significant influence over the world's dominant power, Canada wants the US to help pay for the resources to defend the high Arctic, and Australia found out during WW2 that due to geography, the US was a much more reliable guarantor of security than the UK.
"Don't think it can't happen in Australia, It does."
What a lot of Australians don't even realise is that anything can happen, our political system guarantees almost no rights to citizens, with only one real recourse; you can vote for another politician at the next election. Problem is, when the two-party system moves in step, there's pretty much nothing that can be done, and the general apathy of the public ensures that nothing will be done.
It is my understanding, that in the USA, the spying conducted by the NSA is probably illegal. The problem in Australia is, as far as I'm aware, there's no problem with the parliament passing a law permitting or compelling third parties to spy or provide data, so whatever had been happening, is perfectly legal here, and the public at large doesn't care.
I'll go a bit further and say the obvious implication which you hint at. It's not a "listening post for the US", it's a "partnership in a massive world wide spying program". Germany, Spain, Italy, UK, Australia, Canada, they are all in on it.
Funny that all of these people are bitching about the US doing it when they are not complaining about their own countries collusion and benefits from this spy ring.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
After all, we must all be protected from any form of true democracy and/or choice!
The people who work at these agencies would probably remind you that without all this surveillance, you'd be hiding under your bed waiting for the next terror attack or IED. Democracy would be on the evening news every night waving a flag over the bodies of its adherents while its opponents marched in the streets, celebrating victory after victory.
People forget that we do have enemies; There is more than one way to organize a society, and a lot of people feel like the best way to deal with a society different than your own, is to advocate, encourage, and even practice violence against them "so they know their place." Are the threats as big as they say? Are the sacrifices we've made to keep those threats at bay worth it? I don't know. But don't you dare get on a soap box and preach about "true democracy" without answering the question: How do we protect it?
You do not just get to handwave away the threats. You have to answer them -- even if it's just to say "Then that is the price we will pay." It's okay to say everything they're doing is wrong; Afterall, this is a democracy right? But if you won't suggest an alternative, then you don't really care about democracy. You just want to rage against "the man" and be a rebel without a cause. You want to feel righteous, but without all that hard work of enduring tensions, making compromises, and reasoning out not what's best for you -- but what's best for an entire country.
And if you do that, then I have no respect for you. You want to bitch about the NSA? Okay, fine. I grant you that. But what's your alternative? Put something on the table for the rest of us to discuss, or give up your chair for someone who's willing to not just talk about democracy, but sit down and actually do it.
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Alice Springs, Darwin, Geraldton - all of those are very poor places to intercept large amounts of important traffic.
In the Internet era, sure. But you have to realise that Pine Gap (and its cousin, NZ's Waihopai) was built in the 1970s, to catch satellite transmissions rather than cable. Hence the big domes hiding big dishes (so you can't see what satellite they're pointing at).
It's always possible that Pine Gap does more than one thing. There were persistent rumours for a while that it was also an emergency Undisclosed Location ("we must eliminate the mineshaft gap, Mein President!") since the centre of Australia would maybe be one of the safest places left on Earth after a nuclear exchange. OTOH, as a major US military company town Alice would probably be the first place in Australia to be hit, so maybe not so much.
It is funny seeing people constantly 'rediscover' common knowledge like this. I was wondering when Pine Gap was going to get its fifteen minutes in the Snowden spotlight.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
You do not just get to handwave away the threats. You have to answer them -- even if it's just to say "Then that is the price we will pay."
Okay: then that is the price we will pay.
More precisely, that is the price we might pay. Personally, I think the price will be a lot lower than you say--but I'm willing to take that risk. Because there is nothing al-Qaeda or any other bunch of troglodytes is going to do to us that's worse than what we can do, and are doing, to ourselves.
Happy now?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You would just mirror the data like room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A .
Australia is full of public, totally private, commercial and banking networks, splitters - who would notice another cleared contractor on site?
A lot of brands for local exchange backhaul but very little actual state wide or international.
The data could end up at any secure location for filtering and long term storage. Lots of different optical was rolled out over the years under many brands.
The tech is now so cheap national or state police can even have a go for some types of data within bulk internet traffic.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"