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New Snowden Docs Show GCHQ Paid Telcos For Cable Taps
Advocatus Diaboli sends word of a new release of documents made available by Edward Snowden. The documents show British intelligence agency GCHQ had a deep partnership with telecommunications company Cable & Wireless (acquired later by Vodafone). The company allowed GCHQ to tap submarine cables around the world, and was paid millions of British pounds as compensation. The relationship was so extensive that a GCHQ employee was assigned to work full time at Cable & Wireless (referred to by the code name “Gerontic” in NSA documents) to manage cable-tap projects in February of 2009. By July of 2009, Cable & Wireless provided access to 29 out of the 63 cables on the list, accounting for nearly 70 percent of the data capacity available to surveillance programs. ... As of July of 2009, relationships with three telecom companies provided access to 592 10-gigabit-per-second pipes on the cables collectively and 69 10-gbps “egress” pipes through which data could be pulled back. The July 2009 documents included a shopping list for additional cable access—GCHQ sought to more than triple its reach, upping access to 1,693 10-gigabit connections and increasing egress capacity to 390. The documents revealed a much shorter list of "cables we do not currently have good access [to]."
Thats the interesting new part "1,693 10-gigabit connections and increasing egress capacity to 390"
Collect it all is back in the news.
A select few nations and their friends have total mastery over much of the telco networks. What if the other nations of interest stop using telco networks or just provide well created disinformation?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Thank you for your valued insight, Mr. US Government Agent.
Thie biggest enemy of citizens has been governments, for quite a while already.
And as always these governments point to the hardly exisiting threats of "terrorism" (but not theirs) and child abuse to lure naive idiots (the vast majority of citizens) into acquiescing these programs.
And oh, the civilians themselves pay for it all.
Nice.
So Vodafone owes the compensation to the people spied on, particular the Europeans where we have the right to privacy and this is illegal. You can't legally be paid to break laws.
Germany might want to re-examine Vodafones takeover of a German ISP Kabel Deutschland on national security grounds, and this is also an illegal hidden subsidy to the companies involved in the spying. Something that brings it under EU trade domain. Vodafone had a competitive advantage by spying on Europeans and receiving this hidden funding, and thus it is a trade issue.
I don't expect the spooks to yield to the democratic controls gracefully. They have all this info on their political bosses and every reason to use it. UK in particular, Theresa May screams 'terrorist' when you try to make roaming across UK networks... why? Did Vodafone have a word with her and use a bit of leverage? Did GCHQ? Or are they already spying on the Vodafone network and cross mobile roaming would break that?
You don't need NSA for ISIS, just common sense. Toppling two secular governments in a region with a lot of ethnic and religious tensions will not give you peace. Iraq, however, wasn't a learning experience enough for some.
He no longer has the documents. These releases are being made by the journalists in charge of combing over the full dump he gave them before left. It's a giant trove of mostly useless or boring unconnected data, and they're sifting through it trying to find gems like these and piece them together.