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]."

Comments

Re:Enemy

[Rei]

Who's the actual target?

I once knew someone who was in military intelligence during the Cold War who had lots of good stories about where the intelligence to analyze came from. One good source was an undersea Soviet cable that the US had covertly tapped. Another was their predecessor to cell phones. They were analog and unencrypted, but they generally realized the risk and didn't use them anywhere near where there might be a listening post. However in issuing guidelines for their usage they apparently miscalculated on the fact that the signals also propagate up, believing that the low power transmissions would be too weak and distorted by the time they got to orbit to be demodulated. The US however had a satellite that could do precisely that.

The Soviets were also very good at covertly tapping US communications. They (and their Russian successors) also made good use of them in other ways. In the Chechen conflict, their leader Dzhokhar Dudaev stayed in communications with his contacts via short calls by satellite phone. The Russian solution to this was to create a system that would specifically recognize his phone, and mounted it to a HARM - the sort of missile normally used to take out radar transmitters, which homes in on a specific radio signal. It was the world's first - and only - "Anti-Dudaev Missile", and worked quite effectively.