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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?
According to the report on the death of Private Lee Rigby, his death was not prevented because of failures by British intelligence services, but instead, because Facebook did not tell the UK intelligence services what was going to happen.
If they expect Facebook to police postings on Facebook and inform the UK authorities, why do they need to tap into the cables? It's all money wasted.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
What, should they be paid in bananas? I mean, what's the problem? If I'm going through the effort to help them tap into my line, I would want to be compensated also. Seems only fair.
And to all those people out there complaining about the government, and then turning around and reelecting the sons of bitches, I don't have any family safe words to say. I believe the proper British phrase is, Piss off!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This ain't US government agent, but a useful idiot, someone who believes the crap he/she's been fed by the establishment in his country. The same kind of behaviour keeps Putin's approval rating in the new USSR at 60% despite the rampant corruption, international isolation and deteriorating home economy.
It seems like a lot of the high bandwidth claims related to the NSA and other spooks indicate they want an iSCSI connection or other high speed, low-latency access to their sources to make for more efficient and cheaper connections. Why bother recording everything when that's already done by the telcos? My inner spook just wants a fast connection to data that is already on disk.
Everything I've ever learned the hard way was based on a statistically invalid sample.
You got it wrong, highschool capitalist. Your parents paid and someone, not them, turned a profit. Now go to bed, school starts early tomorrow.
It would be fascinating to know the infrastructure and methods used for storage and to process this volume of data. Presumably, they initially store everything, and then somehow process it to decide what is worth keeping as future potential blackmail material, or occasionally intelligence purposes. The scale of the task is mind boggling.
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.
All tea merchants are hereby ordered to give free tea to GCHQ stormtroopers. For the glory of the British Empire!!!eleven
That goes back years. The UK faced the same with the interception of international telegrams and telexes (cable vetting, the D-Notice affair) in 1967. :)
The GCHQ was getting a copy of international telegrams and telexes.
D-notice affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The tradition of looking at all international telegrams went back to WW1.
Now its all optical
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That hinges on a false assumption: That you are a customer to begin with.
Remember: You are the product.
(offtopic: can we has rich text editor here, Slashdot? pretty please? or even better: Markdown?)
They are allowed to collect foreign calls, catch up with the law please.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
In GCHQ's eyes, that probably the worst thing about this leaking. Not because of what they did, but because now the other companies know how much the paid and will raise their rates.
Vodafone in the U.K. has always been doing this it is not news. My colleague used to work for "British Telecom" BT they have a complete floor dedicated to spying at BT. The BBC broadcasting house has a propaganda department run by the security services which is now run by the U.S. and funded by the U.S. under the name of "BBC World Service". They do all this silly security nonsense about secrecy and the company supplying air-conditioning systems and maintaining it climb all over their tapping systems and documents every year.
I'm surprised no one has blamed Snowden for the rise of ISIS and their ability to now avoid identification on-line...
Sarcasm?
Islamic State using leaked Snowden info to evade U.S. intelligence
Besides being the subject of a lot of clickbait, exactly what has he accomplished?
It's astonishing that all communication is not encrypted. If you are sharing information over a common carrier, you should expect that somebody is going to be grabbing and examining the bytes.
So, somehow, it is just not the norm to encrypt communication. One reason might be that during the eighties and nineties as the internet was going wide, ITAR and patents on systems like RSA made people and companies nervous and unwilling to go there; that was definitely a missed opportunity.
Perhaps another problem is that there's no money to be made in encryption; and there are real (small, but real) costs in establishing it.
Still, though...
Why is there no encrypted "WhatsApp"? It would not be hard, it would be trivial to deliver through Google Play, and there would be a immediate market. If the connections were truly peer-to-peer, the infrastructure to support it would be almost zero.
How has the world convinced people not to encrypt all communication?
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
It's just hyperbole.
Think like the DOJ telling Apple that children will now die as a result of their encryption. Is there a ring of truth to it? Maybe, but at the end of the day it's a load of crap because the days where Club Fed can ask for and receive whatever laws it wants have just gone bye-bye, and that upsets them.
If telcos are compliant, so are corps like Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
what about releasing 10% of the cache at once?