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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?
Gah, I meant:
his death did not happen because of failures by British intelligence services, but instead, it happened because Facebook did not tell the UK intelligence services that it was going to happen.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
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.
Why bother recording everything when that's already done by the telcos?
In the past the NSA and GCHQ could only store so much information. The idea was to collect all, sort and remove as much data as possible very quickly.
The Dictionary system using keywords and predesignated phrases would try and find new people of interest.
Later the cost of storage was so low that it was more simple just to collect and store it all.
The ability to track a message end to end and store that result for long term computer retrieval was ready for US use in the 1970's.
The UK would have had the same new options after its Cray upgrades from IBM-700 by the late 1970's.
The need to record everything is so the UK gov has its own copy. The UK could not trust that the US would keep its own data or data of interest to the UK long term.
That also helps with tracking UK gov staff and their personnel files long term. Internal UK security enquiries can then recall a lot of data without having to ask the US for help.
Every aspect of all network use is kept, everyone has a file.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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"
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.