NSA, GCHQ Have Been Intercepting In-Flight Mobile Calls For Years (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: American and British spies have since 2005 been working on intercepting phone calls and data transfers made from aircraft, France's Le Monde newspaper reported on Wednesday, citing documents from former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden. According to the report, also carried by the investigative website The Intercept, Air France was targeted early on in the projects undertaken by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its British counterpart, GCHQ, after the airline conducted a test of phone communication based on the second-generation GSM standard in 2007. That test was done before the ability to use phones aboard aircraft became widespread. "What do the President of Pakistan, a cigar smuggler, an arms dealer, a counterterrorism target, and a combatting proliferation target have in common? They all used their everyday GSM phone during a flight," the reports cited one NSA document from 2010 as saying. In a separate internal document from a year earlier, the NSA reported that 100,000 people had already used their mobile phones in flight as of February 2009, a doubling in the space of two months. According to Le Monde, the NSA attributed the increase to "more planes equipped with in-flight GSM capability, less fear that a plane will crash due to making/receiving a call, not as expensive as people thought." Le Monde and The Intercept also said that, in an internal presentation in 2012, GCHQ had disclosed a program called "Southwinds," which was used to gather all the cellular activity, voice communication, data, metadata and content of calls made on board commercial aircraft.

Comments

Okay, so they've been spying

[fustakrakich]

Now what?

Re:Okay, so they've been spying

[AHuxley]

People can now understand the risk of having no anonymity or security on any device globally.
So to take back privacy use a one time pad not created on the same device.
Getting any from of anonymity is more tricky but at least privacy can be attempted.
This is also important for journalists, members of the press. Phoning in a story, update or talking to a colleague or office after meeting a whistleblower, bureaucrat, politician or other contact might not be a very secure part of getting a story ready. Voice prints will ensure any comments get tracked.
So the wider press, media, journalists now have a better understanding to not use any phone to chat about contacts.

Re:Okay, so they've been spying

[russotto]

What the majority of people complaining about a spy agency that actually spies need to do is realize no one really gives a shit about them or their mundane lives.

That was before they started funneling information to law enforcement for the purposes of criminal investigations. So far it seems to be mostly drugs (but there's a lot of mundane people using illegal drugs), but in the future it could as easily be copyright violation, nanny tax evasion, underaged drinking (think your kids are smart enough to never mention it on the phone? If they are, what about their friends?), or zoning violations.

What do UK, USA, Aus, NZ, Can have in common?

[Anonymous Coward]

All 5eyes countries have moved to a more extreme surveillance regime over time.

Take Theresa May, she was Home Secretary. For quite a while only women would be made Home Secretary, and we didn't know why. Then we found out about the mass surveillance of Britain done in secret and against Parliament wishes and the reason was clear. Online porn. Men surf porn, MPs do too.

You can't have a boss with a weak spot being spied on by GCHQ. So the Prime Minister always chose a surveillance friendly women in the role of Home Secretary, who wouldn't rock the boat, and wouldn't be vulnerable to the surveillance.

So David Cameron resigns, and she sort of works her way from the Home Office, into the Prime Ministers office. Did we elect her? No, she just sort of became the PM. None of the major political candidates wanted to stand, I wonder why, they would all know about the surveillance.

And as PM she passes a new law, legalizing the mass surveillance they were already doing.

So you can see how GCHQ's mass surveillance of Britain has affected the political makeup of Britain. Just by existing, they've made Britain into an authoritarian state with an unelected leader.

And the same pattern is happening right across the 5 eyes nations. With leaders increasingly being pro-surveillance, extreme right, in power without a democratic mandate from the voters. Trump is just the latest of these.

Re:What do UK, USA, Aus, NZ, Can have in common?

[Xest]

Ironically that one female home secretary before Theresa May was also brought down by the fact her husband was caught buying porn using the MP expenses system. So you're right, there's zero merit in his porn theory.

Not that I disagree with him that Theresa May is, and is acting like a defacto authoritarian dictator though. The fact she believes something as important as the terms for triggering Brexit shouldn't undergo parliamentary scrutiny is astounding. It's the single biggest change to British statute in 40 years and she thinks parliament shouldn't scrutinise the terms? She couldn't be more dictatorial if she tried.

Re: Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I'm the political opposition to the current power holders? More to the point, what if I'm the political opposition exposing the corruption of the current power holders who have control over a massive surveillance state?
Do I have the right to be worried then?

captcha: depends

Re: Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah you do. If left unchecked everything will wind up on the slope.
You don't want to live in a world where everything, even innocuous things like hairstyle, are mandated by law. Because then we are stuck with super nazis who will put you in jail because one of your tires is inflated to 36 psi instead of the mandatory 35.
When mundane things become a matter of law we are literally in hell.

Re:A lot longer than that, actually

[WillAffleckUW]

Well I will fight the power by turning OFF my cellphone during the flight!

Lol, it's not really going to help, even when not flying. Always assume any device you didn't design and build yourself is compromised, and even then you have to presume any encryption protocols are compromised if you yourself didn't write them, and the signal intercepts have already occurred.

All you have going for you is being incredibly boring. The more boring, the better.

Here's how many terrorists these spooks have found

[Patent Lover]

ZERO.

Re: Eh

[NotAPK]

" innocuous things like hairstyle, are mandated by law."

Actually, at least if it's mandated by law it would be possible to know what the laws are, and even somehow change them. In the end, those are just "bad laws" and we already have plenty of those on the books.

The *worst* outcome is when the "laws" are secret or unknowable and enforced arbitrarily. That's where mass surveillance is going. There won't be a law saying "visiting website XYZ is illegal", since if there was there would be an easy way to query the database and go door knocking to arrest everyone. No, it will be used in the opposite way: when you're being socially or politically "difficult" or even just successful: your data will be leaked to the press, you will be arrested on trumped up charges founded by surveillance data that are "too secret" to release to the public, and you will generally be shamed and tamed into submission. That is *not* a fair and open society based on the rule of law, and that is why mass surveillance is fundamentally wrong.

Re:The original article

[jittles]

Makes no claims that the NSA was intercepting calls made by those people in the US, nor GCHQ in the UK. Since Air France was targeted they may have been intercepting calls made anywhere in the world.

This is, by the way, what NSA and GCHQ are supposed to be doing. Intercepting foreign (to the US and UK respectively) communications.

Yes of course that is what those organizations should be doing. But we all know that they no longer restrict themselves to foreign surveillance. This means that if they were doing it against Air France back in 2005, they're now doing it in the US and UK now.