German media neglects UK mass surveillance | Transatlantic Voices | DW.DE | 29.08 DW: Edward Snowden's revelations on surveillance by the US and Britain have played out very differently in Germany and in Britain. While German media covered the issue prominently and continuously, British outlets with the exception of the Guardian and the BBC seemed to report about the story with much less gusto. Having worked in both German and British media, how do you explain this difference? Wolfgang Blau: Germany has a tradition of fierce debates about privacy that reaches back long before the advent of the internet. Germany holds deeply rooted collective - as well as individual - memories from two totalitarian systems in recent history: fascism and then communism. I remember more than one conversation in my prior newsroom in Germany where we were discussing hypothetically how the Stasi, the former Eastern German Secret Service, would have used Facebook had it already been available for them. Wolfgang Blau The UK features prominently in Snowden's disclosures and the fallout.
Are the Brits Trying to Protect British Telecom? In addition to her latest stories describing the generalized spying the NSA and GCHQ engage in, Laura Poitras today also tells her side of the David Miranda story. In it, she reveals the hard drives destroyed at the Guardian included details on Tempora. Included on those drives were documents detailing GCHQ’s massive domestic spying program called “Tempora.”This program deploys NSA’s XKeyscore “DeepDive” internet buffer technology which slows down the internet to allow GCHQ to spy on global communications, including those of UK citizens. Tempora relies on the “corporate partnership” of UK telecoms, including British Telecommunications and Vodafone. Revealing the secret partnerships between spy agencies and telecoms entrusted with the private communications of citizens is journalism, not terrorism. It seems she’s trying to suggest that the Brits are trying to protect this program, specifically. It makes sense. Let’s presume it is also about, say, spying on partners like the Saudis.
Glimmerglass Intercepts Undersea Cable Traffic for Spy Agencies Glimmerglass, a northern California company that sells optical fiber technology, offers government agencies a software product called “CyberSweep” to intercept signals on undersea cables. The company says their technology can analyze Gmail and Yahoo! Mail as well as social media like Facebook and Twitter to discover “actionable intelligence.” Could this be the technology that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is using to tap global communications? The company says it counts several intelligence agencies among its customers but refuses to divulge details. “Revolutions in communications technologies are usually followed by revolutions in collection capabilities,” Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archives and the author of the definitive guide to the U.S. intelligence agencies, told CorpWatch. Vanee Vines, a spokesperson for the NSA, declined to comment to CorpWatch on either Glimmerglass or the tapping of the undersea cables. Optical Tapping and here:
Undersea cable cut near Egypt slows down Internet in Africa, Middle East, South Asia It is like Groundhog Day! Once again an undersea cable has been cut — the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 (aka SEA-ME-WE 4) cable and that is causing an internet (and communications) slowdown in and around Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia. The cut was said to be near Alexandria in Egypt. Tata Communications – previously Videsh Sanchar Nigam LimitedIndia – administers the network. While the cut was on a single cable, it came at an unfortunate time as a few other major cables were in “maintenance mode” and that has resulted in problems for service providers across the region. Sunil Tagare, who runs the BuySellBandwidth.com, on his blog wrote It’s not good enough to say since you have 10 cables even if going through Egypt, you have route diversity. He was arguing that four major cable — I-Me-We, Sea-Me-We-4, EIG and TE North – were impacted at the same time and thus causing problems in the Middle East and Asia. Mark Simpson, CEO of SEACOM, said in a press note:
Undersea cable cut affects 50% of Pakistan’s internet traffic Internet speed slows down by 60% in several countries including Pakistan. Internet speed slowed don by 60 percent when an undersea internet cable got cut in the Arabian sea. KARACHI: A fiber optic cable got cut in the Arabian Sea near Karachi resulting in nearly 60 per cent decrease in internet speed across Pakistan on Wednesday. Nearly 50 per cent of Pakistan’s internet traffic faces disruption as SMW4 – one of the four undersea cables that connects the country with internet was damaged. The disruption occurred around 12pm on Wednesday. The country’s internet traffic is currently running on two cables instead of four. SMW is also referred to as SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia Middle East and Western Europe). PTCL and Transworld – the internet gateways for Pakistan – provide internet using this fiber optic cable. This is the second submarine cable that has been effected after IMWE which was cut more than a week ago.
Undersea cables are actually more vulnerable than you might think The idea that saboteurs in wetsuits would dive to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and cut a fibre optic cable, though not impossible, is highly unlikely, if only because doing so would be a good way to wind up dead. "These cables are carrying thousands of volts of power," Mark Simpson, CEO of SEACOM, told Wired. The company owns five undersea fibre optic lines running from South and East Africa to Asia and Europe. Attempting to cut such a line could easily kill you, he said, making sabotage "pretty unusual and pretty dangerous." That's not to say it didn't happen, and so far, it's one of the explanations the Egyptian military has offered in the five days since naval forces arrested three men alleged to have attempted to cut an undersea cable off the coast of Alexandria. The men have insisted they cut the cable by mistake. Regardless of what exactly happened, the incident underscores the vulnerability of the world's undersea communications cables to damage, intentional or not.
The Ecuadorian Library — Geek Empire or, The Blast Shack After Three Years Back in distant, halcyon 2010, I was asked to write something about Wikileaks and its Cablegate scandal. So, I wrote a rather melancholy essay about how things seemed to me to be going — dreadfully, painfully, like some leaden and ancient Greek tragedy. In that 2010 essay, I surmised that things were going to get worse before they got any better. Cablegate merely kicked the kneecap of the archaic and semi-useless US State Department. You see, as it happens, a good half of my essay “The Blast Shack” was about the basic problem of the NSA. One minute’s thought would reveal that a vast, opaque electronic spy outfit like the National Security Agency is exceedingly dangerous to democracy. Well, dear readers, nowadays we do pay that some mind. So, I no longer feel that leaden discontent and those grave misgivings that I felt in 2010. This is the kind of comedic situation that Russians find hilarious. Modern Russia is run entirely by spies.
The Privacy Diaries: Snowden, PRISM and Tempora at a glance | Cloud Hosted Virtual Desktops | tocario In the last months you could almost daily read articles in the newspapers about Edward Snowden and the NSA affair. PRISM and Tempora were omnipresent topics in the mass media around the world that rocked the boat. As for tocario data protection and data security are essential issues within the business model, we decided to start a blog series to pick-up, discuss, comment or explain these current happenings which dominate the press titles. The series “The Privacy Diaries” starts with a brief and impartial summary of the last events since June 2013. June 2013 June, 7th: PRISM The Guardian and the Washington Post report that the National Security Agency (NSA) got access to servers of nine internet companies. June, 9th: Edward Showden goes public The former NSA employee Edward Snowden exposes himself as whistleblower during a long interview with The Guardian in Hong Kong. June, 11th: The Federal German Government surprised June, 18th: NSA stands up for PRISM June, 21st: Tempora July 2013 November
Britain Upsets Germany With ‘Tempora’ Spy Programme German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has written to British ministers demanding to know to what extent a British spy agency targeted German citizens in a large-scale data trawling programme that has upset Berlin. “The accusations show that the German government must do everything it can to thoroughly and quickly clear up every open question about Prism and Tempora,” she said on Wednesday “Three lean lines are not enough,” she added, referring to the answer send the German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich. “Letters to my colleagues have not been answered yet. Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger again reiterated that she intends to discuss the issues of date safety within the European Union at the meeting of EU justice ministers in July. Germans are sensitive about government monitoring, having lived through the Stasi secret police in communist East Germany and with lingering memories of the Gestapo under the Nazis.
Kommentar zu Tempora: Ein Skandal von historischem Ausmaß Der Begriff "Datenautobahn" für das Internet griff schon immer zu kurz. In Wahrheit ist das Netz ein globaler Kommunikationsraum, in dem private und privateste Informationen über einen Großteil der Bevölkerung aller entwickelten Länder zu finden sind. Das Erpressungspotential jener, die auf ein allsehendes Internet-Auge zugreifen können, ist schier grenzenlos. Genau dieses allsehnde Auge haben der britische Geheimdienst GCHQ und die amerikanische NSA unter dem Namen Temporaoffenbar entwickelt. Das klingt grotesk, es ist aber erschreckend nahe an der Realität, die der "Guardian" am Freitag enthüllte: Das GCHQ und die NSA kooperieren bei der Überwachung des Internetverkehrs, indem sie an den Glasfaser-Seekabeln direkt den Datenstrom abzweigen, kopieren und zwischenspeichern, um ihn bei Bedarf nach Informationen zu durchforsten. Wir schauen doch nur hin, wenn wir es für geboten halten Es mutet daher seltsam an, dass die Reaktionen in der angelsächsischen Welt so verhalten ausfielen.
Public Must Fight against Prism and Tempora Surveillance The term, "information superhighway" has always been insufficient to describe the Internet. In reality, the Web is a global communication space containing the private information of a large part of the population of every developed country. If someone were able to train an all-seeing eye onto the Internet, the blackmail potential would be almost limitless. It is precisely this all-seeing eye that the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the American National Security Agency (NSA) have developed under the name Tempora. It sounds preposterous, but it is frighteningly close to the reality that was unveiled by the Guardian on Friday. Those behind this disgraceful program have not even bothered to deny what they are up to. But that's all just pretence. Would the public agree to the total video surveillance of their private living space because it could possibly also help in the pursuit of terrorists? Where is the Outrage? And for good reason.
GCHQ and European spy agencies worked together on mass surveillance | UK news The German, French, Spanish and Swedish intelligence services have all developed methods of mass surveillance of internet and phone traffic over the past five years in close partnership with Britain's GCHQ eavesdropping agency. The bulk monitoring is carried out through direct taps into fibre optic cables and the development of covert relationships with telecommunications companies. A loose but growing eavesdropping alliance has allowed intelligence agencies from one country to cultivate ties with corporations from another to facilitate the trawling of the web, according to GCHQ documents leaked by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The files also make clear that GCHQ played a leading role in advising its European counterparts how to work around national laws intended to restrict the surveillance power of intelligence agencies. 'Huge potential' "Very friendly crypt meeting with DGSE in July," British officials reported. Fresh opportunities European allies
GCHQ Advises Netherlands Spies on TEMPORA 3 November 2013 GCHQ Advises Netherlands Spies on TEMPORA Date: Sat, 2 Nov 2013 19:15:57 +0100 Subject: update From: xxxxx To: cryptome[at]earthlink.net On November 1st, the Guardian published the article "GCHQ and European spy agencies worked together on mass surveillance" that unmasks "close technical and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies" [0]. The topic is the Tempora program (=wiretapping fibre-optic cables that carry internet traffic [1]), and GCHQ providing advice to the Netherlands for setting up such a program: "GCHQ also maintains strong relations with the two main Dutch intelligence agencies, the external MIVD and the internal security service, the AIVD. Obviously said "legislative issues" include the Dutch WIV 2002 Article 27 (=SIGINT selection) restriction to non-cablebound communications [2]. Dutch readers are referred to Bits of Freedom [3]. [1]
German DPAs pass resolution on PRISM, Tempora and Xkeyscore On September 5, 2013, the 16 German state data protection authorities and the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information (the “DPAs”) passed a resolution concerning recent revelations about the PRISM, Tempora and XKeyscore surveillance programs. The DPAs were critical of the programs, indicating that more should be done to understand their scope, especially since the programs raise serious constitutional concerns in Germany. In particular, it remains unclear whether German federal authorities illegally shared personal data with other countries or used illegally obtained personal data for their own purposes. In the resolution, the DPAs advocate the following actions: Develop and implement national, European and international laws to ensure that privacy is fully protected, and to guarantee telecommunications secrecy and the fundamental rights to informational self-determination, confidentiality and integrity of IT systems.