Thanks to more classified documents leak byNSA whistleblower Edward Snowden , The Guardian is now reportingthat a British undercover agent delegacy has tapped into trans - Atlantic fiber optic cables , allowing them get at to everything from electronic mail and Facebook subject matter to cyberspace search histories and earpiece calls . Which they garner indiscriminately . Oh , andthey’re deal it with the NSA .
https://gizmodo.com/nsa-whistleblower-truth-is-coming-and-it-cannot-be-s-513786769
The British agency in interrogative sentence , the Government Communications Headquarters ( GCHQ ) , is the overseas combining weight of our NSA , but because the extent of data they ’re collecting is so massive , they do n’t have the “ resource ” to analyze it all themselves . concord to The Guardian :
The sheer scale leaf of the bureau ’s dream is ponder in the titles of its two principal component : Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation , aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone dealings as possible . This is all being comport out without any physical body of public recognition or argumentation .
But even if they ca n’t analyse the information forthwith , the GCHQ ’s sheer ability to rap into these worldwide information - carrying cables has made the agency “ an intelligence superpower,”The Guardian take note :
By 2010 , two years after the project was first trialled , it was able to boast it had the “ cock-a-hoop net access ” of any appendage of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance , represent the US , UK , Canada , Australia and New Zealand .
And ifthe metadata take in by the NSAseemed troubling , you probably wo n’t be too happy to learn that the GCHQ “ develop larger amounts of metadata than NSA , ” according to UK officials . So how does someone even begin to test to sort through that variety of data ? Well , fortunately for the GCHQ , in addition to the 300 of their own analysts they had sifting through the mounds of intelligence , 250 of their friend over at the NSA were happy to lend a bridge player .
https://gizmodo.com/what-is-prism-511875267
To actually exploit the cable television service , the GHCQ bond intercept probes at points on the fiber - eye cables ( on British soil ) where they brought in datum from telephone set and internet servers in the US . And all of this was done in agreement with “ intercept partners”—or in other words , commercial-grade corp . But just because they had entree to all this information does n’t think they were reading all this data . As the anonymous tidings sourcetold The Guardian :
Essentially , we have a unconscious process that appropriate us to select a small issue of needles in a haystack . We are not looking at every musical composition of wheat . There are certain gun trigger that allow you to cast aside or not examine a hatful of data so you are just count at needle . If you had the stamp we are reading millions of electronic mail , we are not . There is no intention in this whole programme to apply it for looking at UK domestic traffic – British people mouth to each other .
That being said , by the summer of 2011 , over 200 “ interception item ” had been created , all of which evidently carried information at 10 gigabit per irregular . To put that into perspective , even if a list of aim individuals was request , as the GCHQ ’s lawyers put it , it would be impossible and “ an infinite listing which we could n’t manage . ”
Plus , the GCHQ has the capacity to store Brobdingnagian quantity of tapped contentedness for 3 days and metadata for up to 30 Clarence Day , so they can take their prison term as they go through the hundred of thou of innocent civilians ’ secret information . This project , codenamed Tempora , has been extend on for about 18 month .
However , “ a source with knowledge of intelligence ” is claiming that the data was gather up under entirely legal terms . Even if that shew to be true , the fact that not only are both the United States and Britain working together to pile up information , but they ’re also doing so arbitrarily in such monumental measure is , to say the least , extremely troubling . And the GCHQ is presently working to construct even high capability cables that could carry data at 100 gigabits a second — so if this is somehow effectual , they ’re nowhere near done yet . [ The Guardian ]
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