U.K. Spy Agency Secretly Taps Over 200 Fiber-Optic Cables, Shares Data With the NSA

The British spy agency GCHQ has secretly tapped more than 200 fiber-optic cables carrying phone and internet traffic and has been sharing data with the U.S. National Security Agency, according to a news report.

 

The spy operation, which included placing intercepts at the landing points of transatlantic undersea cables where they surface in the U.K., has allowed the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to become the top interceptor of phone and internet data in the world, according to the Guardian newspaper, which broke the story based on documents leaked by former NSA systems administrator Edward Snowden.

 

One part of the operation, codenamed Tempora, has been operating for about 18 months and allows the agency to tap large volumes of data siphoned from the cables and store it for up to 30 days for sifting and analyzing.

 

Each of the cables carries about 10 gigabits of data per second, which the paper likened to sending all of the information in all the books in the British Library through the cables 192 times every 24 hours.

 

Filters allow the agency to reduce the amount of traffic it records — one filter cuts out about 30 percent of traffic just by eliminating peer-to-peer downloads — while still collecting vast amounts of data that get sifted by analysts.

 

Some 850,000 NSA employees and U.S. private contractors with top secret clearance have access to GCHQ databases and as of May last year, at least 750 analysts from the U.K. and NSA were tasked specifically with sifting through the data, using more than 70,000 search terms related to security, terrorist activity and organized crime. Search terms focus on subjects, phone numbers and email addresses of interest.

 

The tapping was conducted in cooperation with commercial companies that own and operate the cables, the paper noted.

 

“There’s an overarching condition of the licensing of the companies that they have to co-operate in this,” an unnamed source told the paper. “Should they decline, we can compel them to do so. They have no choice.”

 

The tapping began as a trial in 2008 and within two years the GCHQ achieved top eavesdropper status among the nations known as the Five Eyes of electronic eavesdropping — U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. GCHQ reportedly now “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA” as a result of the program.

 

During a 2008 visit to the GCHQ’s listening station at Menwith Hill NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander reportedly remarked: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”

 

The program has been justified for allowing the agencies to identify new techniques used by terrorists to thwart security checks, to uncover terrorist activities during the planning stages and to track child exploitation networks and aid in cybersecurity defenses against network attacks.

 

 

British intelligence tapping fiber-optic cables for massive amounts of data

More secret National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden to The Guardian suggest that the U.S. agency’s British counterpart intercepts petabytes worth of communication data daily from fiber-optic cables.

The operation codenamed “Tempora” by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been going on for at least 18 months and involves the use of “intercept probes” attached directly to transatlantic fiber-optic cables landing on British shores from telephone exchanges and Internet servers in North America.

Commercial companies, described in the documents only as “intercept partners,” were secretly used to attach the intercepts on behalf of the GCHQ. The companies, whose identities have been concealed in the documents, were apparently obliged by law to cooperate with the GCHQ and in some cases paid for their effort.

The intercepts have allowed GCHQ to scoop up and filter huge volumes of data, including email content, records of phone calls, Facebook entries and Internet browsing histories. “For the 2 billion users of the world wide web, Tempora represents a window on to their everyday lives, sucking up every form of communication from the fiber-optic cables that ring the world,” the Guardian noted.

As of May a year ago, 300 analysts from the GCHQ and 250 from the NSA had been assigned to sift through and analyze the data for terrorist threats and signs of other criminal activity.

Each set of analysts, however, was operating under different rules, with those at the NSA appearing to have more stringent guidelines about how they use the data.

Details of the GCHQ operation are likely to fuel new fears about the nature and scope of the data surveillance activities by the NSA. The concerns first surfaced when Snowden leaked two documents describing a couple of surveillance programs to the Guardian and the Washington Post. Since then, there have been several other disclosures pertaining to surveillance activities by the NSA and the FBI and the authority under which it is being done.

The Obama Administrationand U.S. intelligence agencies have insisted that everything is being done under proper authority and oversight. They have downplayed concerns about U.S. persons being illegally spied on and have maintained that the surveillance activities are crucial to national security.

Even so, the sheer scale of the efforts, at least as described by the documents that the Guardian claims to have obtained from Snowden, is sure to heighten calls for more transparency into the data collection programs.

According to the Guardian, the GHCQ has been expanding its data interception capabilities steadily over the past five years. As of last year, the agency was capable of handling 600 million telephone “events” a day and was able to process data from at least 46 of the more than 200, 10Gbps fiber-optic cables on which it placed intercepts.

The agency applies a series of filters to the data it intercepts to reduce the volumes. For instance, the first filter throws out all high-volume, low-value traffic such as peer-to-peer downloads, reducing traffic volumes by up to 30% right away, the paper noted.

Numerous other filters pull out information that is of specific interest to the NSA or GCHQ. The NSA uses a total of 31,000 specific search terms, including specific phone numbers, email addresses and other identifiers to keep an eye on communications being carried out by persons or entities of interest. The GCHQ uses about 40,000 such terms to filter the information it intercepts.

The technology allows GCHQ to store certain information of interest for up to three days and phone call metadata for up to 30 days. Such data interception and filtering has apparently allowed the agency to identify potential terrorist threats, child exploitation networks and cyber threats.