6-21-2013 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. https://www.wired.com/2013/06/gchq-tapped-200-cables/
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National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
By tapping those links the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html?utm_term=.2dc2dbfc7264 and https://www.washingtonpost.com/apps/g/page/world/the-nsas-three-types-of-cable-interception-programs/553/?noredirect=on#document/p1/a129985
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NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners “provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment.” This allows the agency to covertly tap into “congestion points around the world” where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.
The program, which the secret files show cost U.S. taxpayers about $170 million between 2011 and 2013, sweeps up a vast amount of communications at lightning speed. According to the intelligence community’s classified “Black Budget” for 2013, RAMPART-A enables the NSA to tap into three terabits of data every second as the data flows across the compromised cables – the equivalent of being able to download about 5,400 uncompressed high-definition movies every minute. https://theintercept.com/2014/06/18/nsa-surveillance-secret-cable-partners-revealed-rampart-a/
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The back of two satellite antennae at GCHQ’s surveillance base in Bude, England. Photo: Education Images/UIG/Getty Images
The technology was designed by Endace, a little-known New Zealand company. And the important customer was the British electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.
Dozens of internal documents and emails from Endace, obtained by The Intercept and reported in cooperation with Television New Zealand, reveal the firm’s key role helping governments across the world harvest vast amounts of information on people’s private emails, online chats, social media conversations, and internet browsing histories.
The leaked files, which were provided by a source through SecureDrop, show that Endace listed a Moroccan security agency implicated in torture as one of its customers. They also indicate that the company sold its surveillance gear to more than half a dozen other government agencies, including in the United States, Israel, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Spain and India.
Some of Endace’s largest sales in recent years, however, were to the United Kingdom’s GCHQ, which purchased a variety of “data acquisition” systems and “probes” that it used to covertly monitor internet traffic….
ENDACE says it manufactures technology that allows its clients to “monitor, intercept and capture 100% of traffic on networks .” The Auckland-based company’s motto is “power to see all” and its logo is an eye.
The company’s origins can be traced back to Waikato University in Hamilton, New Zealand. There in 1994 a team of professors and researchers began developing network monitoring technology using university resources….
By March 2011 GCHQ’s aim was to tap into 415 of the 10Gs cables, and its longer-term goal was to “grow our internet access to 800 10Gs.” The agency wanted to build what it described as the largest covert surveillance apparatus in the world. And in an effort to fulfill that plan, it turned to Endace’s technology.
Leaked documents and emails from Endace, obtained by The Intercept, lay out a series of deals the company made with GCHQ to help it broaden its mass surveillance capabilities. A confidential February 2010 Endace statement of work for GCHQ, for instance, outlined a £245,000 ($299,500) deal to upgrade “monitoring solutions” for the British agency that were designed to intercept large amounts of internet traffic and send it into “memory holes” — repositories used to store the data….
Notably, the Medusa status reports reveal that Endace was using taxpayers’ money to develop the new equipment for GCHQ. They state that the Medusa system was being built for “FGA” with funding from the Foundation of Research Science and Technology, the body that handed out New Zealand government research grants.
In 2010 Endace received two grants totaling $11.1 million. A public announcement for the first grant--issued in July 2010-- said the funding was for “50% of the cost of a series of substantial product developments over the next two years,” but did not say what the products were nor who they were for….
Endace’s sales lists include finance industry giants such as Morgan Stanley, Reuters and Bank of America. Endace’s website says it provides financial companies with its monitoring technology to help “high-frequency traders to monitor, measure and analyze critical network environments.” https://theintercept.com/2016/10/23/endace-mass-surveillance-gchq-governments/
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1-29-19 Indictments are only one part of a larger warning the Justice Department has sounded since Bill Clinton was president--that Huawei and other Chinese telecommunications companies are arms of the Chinese government and that they could plant spyware in communications at the heart of U.S. infrastructure systems like the power grid, the air traffic control network and nuclear plants. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/arm-chinese-state-what-s-behind-huawei-indictments-n963776
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Elsa B. Kania, adjunct senior fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security: “It (Huawei) is a Chinese tech company operating within a system which Xi Jinping has declared the Party leads everything. And like any other Chinese company, Huawei is expected to have a Party secretary and Party committee who exercise some rather ambiguous position in terms of its leadership and management.” https://www.thestar.com/vancouver/2019/02/18/beijings-denial-of-huawei-control-bucks-expert-analysis.html
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