<story><title>GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world&apos;s communications</title><url>http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa?CMP=twt_gu</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who&amp;#x27;s actually surprised by this revelation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>grey-area</author><text>&lt;i&gt;This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who&amp;#x27;s actually surprised by this revelation.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m truly appalled that the GCHQ see it as their job to collect network traffic from every communication passing through the UK, and pass that on to foreign intelligence agencies and politicians in the UK and abroad. The potential for corruption and abuse there is astounding, and no organisation or person should have anything like this amount of power over our lives. Politicians can be bribed, judges turned, legal cases undermined, corporate financials exposed, and leaders overthrown, all at the whim of any one of the millions of people with access to these databases, which apparently also have appallingly lax access controls and standards of oversight, along with their terrible standards for defining which signals they should intercept.&lt;p&gt;If complete surveillance of the population is the purpose of the GCHQ, it should be shut down in my opinion, but I think that&amp;#x27;s a perversion of the role of signals intelligence in our society. The purpose of these agencies should be (and originally was) to defend the communications of our government from interception, to intercept communications from known enemies of the nation and to assist law enforcement and the judiciary in intercepting the communications of criminals, using all the standards of reasonable suspicion, judicial oversight etc that we hold so dearly to in collecting evidence in every other domain. Just because it&amp;#x27;s easier and more practical for them to intercept everything and record it for later use, doesn&amp;#x27;t make that extreme violation of many of our codes of privacy and law acceptable, predictable or desirable. It has enormous implications for our society, this is an essential debate when so much of our lives are now held in digital form, and &lt;i&gt;I&amp;#x27;m surprised&lt;/i&gt; that you try to blow it off as old news and of little consequence.</text></comment>
<story><title>GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world&apos;s communications</title><url>http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa?CMP=twt_gu</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>This being more or less the entire stated mission of GCHQ, I wonder who&amp;#x27;s actually surprised by this revelation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kryten</author><text>Not at all surprised.&lt;p&gt;In the late 1990s I worked for the UK subsidiary of a large US defence contractor. They had an international network which connected their subsidiaries to transfer documents, emails and engineering drawings. Most work was done for the US DoD.  This was a typical leased ISDN system from BT.&lt;p&gt;It had cryptos at each end of a link (each in a literally a 2m by 2m room declared US soil by the then home secretary).&lt;p&gt;The biggest threat vector they had was actually listed as GCHQ and the line would suspiciously go down occasionally for a few ms resulting in the cryptos being &amp;quot;red buttoned&amp;quot; (key erasure).&lt;p&gt;A telling tale if any.</text></comment>