Published in News

GCHQ and NSA have control of submarine cables

by on26 November 2014



Feel safer?

New documents from the Edward Snowden collection show that in 2009 the British GCHQ and the US NSA had access to the traffic on 63 submarine cable links around the globe. These cables listed handle the vast majority of international Internet traffic as well as private network connections between telecommunications providers and corporate data centres.

According to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the telecommunications company Cable & Wireless “actively shaped and provided the most data to GCHQ surveillance programs and received millions of pounds in compensation.” 

A GCHQ employee was assigned to work full time at Cable & Wireless to manage cable-tap projects in February of 2009. By July of 2009, Cable & Wireless provided access to 29 out of the 63 cables on the list, accounting for nearly 70 percent of the data capacity available to surveillance programs.

We can’t work out what the problem is. After all, thanks to those wiretaps there were no terrorist attacks anywhere in the world where there?

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