This shouldn't surprise anyone - thanks to our colonial heritage Britain has always contributed disproportionately to SIGINT gathering as we have lots of locations dotted around the world that are well placed for data gathering.
Given the Royal Navy like to think they have the most skilled submarine service in the world, and we have a long history of maritime charting, it shouldn't be a huge surprise that if any country is tapping undersea cables that it is Britain.
There are also plenty of stories from years ago about undersea cables being tapped. So that is hardly a revelation.
I've talked with RN submariners who visited our homeport. I would certainly call them more skilled than the average USN submariner; they have a much smaller cadre and spend a lot more time on sea duty since they don't have to follow U.S. DOPMA requirements.
However they don't have enough spare submarines lying around to just convert one like the U.S. did for Halibut, Parche, or our current special projects boat.
It's weird that people are surprised by this considering it's the stated mission of GCHQ to monitor all communications.
I genuinely don't care that GCHQ monitors and stores all this stuff. I'd prefer that they didn't; I think it's mostly a waste of money.
But when I look at spying on citizens by factions of the UK government there are far worse examples of abuses. GCHQ just has a bunch of data stored on disc that they grep for data.
Local councils abusing their powers under RIPA actually affect people. people suffer as a result of the abuses of RIPA.
I would much rather we spent time and money fixing other UK government computing projects than sorting out GCHQ.
(1) GCHQ forces communications companies to allow them to install interception devices on land at international communications cable landing points "where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America". (Europe is going to be pissed off!)
(2) NSA/GCHQ feared revealing the identities of those commercial "intercept partners" in this scheme would cause high-level political fallout.
(3) "Some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation".
(4) The companies themselves "are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables." (Not a surprise; Assange often points out that the UK is the world's biggest deployer of media gag orders... so why not here?)
(5) This mass tapping operation has been built up over five years, since 2008. GCHQ set up a three-year trial at the GCHQ station in Bude, Cornwall. By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second. "This is a massive amount of data!" as one internal slideshow put it. That summer, it brought NSA analysts into the Bude trials. In the autumn of 2011, it launched Tempora as a mainstream programme, shared with the Americans.
(6) Message content is maintained for three full days in what is referred to as an "internet buffer" ... Tempora allowed the agency to set up internet buffers so it could not simply watch the data live but also store it – for three days in the case of content and 30 days for metadata. "Internet buffers represent an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ's special source data," one document explained. It also details a constant effort to build up storage capacity at the stations at Cheltenham, Bude and at one overseas location and ongoing technical work to expand GCHQ's capacity to ingest data from new super cables carrying data at 100 gigabits a second.
(7) Suggestions that GCHQ now captures more signals than the NSA.
(8) NSA's General Alexander made a casual remark supporting the breadth of GCHQ's internet interception capabilities, in particular Menwith Hill's role, and his awareness of the situation: Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith. - General Alexander, Menwith Hill, June 2008.
(9) UK legal basis for interception "is in doubt" ... According to GCHQ's legal advice, it was given the go-ahead by applying old law to new technology. The 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) requires the tapping of defined targets to be authorised by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary. However, an obscure clause allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad. Also states that it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted because "this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage".
The challanges mentioned for the project are predictable ... political fallout, global internet routes shifting away from the UK/US, ingestion-time filtering, and ongoing technical challenges regarding interception of ever-greater amounts of data.
The point, for their spying purposes, is that it's significantly more hassle to gain access to bulk communications that don't physically flow through your country. The point for us is that greater decentralization of internet infrastructure is confirmed - from the horse's mouth - as an actionable and reasonable, albeit partial, measure of resistance.
You are right, though. That's more like buying time than actually solving the problem.
