Tuesday 13 September 2016

Spying, the seaside, sub-sea cables – and Rudyard Kipling @C4News

Spying, the seaside, sub-sea cables – and Rudyard Kipling | Tom Clarke on Science: "What’s very clear as soon as you get there is that GCHQ Bude is nothing new. The dishes of the satellite listening station on the cliff top have loomed over the town for years. That GCHQ snoops on phone and internet traffic in the interests of national security is also accepted by pretty much everyone.

 But what has come as a surprise are the revelations about how GCHQ, with its US partner the NSA, may have the ability to capture and store all of the data traffic coming across undersea cables crossing the Atlantic through a programme called Tempora.


While the satellite dishes have long pointed at the shiny communications platforms orbiting the earth, it now appears that with the growth of the internet and mobile phones, GCHQ Bude has actually been paying far more attention to the cable that connects Europe with north America, that runs practically right beneath it.

 TAT-14 is the main fibre-optic communications link between the US and the rest of the world and it makes landfall at Bude. Snowden’s leaks suggest GCHQ, with the help of the NSA, can gobble up all the data travelling along it, then filter it for information they are interested in." 'via Blog this'

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