Monitoring NSA in de VS en erbuiten, deel 7

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Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 11:05 schreef Perrin het volgende:

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Omdat me het 't waarschijnlijkst lijkt dat de overheid contact met hen heeft.

En idd een klein team technici zal er ook vanaf weten, maar het lijkt me plausibeler dat die intern worden aangestuurd en niet als infiltranten stiekem op de NSA-loonlijst staan.

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Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 11:06 schreef Eyjafjallajoekull het volgende:

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Ja, maar in zo'n groot bedrijf heb je natuurlijk wel 10 lagen van bestuur. Dat kleine team kan prima aangestuurd worden door de CTO bijvoorbeeld die er dan vanaf weet, maar die zegt niets tegen de CEO's...

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Op vrijdag 13 december 2013 11:07 schreef Perrin het volgende:

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En zodra de CEO via een omweg komt te weten wat er speelt in zijn bedrijf, wat denk je dat die met zo'n CTO gaat doen die achter zijn rug om vanalles bekokstooft?

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Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden’s Leaks

WASHINGTON — American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.

Investigators remain in the dark about the extent of the data breach partly because the N.S.A. facility in Hawaii where Mr. Snowden worked — unlike other N.S.A. facilities — was not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time.

Six months since the investigation began, officials said Mr. Snowden had further covered his tracks by logging into classified systems using the passwords of other security agency employees, as well as by hacking firewalls installed to limit access to certain parts of the system.

“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”

That Mr. Snowden was so expertly able to exploit blind spots in the systems of America’s most secretive spy agency illustrates how far computer security still lagged years after President Obama ordered standards tightened after the WikiLeaks revelations of 2010.

Mr. Snowden’s disclosures set off a national debate about the expansion of the N.S.A.’s powers to spy both at home and abroad, and have left the Obama administration trying frantically to mend relations with allies after his revelations about American eavesdropping on foreign leaders.

A presidential advisory committee that has been examining the security agency’s operations submitted its report to Mr. Obama on Friday. The White House said the report would not be made public until next month, when Mr. Obama announces which of the recommendations he has embraced and which he has rejected.

Mr. Snowden gave his cache of documents to a small group of journalists, and some from that group have shared documents with several news organizations — leading to a flurry of exposures about spying on friendly governments. In an interview with The New York Times in October, Mr. Snowden said he had given all of the documents he downloaded to journalists and kept no additional copies.

In recent days, a senior N.S.A. official has told reporters that he believed Mr. Snowden still had access to documents not yet disclosed. The official, Rick Ledgett, who is heading the security agency’s task force examining Mr. Snowden’s leak, said he would consider recommending amnesty for Mr. Snowden in exchange for those documents.

“So, my personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Mr. Ledgett told CBS News. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”

Mr. Snowden is living and working in Russia under a one-year asylum. The Russian government has refused to extradite Mr. Snowden, who was indicted by the Justice Department in June on charges of espionage and stealing government property, to the United States.

Mr. Snowden has said he would return to the United States if he was offered amnesty, but it is unclear whether Mr. Obama — who would most likely have to make such a decision — would make such an offer, given the damage the administration has claimed Mr. Snowden’s leaks have done to national security.

Because the N.S.A. is still uncertain about exactly what Mr. Snowden took, government officials sometimes first learn about specific documents from reporters preparing their articles for publication — leaving the State Department with little time to notify foreign leaders about coming disclosures.

With the security agency trying to revamp its computer network in the aftermath of what could turn out to be the largest breach of classified information in American history, the Justice Department has continued its investigation of Mr. Snowden.

According to senior government officials, F.B.I. agents from the bureau’s Washington field office, who are leading the investigation, believe that Mr. Snowden methodically downloaded the files over several months while working as a government contractor at the Hawaii facility. They also believe that he worked alone, the officials said.

But for all of Mr. Snowden’s technical expertise, some American officials also place blame on the security agency for being slow to install software that can detect unusual computer activity carried out by the agency’s work force — which, at approximately 35,000 employees, is the largest of any intelligence agency.

An N.S.A. spokeswoman declined to comment.

After a similar episode in 2010 — when an Army private, Chelsea Manning, gave hundreds of thousands of military chat logs and diplomatic cables to the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks — the Obama administration took steps intended to prevent another government employee from downloading and disseminating large volumes of classified material.

In October 2011, Mr. Obama signed an executive order establishing a task force charged with “deterring, detecting and mitigating insider threats, including the safeguarding of classified information from exploitation, compromise, or other unauthorized disclosure.” The task force, led by the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, has the responsibility of developing policies and new technologies to protect classified information.

But one of the changes, updating computer systems to track the digital meanderings of the employees of intelligence agencies, occurred slowly.

“We weren’t able to flip a switch and have all of those changes made instantly,” said one American intelligence official.

Lonny Anderson, the N.S.A.’s chief technology officer, said in a recent interview that much of what Mr. Snowden took came from parts of the computer system open to anyone with a high-level clearance. And part of his job was to move large amounts of data between different parts of the system.

But, Mr. Anderson said, Mr. Snowden’s activities were not closely monitored and did not set off warning signals.

“So the lesson learned for us is that you’ve got to remove anonymity” for those with access to classified systems, Mr. Anderson said during the interview with the Lawfare blog, part of a podcast series the website plans to run this week.

Officials said Mr. Snowden, who had an intimate understanding of the N.S.A.’s computer architecture, would have known that the Hawaii facility was behind other agency outposts in installing monitoring software.

According to a former government official who spoke recently with Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A. director, the general said that at the time Mr. Snowden was downloading the documents, the spy agency was several months away from having systems in place to catch the activity.

As investigations by the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. grind on, the State Department and the White House have absorbed the impact of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures on America’s diplomatic relations with other countries.

“There are ongoing and continuing efforts by the State Department still to reach out to countries and to tell them things about what he took,” said one senior administration official. The official said the State Department often described the spying to foreign leaders as “business as usual” between nations.

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NSA Can 'Easily' Break Cellphone Encryption, Report Says

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The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has the technical capacity to crack the most commonly-used cellphone encryption technology, and in doing so it can decode and access the content of calls and text messages, according to a Washington Post report published Friday.

Citing a top-secret document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the report states that the agency can easily break a technology called A5/1, the world's most common stream cipher used to encrypt cellular data as it transmits to cell towers.

SEE ALSO: Will Obama Rein in NSA Surveillance Powers?

Privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani, co-author the Post's report, explains that encryption experts have long been aware of the weakness of A5/1. The technology makes use of decades-old 2G GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) cellular network technology.

The so-called "summer of revelations" on NSA surveillance tactics, fueled by Snowden's leaked documents, has brought to light the agency's vast data-collecting capabilities. The NSA's considerable abilities to collect and decode cellular data would seem to allow it to track private conversations on a very wide scale.

Of course, it would be against the law for the NSA to use these capabilities to spy on Americans without a court order. But experts believe other nations have probably developed many of these same surveillance technologies.

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Tech firms meet Obama to press their case for NSA surveillance reform

A delegation of 15 from Silicon Valley, including Tim Cook and Marissa Mayer, visit White House for face-to-face talks

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Senior executives from some the world’s largest technology firms were meeting face to face with Barack Obama on Tuesday to press their case for a major rollback of National Security Agency surveillance.

The White House is hosting the 15-strong delegation from Silicon Valley, which includes the chief executives of Apple, Yahoo and Google, less than 24 hours after a federal judge ruled that the NSA program to collect telephone metadata is likely to be unconstitutional.

Many of the senior tech leaders meeting the president and the vice-president, Joe Biden, have already made public their demand for sweeping surveillance reforms in an open letter that specifically called for a ban on the kind of bulk data collection that the judge ruled on Monday was probably unlawful.

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Tech firms push back against White House efforts to divert NSA meeting

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The top leaders from the worlds biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agencys controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.

Senior executives from the companies whose bosses were present at the meeting said they were determined to keep the discussion focused on the NSA, despite the White House declaring in advance that it would focus on ways of improving the functionality of the troubled health insurance website, healthcare.gov, among other matters.

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Merkel compared NSA to Stasi in heated encounter with Obama
German chancellor furious after revelations US intelligence agency listened in on her personal mobile phone

In an angry exchange with Barack Obama, Angela Merkel has compared the snooping practices of the US with those of the Stasi, the ubiquitous and all-powerful secret police of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, where she grew up.

The German chancellor also told the US president that America's National Security Agency cannot be trusted because of the volume of material it had allowed to leak to the whistleblower Edward Snowden, according to the New York Times.

Livid after learning from Der Spiegel magazine that the Americans were listening in to her personal mobile phone, Merkel confronted Obama with the accusation: "This is like the Stasi."

The newspaper also reported that Merkel was particularly angry that, based on the disclosures, "the NSA clearly couldn't be trusted with private information, because they let Snowden clean them out."

Snowden is to testify on the NSA scandal to a European parliament inquiry next month, to the anger of Washington which is pressuring the EU to stop the testimony.

In Brussels, the chairman of the US House select committee on intelligence, Mike Rogers, a Republican, said his views on the invitation to Snowden were "not fit to print" and that it was "not a great idea".

Inviting someone "who is wanted in the US and has jeopardised the lives of US soldiers" was beneath the dignity of the European parliament, he said.

He declined to comment on Merkel's alleged remarks to Obama. In comments to the Guardian, he referred to the exchange as "a conversation that may or may not have occurred".

Senior Brussels officials say the EU is struggling to come up with a coherent and effective response to the revelations of mass US and British surveillance of electronic communication in Europe, but that the disclosure that Merkel's mobile had been monitored was a decisive moment.

A draft report by a European parliament inquiry into the affair, being presented on Wednesday and obtained by the Guardian, says there has to be a discussion about the legality of the NSA's operations and also of the activities of European intelligence agencies.

The report drafted by Claude Moraes, the British Labour MEP heading the inquiry, says "we have received substantial evidence that the operations by intelligence services in the US, UK, France and Germany are in breach of international law and European law".

Rather than resorting to a European response, Berlin has been pursuing a bilateral pact with the Americans aimed at curbing NSA activities and insisting on a "no-spying pact" between allies.

The NYT reported that Susan Rice, Obama's national security adviser, had told Berlin that there would be not be a no-espionage agreement, although the Americans had pledged to desist from monitoring Merkel personally.

A high-ranking German official with knowledge of the talks with the White House told the Guardian there had been a "useful exchange of views", but confirmed a final agreement was far from being reached.

The Germans have received assurances that the chancellor's phone was not being monitored and that the US spy agency is not conducting industrial espionage.

However the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks, said German and US officials were still in the process of negotiating how any final agreement – the details of which could remain secret between both governments – would be formalised.

Their discussions, which include talks about so-called confidence building measures, are also bound-up with wider discussions with the EU regarding special privacy assurances that might be afforded to its citizens under a future arrangement.

"We want to be assured that not everything that is technically possible will be done," the German official added.

In Germany, the main government minister dealing with the NSA fallout, Hans-Peter Friedrich, has fallen victim to a reshuffle in the new coalition unveiled in Berlin at the weekend. Friedrich, from Bavaria's Christian Social Union, is not seen as an ally of Merkel's and was widely viewed to have performed less than robustly in the exchanges with the Americans.

His replacement as interior minister, by contrast, is a close ally of Merkel's – her former chief of staff and former defence minister, Thomas de Maiziere. Additionally, Merkel has brought a former senior intelligence official into the new coalition.

Alongside De Maiziere at the interior ministry, she has appointed Klaus-Dieter Fritsche, previously deputy head of the domestic intelligence service, Germany's equivalent of MI5.

http://www.theguardian.co(...)ares-nsa-stasi-obama

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Red de democratie, doe als wij en word klokkenluider

Enkele internationaal bekende klokkenluiders en ex-inlichtingenfunctionarissen roepen vandaag in NRC Handelsblad mensen op zich in hun organisaties, net als zij ooit, verdienstelijk te maken als klokkenluider. Wilt u geen tirannie van spionnen in de wereld, meld u dan als klokkenluider, schrijven de zeven whistleblowers.

In elk geval na september 2001 hebben de westerse regeringen en inlichtingendiensten alles in het werk gesteld om het bereik van hun macht te vergroten, ten koste van onze privacy, burgerlijke vrijheden en publieke controle op het beleid.

De doofpot- en complotfantasieën die altijd als paranoïde en Orwelliaans werden beschouwd bleken na Snowden nog niet eens het hele verhaal te zijn.
Het opmerkelijkste is dat we al jaren voor deze gang van zaken worden gewaarschuwd: massale surveillance van hele bevolkingen, militarisering van het internet, het einde van de privacy.

Alles gebeurt in naam van de ‘nationale veiligheid’, die min of meer een kreet is geworden om discussie af te houden en te vermijden dat overheden verantwoording afleggen – verantwoording af kúnnen leggen – omdat alles zich in het duister afspeelt: geheime wetten, geheime uitleg van geheime wetten door geheime rechtbanken – en geen enkele doeltreffende parlementaire controle.

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NSA review panel to release findings on US surveillance practices – live

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Op woensdag 18 december 2013 21:39 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

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Op woensdag 18 december 2013 21:42 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:

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Ik had begrepen in een van de berichten van jouw vorige linkjes dat ze wel iets gaan reformen, vooral de items die Snowden reeds bekend heeft gemaakt, maar dat het qua surveillance grotendeels blijft zoals het nu is.

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Op donderdag 19 december 2013 01:48 schreef Woods het volgende:
Zou het zelfs zo kunnen zijn dat ze kunnen sturen wie er aan de macht komt in een bepaald land(als je anti-vs ofzo bent dat ze je dan eventueel killen ofzo)?

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Barack Obama’s NSA fine-print problem

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An independent panel’s call for major changes to the nation’s surveillance programs ups the pressure on President Barack Obama to back serious reforms.
But the big changes the committee is calling for may be less vexing for Obama than one painful, half-buried conclusion: Vacuuming up all that data the National Security Agency collects in its call-tracking database, the panel says, hasn’t actually done much to protect the country from terrorism.

And so the panel’s report raises a pointed question: If collecting huge volumes of metadata on telephone calls from, to and within the United States doesn’t bring much benefit, just how much political capital is Obama willing to spend to keep the program going?

The review group’s finding that the much-debated metadata program hasn’t really accomplished much isn’t mentioned in the report’s executive summary or any of the 46 recommendations, but it appears, in an understated tone, about a third of the way into the 300-plus-page document released by the White House on Wednesday.

“Our review suggests that the information contributed to terrorist investigations by the use of section 215 telephony meta-data was not essential to preventing attacks and could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional section 215 orders,” the report says.

In a footnote a few pages later, the panel members are even more blunt: The section 215 telephony meta-data program has made only a modest contribution to the nations security and there has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome would have been different without the section 215 telephony meta-data program.

Under the current program, the NSA gets daily updates with information on calls made or received in the United States. That info is placed for five years in a database that authorities can search to try to establish with which numbers a terror suspect has been in contact. Authorities say they authorized fewer than 300 numbers last year for searches in that database.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/s(...)7.html#ixzz2nwyRzybr

Read more: http://www.politico.com/s(...)7.html#ixzz2nwx6TYUu

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Report Suggests NSA Engaged In Financial Manipulation, Changing Money In Bank Accounts

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Matt Blaze has been pointing out that when you read the new White House intelligence task force report and its recommendations on how to reform the NSA and the wider intelligence community, that there may be hints to other excesses not yet revealed by the Snowden documents. Trevor Timm may have spotted a big one. In the recommendation concerning increasing security in online communications, the second sub-point sticks out like a sore thumb:

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Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer

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Obama concedes NSA bulk collection of phone data may be unnecessary

• President: 'There may be a better way of skinning the cat'
• 'Potential abuse' of collected data cited as concern

President Barack Obama has conceded that mass collection of private data by the US government may be unnecessary and said there were different ways of “skinning the cat”, which could allow intelligence agencies to keep the country safe without compromising privacy.

In an apparent endorsement of a recommendation by a review panel to shift responsibility for the bulk collection of telephone records away from the National Security Agency and on to the phone companies, the president said change was necessary to restore public confidence.

“In light of the disclosures, it is clear that whatever benefits the configuration of this particular programme may have, may be outweighed by the concerns that people have on its potential abuse,” Obama told an end-of-year White House press conference. “If it that’s the case, there may be a better way of skinning the cat.”

Though insisting he will not make a final decision until January, this is the furthest the president has gone in backing calls to dismantle the programme to collect telephone data, a practice the NSA claims has legal foundation under section 215 of the Patriot Act. This week, a federal judge said the program “very likely” violates the US constitution.

“There are ways we can do this potentially that give people greater assurance that there are checks and balances, sufficient oversight and transparency,” Obama added. “Programmes like 215 could be redesigned in ways that give you the same information when you need it without creating these potentials for abuse. That’s exactly what we should be doing: to evaluate things in a very clear specific way and moving forward on changes. And that’s what I intend to do.”

He promised a meaningful response to a review panel that reported earlier this week, which urged more transparency in surveillance activities. “Just because we can do something it doesn’t mean we necessarily should,” he told reporters at the White House.

The president also went further than his review panel in suggesting the US needed to rein in its overseas surveillance activities. “We have got to provide more confidence to the international community. In a virtual world, some of these boundaries don’t matter any more,” he said. “The values that we have got as Americans are ones that we have to be willing to apply beyond our borders, perhaps more systematically than we have done in the past.”

Obama pointedly declined to be drawn into a debate about possible amnesty for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose revelations about the NSA have sparked intense internal deliberation about changing US surveillance activities. The president distinguished between Snowden’s leaks and the debate those leaks prompted, which he said was “an important conversation we needed to have”, but left open the question of whether Snowden should still be prosecuted.

“The way in which these disclosures happened has been damaging to the United States and damaging to our intelligence capabilities,” Obama said. “I think that there was a way for us to have this conversation without that damage. As important and as necessary as this debate has been, it’s important to keep in mind this has done unnecessary damage.”

Ben Wizner, Snowden's attorney, told the Guardian: “The president said that we could have had this important debate without Snowden, but no one seriously believes we would have. And now that a federal court and the president’s own review panel have agreed that the NSA’s activities are illegal and unwise, we should be thanking Snowden, not prosecuting him.”

The president would not comment on a suggestion last weekend by Richard Ledgett, the NSA official investigating the Snowden leaks, that an amnesty might be appropriate in exchange for the return of the data Snowden took from the agency.

Obama said he could not comment specifically because Snowden was “under indictment”, something not previously disclosed. While the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against Snowden on espionage-related charges in June, there has been no public subsequent indictment, although it is possible one exists under gag order.

The Justice Department referred comment on a Snowden indictment to the White House. Caitlin Hayden, the chief spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, clarified that Obama was referring to the criminal complaint against Snowden. It remains unclear if there is an indictment under seal.

Conspicuously, Obama declined to rebut one assessment from his surveillance review group – that the bulk collection of US call data was not essential to stopping a terrorist attack.

Instead, he contended that there had been “no abuse” of the bulk phone data collection. But in 2009, a judge on the secret surveillance court prevented the NSA from searching through its databases of US phone information after discovering “daily violations” resulting from NSA searches of Americans’ phone records without reasonable suspicion of connections to terrorism.

That data was inaccessible to the NSA for almost all of 2009, before the Fisa court was convinced the NSA had sufficient safeguards in place for preventing similar violations.

In another indication of the shifting landscape on surveillance, the telecoms giant AT&T announced on Friday that it will begin publishing a semi-annual report about its complicity with government surveillance requests. AT&T followed its competitor Verizon, which announced a similar move on Thursday.

“We believe clear legal frameworks with accountability and oversight are required to strike the right balance between protecting individual privacy and civil liberties, and protecting the national and personal security, a balance we all desire. We take our responsibility to protect our customers' information and privacy very seriously and pledge to continue to do so to the fullest extent possible,” said AT&T vice-president Wayne Watts.

The first such report is expected for early 2014, Watts said. While technology firms like Yahoo and Google have pushed for greater transparency about providing their customer data to the government, the telecommunications firms – which have cooperated with the NSA since the agency’s 1952 inception – did not join them before the events of the past week.

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Op zondag 22 december 2013 18:33 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
http://m.volkskrant.nl/vk(...)avigationItemId=2664

Nederland wordt plotseling overspoeld met data centers

SPOILER

Om spoilers te kunnen lezen moet je zijn ingelogd. Je moet je daarvoor eerst gratis Registreren. Ook kun je spoilers niet lezen als je een ban hebt.

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Internet privacy as important as human rights, says UN's Navi Pillay

Navi Pillay compares uproar over mass surveillance to response that helped defeat apartheid during Today programme

The UN human rights chief, Navi Pillay, has compared the uproar in the international community caused by revelations of mass surveillance with the collective response that helped bring down the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Pillay, the first non-white woman to serve as a high-court judge in South Africa, made the comments in an interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee on a special edition of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, which the inventor of the world wide web was guest editing.

Pillay has been asked by the UN to prepare a report on protection of the right to privacy, in the wake of the former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden leaking classified documents about UK and US spying and the collection of personal data.

The former international criminal court judge said her encounters with serious human rights abuses, which included serving on the Rwanda tribunal, did not make her take online privacy less seriously. "I don't grade human rights," she said. "I feel I have to look after and promote the rights of all persons. I'm not put off by the lifetime experience of violations I have seen."

She said apartheid ended in South Africa principally because the international community co-operated to denounce it, adding: "Combined and collective action by everybody can end serious violations of human rights … That experience inspires me to go on and address the issue of internet [privacy], which right now is extremely troubling because the revelations of surveillance have implications for human rights … People are really afraid that all their personal details are being used in violation of traditional national protections."

The UN general assembly unanimously voted last week to adopt a resolution, introduced by Germany and Brazil, stating that "the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, including the right to privacy". Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, were among those spied on, according to the documents leaked by Snowden.

The resolution called on the 193 UN member states "to review their procedures, practices and legislation regarding the surveillance of communications, their interception and collection of personal data, with a view to upholding the right to privacy of all their obligations under international human rights law". It also directed Pillay to publish a report on the protection and promotion of privacy "in the context of domestic and extraterritorial surveillance ... including on a mass scale". She told Berners-Lee it was "very important that governments now want to discuss the matters of mass surveillance and right to privacy in a serious way".

Berners-Lee has warned that online surveillance undermines confidence in the internet, and last week published an open letter, with more than 100 free speech groups and leading activists, to protest against the routine interception of data by governments around the world.

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Op zaterdag 21 december 2013 23:26 schreef gebrokenglas het volgende:
Dat zijn positieve geluiden van Obama. Dus hij begrijpt dat het abuse of power gevaar het grootste issue is in dat hele NSA afluistergebeuren.

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The British firm laying the cable, Global Marine Systems, is plotting a new route that is shorter than any previously taken by a transatlantic cable. As closely as possible, it will follow "the great circle" flight path followed by London-to-New York flights.

"We spent 18 months planning the route," says Mike Saunders, Hibernia Atlantic's vice-president of business development. "If it ever gets beaten for speed we end up giving our customers their money back, basically, so my boss would kill me if we got it wrong."

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When it opens in 2013, Project Express will be the fastest cable across the Atlantic, reducing the time it takes data to travel round-trip between New York and London to 59.6 milliseconds from the current top speed of 64.8 milliseconds, according to Hibernia Atlantic. Those five milliseconds might not seem like a big deal, but to the handful of electronic trading firms that will have exclusive access to the cable, it will be a huge advantage. “That extra five milliseconds could be worth millions every time they hit the button,” says Joseph Hilt, senior vice president of financial services at Hibernia Atlantic.

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Hibernia Networks has halted all work on its flagship $300 million transatlantic cable, the Hibernian Express, after becoming embroiled in mounting tensions between the US and China over cyber security.

The company was forced to suspend all work on the project, the first attempt to lay a cable across the Atlantic in more than a decade, after key US carriers gave warning that they would not be able to use the proposed network for fear of risking the loss of lucrative contracts with US federal government agencies.

The delay marks the first big casualty in the escalating row between the US and China over alleged links between Chinese equipment makers and the country’s secret services. The development also highlights the growing determination of US authorities to blacklist Chinese equipment makers from new infrastructure projects that could affect the integrity of US networks.

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However, in January and February of 2013, important news about
both projects began to emerge. Emerald Networks’ news was
positive, as it indicated that it had received what it described as
a “preliminary commitment” from the US government’s Export-
Import Bank in the form of a “Preliminary Project Letter.”
Hibernia Networks’ news, on the other hand, appeared dire. The
company was reported to have “halted work with Huawei” on the
Hibernia Express project due to security concerns expressed by the
US government toward Chinese suppliers such as Huawei and ZTE.
Hibernia Networks’ reported decision followed a 2012 investigation
by the US House of Representatives’ Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence which the chairman of the committee, Republican
Congressman Mike Rogers, summarized by saying that “If I were
an American company today...and you are looking at Huawei, I
would find another vendor if you care about your intellectual
property, if you care about your consumers’ privacy, and you care
about the national security of the United States of America.”
Critics asserted that the 60-page report released by the Intelligence
Committee contained no scientific or engineering evidence of
security weaknesses unique to ZTE and Huawei, nor did it identify
any attempts at espionage; instead, the report based its assertions
on what it claimed was the failure of ZTE and Huawei to “provide
clear answers to Committee questions...provide supporting
documentation...or alleviate Committee concerns.” Critics also
claimed that the committee’s actions, which benefitted American
suppliers, could easily be construed as trade protectionism. For its
part, the committee said that more detailed information could be
found in the classified annex to the report, but “that information
cannot be shared publicly without risking US national security.”

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TAT-14 transatlantic cable system upgrade goes to Mitsubishi Electric
May 18, 2011

Mitsubishi Electric Cor. (TOKYO:6503) says it has won a contract to upgrade the DWDM capacity of the transatlantic TAT-14 Cable Network to 40 Gbps per wavelength. The company expects to complete the two-phase upgrade, which will expand the fiber-optic network’s capacity 7X, by the fourth quarter of 2012.

TAT-14 comprises more than 15,000 km of fiber-optic cable and connects seven landing stations in the North Atlantic. It was commissioned in 2001 with a 10-Gbps DWDM system. The seven carriers in the consortium that owns the undersea fiber optic network include Abovenet Communications, Inc., AT&T Corp., Deutsche Telekom AG., France Télécom S.A., KPN B.V., TeliaSonera AB (publ)., and Verizon.
http://www.lightwaveonlin(...)ctric-122205469.html

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Tokyo, November 6, 2012 - Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (TOKYO: 6503) announced today that it has completed work on the India-Middle East-Western Europe (IMEWE) Cable Network to upgrade the submarine cable network with 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) technology. The upgrade involved installation of submarine line terminal equipment in eight countries.
http://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2012/1106.html

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GCHQ was handling 600m "telephone events" each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

Each of the cables carries data at a rate of 10 gigabits per second
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The GCHQ mass tapping operation has been built up over five years by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre-optic cables where they land on British shores carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in north America.

This was done under secret agreements with commercial companies, described in one document as "intercept partners".

The papers seen by the Guardian suggest some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation and GCHQ went to great lengths to keep their names secret. They were assigned "sensitive relationship teams" and staff were urged in one internal guidance paper to disguise the origin of "special source" material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout".

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Op maandag 11 november 2013 11:59 schreef Linkse_Boomknuffelaar het volgende:

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Als de Russische geheime dienst computers niet meer vertrouwt, kan je er gerust van uit gaan dat er een heleboel mis is met die dingen.
Russen zijn bijzonder slimme mensen, hooggeschoold en de geheime Russische dienst bestaat niet uit een stel naïeve lullo's.