is going on. Mr Clapper said a number of things which directly when against things that
he had said during his last round ofquestioning by the US Congress.
In Mr Clappers own words he Had responded to the questions in the "Least most
Untruthful Manner". Or in English, he lied.
So the duly elected politicians who are charged with having oversight of the security
services are lied to. End result. Nothing to see here, move along. Nothing going on here.
Seems familiar somehow.
We have also heard recently that the NSA has paid the GCHQ a rather large sum of money
to run Intelligence gathering operations from the UK and Cyprus.
Here is an interesting geographic detail.
The Transatlantic deep ocean lines run from a number of locations. Bude in Cornwall
has lines that run down the coast of Europe to Portugal then split with some going into
the Mediterranean and others going down the coast of Africa where they split again and
head across to south America.
Others run across to the northern European nations such as Norway, Denmark, the
Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
From Cornwall the Transatlantic lines run across to the US and Canada.
So a tapping operation in Cornwall covers traffic across the whole of northern Europe,
the west coast of Europe, western and South Africa and South America. Digital traffic
from any of those nations along with all of the Mediterranean nations going to any other
nation on those lines or to and from the US. The med link extends to Israel and Egypt,
down to the Gulf of Yemen, round to the middle east, India and the far east to Japan.
Look at this map, zoom in and look at Cornwall and in particular at Bude.
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/
All international traffic from Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and of course
GERMANY goes via the English Channel where they can be listened to from the large
monitoring facility at Bude.
When you see news reports that the Germans are somewhat upset by this situation, this
is why. The NSA and GCHQ have a stranglehold on all German digital traffic via the major
submarine cables. The only way that Germany can send digital traffic that does not pass
the Bude listening point is to route it south through Italy and into the Mediterranean.
Oh wait; there is that monitoring base on Cyprus. Oh well, never mind.
Then of course we have X-Keyscore.
Remember when the NSA said that they were just recording the fact that messages were
being sent and not the content of those messages. I do believe they may have lied.
I know, I know. Public servants lying to people, unheard of. But as we continue to get leak
after leak from the Snowden reports you have to wonder just how much, if anything,
we are being told is the truth.
Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said
of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying
he could do.”
However According to released NSA training documents: X-Keyscore is the NSA’s “widest
reaching” system developing intelligence from computer networks. One presentation
claims the program covers“nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, including the
content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata. Analysts
can also use X-Keyscore and other NSA systems to obtain ongoing “real-time”i
nterception of an individual’s internet activity.
So when a politician who is head of the Committee that has authority over the NSA’s activities
tells us that the leaks are wrong and that things are not that bad do we believe him.
Given that the NSA has admitted to lying to those same politicians I think not.
Here is something for you to think about. “Call me Dave” is demanding massive levels
of censorship online. Censorship that anyone with the faintest idea about the Internet
says will not achieve its stated purpose of protecting children.
Senior police officers, Child protection groups, Internet experts, Civil Rights groups and
the Child Exploitation and Online Protection organization all say this will not work.
Hacker groups are already posting Breaker software online that will break ISP
censorship blocks.
How is it that these super intrusive NSA/GCHQ operations are not revealing online
criminal activity that is so simple to detect that a simple ISP filter can block?
Consider the implications of all of this. Censorship that blocks what you can see and
do online combined with intensive monitoring of what you are allowed to do. All carried
out by the lowest bidder using the cheapest software. Run by a lumbering, glacially
slow bureaucracy. Overseen by our Government and Politicians.
Are our politicians in control? Do they care that our online lives are being monitored
to a massive degree? Are they in favor of a police state where our online activities
are both censored and recorded?
Me. I would say they don’t have a clue what is going on.