Snowden leaks that UK.gov suppressed
Exclusive Above-top-secret details of
Britain’s covert surveillance programme - including the location of a
clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East -
have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA
sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media
organisations, despite being in possession of these facts, have declined
to reveal them. Today, however, the Register publishes them in full.
The secret British spy base is part of a programme codenamed
“CIRCUIT” and also referred to as Overseas Processing Centre 1 (OPC-1).
It is located at Seeb, on the northern coast of Oman, where it taps in
to various undersea cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz into the
Persian/Arabian Gulf. Seeb is one of a three site GCHQ network in Oman,
at locations codenamed “TIMPANI”, “GUITAR” and “CLARINET”. TIMPANI,
near the Strait of Hormuz, can monitor Iraqi communications. CLARINET,
in the south of Oman, is strategically close to Yemen.
British national telco BT, referred to within GCHQ and the American
NSA under the ultra-classified codename “REMEDY”, and Vodafone Cable
(which owns the former Cable & Wireless company, aka “GERONTIC”) are
the two top earners of secret GCHQ payments running into tens of
millions of pounds annually.
The Seeb spy base. Not in your name? My dear boy, that's the whole point
The actual locations of such codenamed “access points” into the
worldwide cable backbone are classified 3 levels above Top Secret and
labelled “Strap 3”. The true identities of the companies hidden behind
codenames such as “REMEDY”, “GERONTIC”, “STREETCAR” or “PINNAGE” are
classified one level below this, at “Strap 2”.
After these details were withheld, the government opted not to move against the Guardian
newspaper last year for publishing above-top-secret information at the
lower level designated “Strap 1”. This included details of the
billion-pound interception storage system, Project TEMPORA, which were
revealed in 2013 and which have triggered Parliamentary enquiries in
Britain and Europe, and cases at the European Court of Human Rights. The
Guardian was forced to destroy hard drives of leaked information
to prevent political embarrassment over extensive commercial
arrangements with these and other telecommunications companies who have
secretly agreed to tap their own and their customers’ or partners’
overseas cables for the intelligence agency GCHQ. Intelligence chiefs
also wished to conceal the identities of countries helping GCHQ and its
US partner the NSA by sharing information or providing facilities.
According
to documents revealed by Edward Snowden to journalists including Glenn
Greenwald among others, the intelligence agency annually pays selected
companies tens of millions of pounds to run secret teams which install
hidden connections which copy customers' data and messages to the
spooks’ processing centres. The GCHQ-contracted companies also install
optical fibre taps or “probes” into equipment belonging to other
companies without their knowledge or consent. Within GCHQ, each company
has a special section called a “Sensitive Relationship Team” or SRT.
BT
and Vodafone/C&W also operate extensive long distance optical fibre
communications networks throughout the UK, installed and paid for by
GCHQ, NSA, or by a third and little known UK intelligence support
organization called the National Technical Assistance Centre (NTAC).
Snowden’s
leaks reveal that every time GCHQ wanted to tap a new international
optical fibre cable, engineers from “REMEDY” (BT) would usually be
called in to plan where the taps or “probe” would physically be
connected to incoming optical fibre cables, and to agree how much BT
should be paid. The spooks' secret UK access network feeds Internet data
from more than 18 submarine cables coming into different parts of
Britain either direct to GCHQ in Cheltenham or to its remote processing
station at Bude in Cornwall.
Among the cables specifically
identified in one document as currently being intercepted or “on cover”
are an Irish connection, Hibernia Atlantic, landing in Southport, and
three European connections landing at Yarmouth, Dover, and Brighton.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk
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