The US has the most sophisticated undersea capability of any nation state. Tapping transatlantic cables is something at which its intelligence organs are experienced.
It is but one of a long string of sea bottom operations which include Project Azorian, the Thresher and Scorpion investigations, Palomares and probably much that remains classified.
There's a third possibility: It's being done for reasons that have nothing to do with the US or the NSA, say to reduce latency in Europe or support the telecommunications industry in Brazil, and the Rousseff only mentions the NSA in order to build the popularity of the project and herself.
I 100% agree. There's an excellent business case for it and the NSA angle gives Brazil political cover for spending public money for the benefit of their wealthier citizens and international economic elites. My earlier comment was largely a reaction to the pandering to naive sentiments in the headline.
I shared your feeling: Got excited but the headlines, but let's get more realistic here, they could just use encryption properly. Instead, NSA makes an excellent, I mean if he got us who know one thing or two, you can imagine how easy is to get to the rest using this facade.
Yeah, it's a lot easier to justify the economic investment on something most people don't feel a direct benefit from by painting it as a response to a third party. I wish we'd use our occasional national freakouts about Chinese espionage to build a next-generation bandwidth infrastructure here in the US.
If the EU and Brazil are using US cables, the US is just interfering with its own cable. Fair enough. Entirely different if the US attacks a cable it does not own. It changes the game. It could be considered a hostile act against allies.
> It could be considered a hostile act against allies.
Come on. Nine EU countries are complicit in the warrantless wiretap/metadata collection scheme GHCQ is running here on behalf of the NSA. If the US is tapping an EU cable, it's just more data going in the same fetid pool. You can see how outraged the various EU governments are by how loud they have been about it. The only one who seems genuinely upset is Merkel, and mostly because the German secret services don't have the same technical abilities.
I don't know how genuinely angry Brazil is, but I would be extremely surprised if Brazilian intelligence didn't have a similar setup at home.
And even if you prove it, so what? The United States is the most powerful country in the world. It has the ability to force other countries' presidential planes to land (on foreign airports, no less) so it can search them for a lone fugitive. What exactly do you think is going to happen if someone proves that the US tapped their undersea cables?
I think it's easy: There are only a few organizations (state owned or private) that are able to pull up something like this.
Keeping an eye on the stock-market of the parties involved (who's went up, who's went down, who bought CDS instead, etc.) will tell you enough. For us, me at least, it's kinda hard to follow through. But imagine you are the "Bundesnachrichtendienst" (I know it's incredibly hard to read, not to mention to spell it correctly, maybe they did it on purpose), it's the German CIA counterpart. They have the means to find out easily.
What happens next depends on so many factors that it could be a good task for a prediction algorithm.
From the telegraph onwards, everyone has signals intelligence organizations, the sole purpose of which is to intercept foreign communications. This changes nothing.
This will launch, reduce latency for South Americans, and 10 minutes later it'll be tapped by the US, France, and everyone else who cares enough to send a submarine on over.
Nope. It costs money, risk and power to tape. Every Unfair taping erodes that country's power a bit. So it's still worth building things defending a country's sovereignty and it's still worth starting anytime.
There's a feeling of a movement developing though. The NSA revelations have provided political will where it didn't exist before. They've perhaps created an atmosphere of the US versus everyone else. There are plenty of people that stand to gain from this situation. Individually many of these projects are opportunistic but in aggregate they will almost inevitably lead to an erosion of the US position.
It won't lead to an erosion of anything. There's already the usual suspects: China, Russia, Cuba, NK, and Venezuela. There is no everyone else except these usual suspects. Will it be eroded in British Commonwealth? Nope. Any European country except possibly Germany? Nope. South America except Venezuela and Brazil's rhetoric? Nope. Africa? Nope.
Do you think the NSA hasn't considered that possibility? The US intelligence community has been seriously pursuing code breaking since the late 1930's. Their interest and resource commitment has only grown. Bletchley Park had a half dozen or so hand built 'bombs' working on Enigma. The US was rolling them off production lines hooking them up to IBM card readers and sorters and working at industrial scale.
Encryption software and hardware has to come from somewhere. Maybe it's not the US. What then - China, Russia, Great Britain, or perhaps Israel? Who else has military grade capability? And who won't backdoor it?
Recently I've been reading history. The Sioux warrior Red Cloud shut down the Bozeman trail. Then the weight of 10 million Americans overwhelmed his nation of 20,000. It's hard to grasp vast differences in scale. The NSA isn't Apple or Google.
It can raise billions to combat bogeymen and need not turn a profit let alone answer to stockholders every quarter. It can appeal to a patriotism that runs far deeper than mere brand loyalty. Nobody is going to put their life on the line for iOS.
Just as an FYI, the Enigma decoding effort was not the war-winning codebreak at Bletchley. Enigma gave access to very tactical, short duration information, like the location of subs and their intended movements over the next few days, or the movement of a land unit, again on a timescale of days. Admittedly Enigma was so thoroughly broken that the UK was able to decrypt huge numbers of communications, and the aggregate did give some indications as to higher-level strategic planning.
Nevertheless, the main game at Bletchley was Colossus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer) which allowed the decryption of high level planning communications between German High Command and the government. By main game, I mean that it was the work on Colossus which created the first machines recognisable as computers. This was the codebreak that truly gave the Allies the ability to outmanoeuvre the Germans at a strategic level. There were no German strategic victories once Colossus came on line in late 1943 (the last substantial German victory in the war was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Battle_of_Kharkov#Manste... in March 1943), compared to numerous Eastern front victories after the Allies started to successfully decrypt Enigma.
Of course we as geeks tend to overestimate the effects of successfully breaking codes. The results are not always positive - for example Rommel's offensive in Africa originally succeeded because Enigma intercepts indicated that he had been told to sit tight, but Rommel decided by himself to launch an offensive. The English were caught flat-footed, and very nearly lost North Africa as a result (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_campaign#Allies), with only a well-fought defensive action by the Australians stationed in Tobruk saving the day.
> Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.
Of course you can infiltrate the facility to access the keys or attack the management systems with zero day exploits. But every bit of protection is worthwhile, because it might be the crucial step that the NSA is not able to break with the assigned budget.
It would actually be interesting if this could be true. Encryption at the transport level (POS, SONet, ATM, VPLS, etc), such that all higher layer traffic whether further encrypted at the application layer or not is automatically secure between two trans-oceanic points. As far as I know, this technology doesn't commercially exist today, but theoretically it could be invented.
I guess they'll need to add on proper regular surveillance of the line(s) then too. And I wonder, is it an act of war? What would the U.S. do if it was found that Obama's lines were being listened to?
> What would the U.S. do if it was found that Obama's lines were being listened to?
Use that knowledge to peddle bad information to diametrically opposed nation states to further their own interest? Use that information to further secure their systems they previously thought were secure? That's what everyone else would do.
Its not like the US aren't spied on. If anything, there is probably more intense interest in the US operations from various nation states than anywhere else on earth. I was watching a documentary on UK/US spying (both human and communication intelligence, I believe it was called Modern Spies and from the BBC) and it was suggested from commentators from the CIA as well as Her Majesty's Secret Service that the Chinese have stolen the largest mass of nuclear secrets and have even managed to copy some top secret technology in their fighter jets etc. The commentators also seemed to suggest that nobody is clear how it was done yet. Maybe that was scare tactics to make the Chinese seem scary, but on the assumption that it wasn't, why wouldn't that be considered an act of war? I think that is because the nations who are the most competent at spying are also the same nations you can't beat in a 2 week war or nations that can impact heavily in an economic war and so the word isn't chucked around as quickly.
I suppose one man's act of war is another man's act of diplomacy that can avoid war.
>What would the U.S. do if it was found that Obama's lines were being listened to?
Given that the Russians or Chinese or Israelis have almost certainly at one point or another compromised the President's communications, we already know the answer.
The "advanced adversary" would simply break the cable (in an unattributable fashion, of course, "silly sharks") and force traffic to go over a connection they can monitor.
I am pretty sure they just splice and run another cable to a Navy base. In this case, they would probably just run a cable from one of the Naval bases in Italy, and splice it in off the coast of Portugal.
I can't install one in my living room either. That's why I tap the internet with a NAT box and a router. With a nuclear reactor and a few billion defense dollars, I could probably rig something up something analogous just about anywhere.
thats assuming everyone bought us cable tech/hired us companies to deploy. im sure now it is not going to be the case. and probably anti tampering will finally be in the features, not just speed and price as before.
I think this is great! As a Brazilian developer I would love to be able to use european datacenters, today the latency makes it almost impossible, they're way cheaper than Brazilian ones and travel to EU is easier than to the US because of the visa.
This isn't the solution to privacy but solves a lot of other problems.
Yeah, doing a bit of spot-testing it looks like even though São Paulo is only about 15% further from Copenhagen than Los Angeles is (10500 km vs. 9000 km), the latency from here is 40-100% worse (300-400ms to São Paulo, vs. 200-220ms to LA). Considerably less consistent, too, with spikes up to 500-600ms to some sites. Would be nice to get a more direct connection to South America, with latencies coming more in line with its actual distance.
Exactly. Claiming it's a move against the NSA might help sell it, but the dividends are going to be faster communication with one of the biggest economies.
I understand. I just do not believe that could happen. Especially in a country that the internet provider just need to delivery 10% of the internet speed contracted.
Key paragraph: "Brazil and the European Union agreed on Monday to lay an undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza to reduce Brazil's reliance on the United States after Washington spied on Brasilia."
It's probably a good idea to add to the existing network of transoceanic cables
but the technical means of monitoring international signal traffic include a lot of other methods besides just having a listening post at the cable landing point, so probably more helpful for worldwide communication privacy is building privacy by design
Indeed, the idea that routing your connections through other countries will help you is beyond naive. Nearly every industrialized country, including EU member nations, is documented conducting surveillance on comparable scales, and most of them (including Portugal) work closely with the NSA. Schemes like this, especially when government-sponsored, need to be looked at a lot more skeptically. They aren't doing it for privacy-conscious reasons.
As Der Spiegel put it, the BND spies on everyone but Germans, shares that data with the other collaborating countries, and then gets data on Germans in return. (And the Germans didn't call France the "evil empire" of industrial espionage for no reason.)
Indeed it would be naive to think it. It's a matter of power and control , there are no borders, no countries, no flags , only two parties , the ones who have power and the ones who don't.
My previous employer collocated in a Terremark facility called "NAP of the Americas" located in downtown Miami. (http://www.terremark.com/data-centers/north-america/nap-amer...) It's a pretty decent facility. One of the most interesting things about it is that at the time (2-3 years ago) they liked to boast that more than 2/3rds of all communications traffic to South America (voice and data) passed through the building. You can bet the NSA has a nice cozy relationship with them. It was always a bit surprising to me that South America had that much of a single point of failure, so it's not surprising they might want to bolster their connectivity a bit.
Is it even possible to transmit all of the tapped data?
It's possible to transmit part of it with a buoy and a satellite connection or using UHF transmitters but if the data is encrypted it seems like it would be impossible to determine the important data or transmit all of it.
I think you missed the joke. The first paragraph clearly says it's "top secret" and "confidential", so even though it was published by the Spiegel, it's not public information. Got it?
I know, it only makes sense in NSA's distorted rhetoric but if this is disputed in a court, that is what you're going to hear (that the information is not public, as in, it should not be disclosed).
> I know, it only makes sense in NSA's distorted rhetoric
Any US citizens propagating this information would probably be in big trouble precisely because of that. I am not sure about this, but IIRC, US citizens may even get in trouble for reading this information if they lack proper clearance.
A US citizen is under no legal obligation to do or not do anything with "classified" information. That is a standard that only its employees must observe.
I can go to Wikileaks and read Snowden and Assange-backed papers all day long. Govt. employees on the other hand aren't allowed to read that info even though it's already public (even at home, even on their own time).
Interesting. Thanks for clarifying. I wonder if those files can have other restrictions tied to them, such as being transported or copied between two computers.
What I mean is that it feels like, the US is starting down the road of becomes economically & socially isolated from the rest of the world in some regards. More or less like eastern Europe at the start of the cold war.
So we all get how this isn't a "real" thing (having your own undersea cable won't help at all in preventing someone from listening in on that cable's traffic), but it is interesting from the point of view of "Why this headline? Why this story?" It seems targeted at making unsophisticated readers uncomfortable with the NSA's activities and how it reflects on the US in the rest of the world. I have no idea how successful it will be, but its a nice counter balance to the various "Our illegal activities had some benefit for you" stories we've been seeing.
The same reason that everyone is reporting that Facebook is paying 16 billion dollars for WhatsApp [1] - these stories write themselves so why work hard performing proper analysis?
[1] Facebook would have to provide significantly more shares to sell another $12-15 billlion dollars worth of stock because the increase in supply would drive the current price down. Likewise, WhatsApp couldn't dump that much and maintain current valuation. But placing a reasonable value on the stock requires thinking and thinking makes people's brains hurt...Hell, all financial reporting is that way. The Dow Jones Industrial average keeps going up because the losers are taken off the list and replaced by winners.[2]
[2] Yes the footnote is longer than the post. That's what happens when one is driven to explain. Not that the low standards for journalism require explaining to you.
and people with cameras, and everybody protesting.. the status quo dont want people protesting.. or fighting for their rights... the midia show only "black blocks", wich is always a minority, to criminalize the movement, and make people hate protests.. mostly of course.. brainwashed people manipulated by the corporate media...
Your comment are really uninformed, or probably very bad informed.. i think you dont have a clue of whats really going on behind the curtains of power..
I am amused by the idea that putting something outside of the USA (where US intelligence organizations aren't even in principle restricted from spying on it) will somehow protect it from US spying. Sure, there have been lots of stories recently about US domestic surveillance, but those have been news specifically because there are, in theory, restrictions on the agencies involved spying within the US, which create expectations and that domestic spying violates, whereas the official purpose of the NSA is spying on electronic communications outside of the US.
Yes, the superficiality of commentary in this thread is pretty disappointing. An undersea cable between two countries neither of which is the USA is going to be the VERY FIRST THING that the NSA taps. That is the PURPOSE of the agency.
I don't trust Brazil at all. The government is a bunch of communists, friends of dictators (Maduro, Castro bros, african 'kings', iran ayatolah, etc). If you don't know, brazilians are ones of the most monitorated people in the globe. We are this time passing through a biometric registration, which soon will be compulsory. Illegal phone wiretapping is very common, and even the legal ones always end in the media, being used to character assassination. There are passed laws that will make long-range RFID obligatory in cars.
Oh great, another dumbass who doesn't now what a communist is. I know the Cold War has turned y'all off from learning anything real about leftist ideologies, but c'mon, you know that Marx et al would be totally opposed to the totalitarian regimes that claim to espose their political theories.
I've read some Marx, though I wouldn't say I'm an expert scholar. But I'm having trouble understanding how Brazil even remotely resembles something Marx would like. It has even larger income and wealth inequality than the USA! And large portions of the economy are controlled by finance capital, multinational companies like Banco do Brasil, Santander, Telefônica, Cosan, etc., often in an incestuous relationship with political elites. Where is the equal distribution of resources, the control of the economy by workers, or any of the rest of the Marxist programme? I mean, Sweden looks more communist than Brazil to me, and Sweden is not actually communist (it's a capitalist welfare state).
> I mean, Sweden looks more communist than Brazil to me, and Sweden is not actually communist (it's a capitalist welfare state).
A welfare state like Sweden's is about what you get when you start with capitalism (under its original definition), and apply about half of the program in the Communist Manifesto to it.
Western European and Scandinavian "welfare states" are the closest thing in the real world to applying the Marxist program to the kind of economies that it was designed to address what Marx saw as problems with.
"Capitalist welfare state" is something that people are able to say with a straight face only as a result of the Cold War idea (mostly, ironically, originating from the side that ended up losing) that whatever stands in opposition to Leninism and its descendants is fairly described as "capitalism".
True, it was initially quite a Marxist program, though at the time it was Marxist it was also considerably more ambitious: at one time the Scandinavian social-democratic parties included among their goals the eventual ownership and democratic management of the means of production by the workers. Their main difference with the Communist Party was that they believed it could be accomplished through incremental, non-revolutionary, Parliamentary means.
Today's Scandinavian Social-Democratic parties have jettisoned that part of their ideological history and no longer mention it much, though, and nowadays the idea of workers owning the means of production is not so popular, and even the state doing so is less popular than it was, with many privatizations taking place over the past 30 years. Today's dominant ideology is probably something more like Poul Nyrup Rasmussen's "flexicurity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity), which is the idea that in terms of economic organization and control, the society should be fully market-based, not worker-owned, with things allocated by supply and demand, hiring and firing being easy, etc. But then there should also be taxation to provide for a safety net so the lower end of society doesn't fall too far. There are a few exceptions, for example health-care is still mostly non-market-based.
I think I agree that the Cold War cemented some of this, but afaik the idea of a capitalist welfare state originated considerably earlier, some of it in Marx's writing itself. He argued that one way capitalism would defend itself would be to institute reformist measures to ameliorate the worst conditions of the working class, in order to keep them from revolting (Otto von Bismarck pioneered the "right-wing welfare state" in the 1880s for precisely this reason). Thus the argument among many Communist parties of the late 19th and earthly 20th centuries that the Social Democratic parties were just helping capitalists to delay revolution, and not fundamentally leftist parties. And then later, capitalist theorists like F.A. Hayek were in favor of a kind of capitalist welfare state (basic income, free hospital care, etc.).
What does this accomplish other than a press op for Dilma? The US will just tap and spy on this cable, too. This is nothing more than a politically motivated PR stunt so that Dilma can appear to be "talking tough" with the US to the Brazilian public.
How soon before we see efforts like this and in the RFQ/RFP it disallows US companies to bid because they are afraid of us companies not being trustworthy.
I'm sure they'll just tap it and screw the submarine intrusion detection. What are they going to do? Stop using it and route it through other cables that are also tapped?
And if they can't access the data due to it being encrypted end to end on that link they will either sabotage the line over and over until it's given up on. Or they will hack into the endpoints (physically or electronically) to retrieve the encryption keys.
And yet the world will fight on against the tyranny and oppression of the powers. This is how it always has been with humans, and it won't be any different in this case.
Oh - but yes it is! Indeed there is much tyranny to be had in the undermining of foreign economies with espionage and injected turmoil, and the nation of the USA has invested much in its ability to tyrannise other nations through economic means. If you cannot see the tyranny, perhaps you are standing too close.
Every little bit counts. I for one welcome the demise of American hegemony - and I don't see why this isn't a step in the right direction. Just because a bunch of Americans say "nu-uh .. we'll just hax0r your cables" doesn't mean the rest of the world needs to bend over and prepare for a greasin' ..
> The swap deal will allow more trade and investment between the regions to be conducted in euros and yuan, without having to convert into another currency such as the U.S. dollar first, said Kathleen Brooks, a research director at FOREX.com.
The problem with using US currency as an intermediary between two other foreign currencies is that the transaction is subject to US law. I can recall a case between two european countries where the goods being paid for happened to be cuban in origin, thus the entire transfer was seized due to the cuban embargo. Between two european banks. That's just silly.
With the dollar still serving as the global reserve currency, it would have implications for everyone.
With the US economy still driving the majority of global consumption (though this is admittedly changing), it would have implications for everyone.
"Break" is, perhaps, mildly overstating the case. But, unless you live somewhere that doesn't interact with the outside world in any meaningful way, you would without doubt feel the pain of a sudden shift away from USD like that.
I don't disagree with you. Some time in the future, other tax jurisdictions will decide it is worth the short term pain to get off of the US$. I wouldn't be surprised if this happens slowly with end to end credit swaps, a few countries getting together to trade with alternative currencies, etc. It is in no one's best interest for this to happen very quickly. My personal bet is that in about 5 years, about half of world trade will be done in currencies other than the US$.
"undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza" Lisbon is usually considered mainland Europe (and quite a bit closer to south america as well)
it's more like they are not as big, paranoid, weaponized and violent than the US, so basically they spy less and kill less people as a result of the spying.
And also they have those pesky European Court of Human Rights and International Court of Justice overseeing them.
(Not everything if pink tho, some EU countries don't want GMO and Brasil and Argentina bet big on it)
Explain to me, a European citizen, sitting in Europe how I am protected against any of the same measures in the US? Forget GCHQ for a second, lets pick say... the Swedish FRA law, the Swedish Titan Traffic Database, the Denmark/Sweden DNS filter (some of the systems I mention have had little or delayed scrutiny from the outside). So how does any European court prevent that from happening in practise? How do these systems throw a spanner in the works?
It seems to me, perhaps I am a pessimist, that these EU systems mean about as much as the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in principle it should mean everything but in practise it means sweet fuck all. Trade treaties might have more weight but I think the US holds more cards than we do as far as that is concerned.
Thanks very much but I was asking about how any systems we have prevent these things from happening, they don't seems to be your answer. No preventions, just consequences... sometimes, assuming the parties aren't too big for consequences or the issues touch on trade factors. Great, but that's the same deal everyone in a moderately free country has all over the world. Show me the case law for Sweden, the UK, NL, Germany, France being taken to court for collecting and processing information, because some of those countries have been doing this in a public fashion for years.
You don't think handing over EU citizen data to the US is a violation of EU policy? Tell me again about how I'm protected again?
I am protected when it comes to local issues, perhaps, but if Germany, Sweden, France, NL, UK etc. decide they are going to keep tabs on things I do online if my traffic enters their territories then European protections are just fluff. At least that's how it seems to me seeing as none of these things are going to change and there are clear violations with respect to privacy in existing European Law (and I'm not just talking about GCHQ here).
It's a bit like slavery being illegal in just about every single country on earth. What an amazing achievement to have everyone on the same page on something important, except on the ground we have more slaves right now than ever before. Every second chocolate bar you've ever bought was probably tainted in slavery. Those protections don't mean anything unless the stakeholders care and the law is enforced. If it is not enforced, its not really a law.
Maybe Portugal doesn't (I doubt it), but unless they have some means of preventing any traffic from going through most of the countries that do, it doesn't make a difference.
Well, it does make the BND happier I suppose.
EDIT: As it happens, a quick Google search reveals that not only does Portugal have its own out of control electronic surveillance program, it is also collaborating closely with the NSA as a Tier B nation.
Yeah good point, it would be much better if every civil servant in every government department in the entire nation-state all collectively only focussed on one national priority at a time. I get very annoyed when my local authorities fix pot-holes in my street, and collect my bins, when they could be concentrating on energy security.
Unfortunately priority #1 needs to be abolishing the counter productive import tax on any electronics, which has led to a mix of company closures and Brazilian brain drain in favour of a relative handful of less skilled factory workers.
Sad, since there is a lot of talent in Brazil and this prevents making the most of it.
Lol at you thinking that being able to import your PS4 is priority #1. I too hate the import tax, but this priority is way down the list of what the government should be tackling.
The US has the most sophisticated undersea capability of any nation state. Tapping transatlantic cables is something at which its intelligence organs are experienced.
http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cabl...
It is but one of a long string of sea bottom operations which include Project Azorian, the Thresher and Scorpion investigations, Palomares and probably much that remains classified.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash