Sina Science and Technology News On the afternoon of June 22, Beijing time, according to the British Guardian, the latest documents disclosed by Edward Snoden, the American "Prism" surveillance plan leaker, show that the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (hereinafter referred to as "GCHQ") has collected and stored massive emails Facebook posts, online history and call data are shared with the National Security Agency (NSA).
"Britain is worse than America"
These documents show that GCHQ has secretly obtained access to the network lines that transmit global telephone and Internet traffic, and has begun to process massive sensitive personal data and share it with NSA.
Although GCHQ has great ambition to monitor network and telephone data as much as possible, its related actions have hardly received any attention or discussion from the outside world.
A key "innovation" of GCHQ is that it can intercept massive data transmitted through optical cables and store it for up to 30 days for screening and analysis. The operation, code named Tempora, has been running for about 18 months so far.
With the help of this project, GCHQ and NSA can not only understand the huge communication information between the target suspects, but also become their monitoring targets, even completely innocent people. The information they intercepted includes call recordings, e-mail content, Facebook posts and online records of any netizen - although the authority obtained by the agency should have been limited to intercepting data of specific target groups, all the above acts do not seem to be illegal.
In order to expose "the largest surveillance project in human history", Snowden has disclosed a large number of documents. He told the Guardian: "This is not just a problem for the United States. Britain also has a strong intelligence agency. GCHQ is worse than the United States."
"Superpower" in the field of intelligence
However, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday that these data were legally collected within a security system, and the British government also obtained a large amount of data, successfully detecting and preventing serious criminal acts. However, due to its ability to intercept optical cable data, GCHQ has become a "super power" in the global intelligence field.
By 2010, two years after the first pilot of the project, GCHQ had claimed to have the largest Internet surveillance capability in the "Five Eyes" electronic surveillance alliance, whose members include the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
British officials also claimed that GCHQ "gets more metadata than NSA". Metadata refers to basic communication information, such as the identities of the two communication parties, but does not include communication content.
By last May, GCHQ and NSA had assigned 300 and 250 analysts to filter massive data. Although GCHQ formulated guidelines when allowing the US to use such data, GCHQ's lawyers said: "We are less supervised than the US."
GCHQ even let the US side "decide by itself" when judging the specific information to be viewed. The Guardian found that a total of 850000 NSA employees and US private contractors had access to top secret information in GCHQ database.
According to the documents disclosed this time, GCHQ handled 600 million "phone incidents" every day last year, monitored 200 optical cables, and was able to process data of at least 46 optical cables at the same time.
Each optical cable transmits data at the speed of 10Gbps, so theoretically, these lines can transmit more than 21PB of data every day - equivalent to 192 times of transmission of all book information in the British Library every 24 hours.
The scale of the project is still expanding with the increase of invading optical cable lines and the increase of GCHQ's data storage facilities in the UK and overseas.
Telecom companies forced to cooperate
For 2 billion users of the world's web, TEMPORA is like a window to peep into their daily life, constantly monitoring various data transmitted through optical cables. NSA's "Prism" project is another window into the internal systems of global Internet giants.
GCHQ has established this project for more than five years by adding interceptors on the Atlantic submarine optical cable. These cables will pass through the British coast and transmit telephone and network data from North America to Western Europe.
This measure is completed through secret agreements with commercial companies, which are called "interception partners" in the documents.
According to the documents obtained by the Guardian, some of these companies have already received the fees paid by the government, while GCHQ is trying to protect their identities from the outside world. They specially set up a "sensitive relationship team" and developed a set of internal rules for employees to cover up "special source" materials in the report, fearing that once the identity of these "intercepting partners" is exposed, it may lead to "high-level political consequences".
A person familiar with the intelligence said on Friday that these companies are obliged to cooperate with the project and are prohibited from disclosing relevant information: "If they refuse, we can force them to cooperate, so they have no choice."
The insider also said that, GCHQ's data collection process is like looking for a needle in a haystack: "We select a small part of the data through the whole process. Instead of viewing all the data, we discard a lot of data through a set of mechanisms to view only useful information. If you think we will read millions of emails, you are wrong, we will not. The whole project is not to monitor the UK's local traffic - that is, communication between Britons. "
He explained that when these "needles in the sea" were found, logs would be made, and interception specialists could see these logs. People familiar with the matter said that the main target was information related to national security, terrorist activities and organized crime. "There is a set of audit process to review these logs to confirm their legitimacy. The vast majority of data is directly discarded without anyone viewing it," said the insider.
Doubt of legality
However, the legality of the project is still in doubt, and GCHQ is likely to use old regulations to apply new technologies. The Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (hereinafter referred to as "RIPA") promulgated in 2000 requires that intelligence agencies must obtain the signature authorization of the British Home Secretary or Foreign Secretary when monitoring designated targets.
However, due to the vagueness of this provision, as long as one of the two parties to the communication is located abroad, the Foreign Secretary can authorize the interception of broader information. The characteristics of modern optical fiber communication mean that a considerable part of the UK's domestic traffic will also be transferred overseas and then returned to the UK.
The types of data collected by the agency used to include fraud, drug trafficking and terrorism, but the specific collection standards of each period have been kept confidential and not subject to public supervision. GCHQ needs to follow the internal review of the organization, but the specific review results are also confidential.
We can roughly understand the monitoring scale of GCHQ lawyers from their statements. These lawyers once said that it is impossible to list all the locked personnel, because "this is an infinite list, and we simply cannot manage it."
Although the British government has a special investigation court to monitor complaints about improper use of data by GCHQ, the agency told NSA analysts in the early development stage of this project in 2009: "So far, they have been protecting us."
Historically, spy agencies used to intercept internal communication information through microwave towers and satellites. NSA's interceptor station in Manway Hill, North Yorkshire, played a leading role. According to an internal document, Keith Alexander, director of NSA, said when visiting Manweis Mountain in June 2008, "Why can't we collect all signals around the clock? This should be a good project for Manweis Mountain this summer."
But at that time, satellite interception only accounted for a small part of the network traffic. Now, most of the traffic is transmitted through optical cables. Since the UK is located at the western edge of Europe, it can easily intercept the data of transatlantic submarine optical cables.
Deploy multi-layer filtering mechanism
The information thus collected provides a powerful tool for the security sector to obtain evidence of serious criminal activities. According to insiders, they can discover new technologies used by terrorists to evade security checks and determine their action plans. In addition, the project has been used to combat the criminal act of exploiting children, and has helped cyber defense.
It is reported that the project once helped the British government destroy a criminal gang in central and western England, which was planning to launch a series of attacks at that time. In addition, the project also helped law enforcement agencies catch terrorists in Luton and those who planned to launch attacks before the London Olympic Games.
With the interception equipment starting to generate data, GCHQ launched a three-year pilot project at Bude substation in Cornwall. By the summer of 2011, GCHQ had been able to monitor more than 200 optical cables, and the speed of each line reached 10Gbps. That summer, GCHQ brought NSA analysts into the Bude pilot project. In the autumn of 2011, they launched TEMPORA as a mainstream project and shared intelligence with Americans.
The installation of interception equipment on the Atlantic submarine optical cable enables GCHQ to obtain unique intelligence sources. TEMPORA has let the organization establish a set of Internet buffer mechanism, which can not only view data in real time, but also store data - content storage time reaches 3 days, metadata storage time reaches 30 days.
A document explained: "The Internet buffer mechanism has brought an exciting opportunity to directly access the massive data provided by GCHQ's special sources."
GCHQ filters data through the so-called "MVR" (Massive Reduction) function and uses a series of complex computer algorithms. The first layer filter will immediately discard the large amount of low value traffic, such as P2P downloading data, thus reducing the amount of data by about 30%. Then the information package related to the "selector" - a search term containing a specific subject, phone number, and e-mail address will be extracted. There are 40000 selectors for GCHQ and 31000 selectors for NSA. Most of the information they extract is "content", such as call recordings or e-mail messages, while others are metadata.
According to GCHQ documents obtained by the Guardian, the agency has been increasing storage capacity in Cheltenham, Bud and an overseas location. As the world's leading telecommunications companies are increasingly deploying optical cables through Asia to reduce costs, GCHQ is also looking for ways to maintain its leading edge. At the same time, GCHQ is still carrying out technical work to intercept data from the super optical cable with transmission speed up to 100Gbps. A training material of the company wrote: "You are in an enviable position - enjoy it and make good use of it." (Shu Yu)
