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Brazil, Europe plan undersea cable to skirt U.S. spying
- gtirloni 13y agoThis is good network management. The NSA datacenters are too overloaded, let's divert the traffic to the GCHQ ones to load balance this thing.
- ubercore 13y agoToo bad U.S. citizens can't get in on it, to skirt U.S. spying.
- dragonwriter 13y agoI 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.
- thrownaway2424 13y agoYes, 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.
- astrodust 13y agoHeadline two years in the future: "US plans submarine mission to tap into undersea cable."
- tachyonbeam 13y agoSnowden already leaked this info, it just isn't public yet.
- mchouza 13y agoIt's already public: http://www.dawn.com/news/1077275/nsa-tapped-into-undersea-cables-report http://www.dawn.com/news/1077275/nsa-tapped-into-undersea-ca...
- gtirloni 13y agoI 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).
- rbanffy 13y ago> 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.
- Karunamon 13y agoA 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).
- rbanffy 13y ago
- ptaffs 13y agoGCHQ is in Europe (UK), maybe they should specifically route to mainland Europe. (Since GCHQ is working with the NSA).
- Xylakant 13y ago"undersea communications cable from Lisbon to Fortaleza" Lisbon is usually considered mainland Europe (and quite a bit closer to south america as well)
- outside1234 13y agoRight, because France or Germany aren't spying on anyone.
- panzi 13y agoLisbon is in Portugal. I don't think they have money for spying (unless they get financed by the NSA, which isn't that unlikely).
- Amezarak 13y agoMaybe 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.
- panzi 13y agoYeah, I should have expected that.
- nraynaud 13y agoit'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)
- jstalin 13y agoAs though the EU doesn't work with US intelligence.
- tokenadult 13y agoKey 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 http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ http://www.submarinecablemap.com/ 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 http://www.privacybydesign.ca/ http://www.privacybydesign.ca/ into every device and every network (and every legal system) all around the world.
- ghostDancer 13y agoYou are completely right, but that doesn't make a good headline either for the politicians or the press.
- wbracken 13y agoAnd, not that "well, everyone is doing it" makes it right, etc. etc., but to think that only the US is spying on these communications is a bit naive.
- Amezarak 13y agoIndeed, 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.)
- ghostDancer 13y ago
- caiob 13y agoBecause internet spying is Brazil's biggest issue at the moment. Talk about priorities, Eh?1
- ballooney 13y agoYeah 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.
- fidotron 13y agoUnfortunately 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.
- scurvy 13y agoWhat 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.
- brianbreslin 13y agoHow 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.
- alisson 13y agoI 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.
- Ihmahr 13y agoAnd hopefully traffic in Brazil will also become cheaper :)
- mjn 13y agoYeah, 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.
- outside1234 13y agoLike cables can only be tapped at endpoints. Hilarious!
- fit2rule 13y agoIts going to be encrypted. And there will be submarine intrusion detection systems. Whats not to like?
- rblatz 13y agoI'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.
- fit2rule 13y agoAnd 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.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoThis plan is not an example of a fight against tyranny.
- fit2rule 13y agoOh - 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.
- batmansbelt 13y agoWould it stop over in Africa first? It looks like that's along the way.
- amitparikh 13y agoThe Great Circle route looks like it just skirts past the Canary Islands: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=FOR-LIS http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=FOR-LIS
- nly 13y agoYou're correct, it's going to land in Tenerife according to this: http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/brazil-spain http://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/submarine-cable/brazil-sp... This seems to have been a popular route for telecommunications cables 'for a while' https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/1901_Eastern_Telegraph_cables.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/1901_Eas...
- jobu 13y agoOnce again, the internet routes around failure.
- ericcumbee 13y agoReading things like this as an American. I think I know how eastern Europeans felt watching the Iron Curtain go up.
- 205guy 13y agoWriting things like that like an American. I don't think my analogies are very clear and I should explain them.
- bas 13y agoTalking to or knowing someone from Eastern Europe may disabuse you of this notion.
- ericcumbee 13y agoWhat 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.
- happyscrappy 13y agoThat is pretty tepid compared to what you said before.
- ccanassa 13y agoThis is just a populist political move in order to gain votes.
- lispm 13y agoPoliticians listening to their voters? What a strange concept...
- AutoCorrect 13y agosubmarine, cable tap, plan is a waste of time and money if anti-spying is the reason.
- brudgers 13y agoIt's a feel good. 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-cable/115877 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/Project_Azorian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593) 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/USS_Scorpion_(SSN-589) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
- TeMPOraL 13y ago> Project Azorian I first read about it in cstross's novel "The Jennifer Morgue"[0], from the Laundry series[1]. A very good read. [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jennifer_Morgue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jennifer_Morgue [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#The_Laundry_Files http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#The_Laundry_File...
- nabla9 13y agoTapping undersea cable is very small scale operation compared to mass surveillance. You can't install massive server rooms into undersea submarines.
- HugoDias 13y agoMost important issues in brazil this days: World Cup and NSA surveillance . Oh, how i hate this government.
- josefresco 13y agoDon't forget the summer Olympics!
- gcb0 13y agoso open you window and see all the popular movements being beaten daily by the police. i think you are more part of the problem if that is all the news you care for
- railsdude 13y agoThe only people "being beaten up" are the black blocs and rightfully, IMHO. And it's not daily.
- rogerthis 13y agoI can confirm that.
- oscargrouch 13y agoand 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..
- gcb0 13y agocoxinha.
- HugoDias 13y agoI do not know if i expressed myself badly, or if you could not understand that i'm criticizing the government, not the people.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoSo 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.
- brudgers 13y agoThe 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 $12-15 billlion dollars worth of stock because the increase in supply would drive the current price down. Likewise, WhatsApp couldn't dump that much and maintain current valuation. But placing a reasonable value on the stock requires thinking and thinking makes people's brains hurt...Hell, all financial reporting is that way. The Dow Jones Industrial average keeps going up because the losers are taken off the list and replaced by winners.[2] [2] Yes the footnote is longer than the post. That's what happens when one is driven to explain. Not that the low standards for journalism require explaining to you.
- grecy 13y agoI look forward to the headline: "The European Union and countries x, y, z agree to stop using the US dollar for all transactions due to spying..."
- rosser 13y agoYeah, let's actually break the global economy, because NSA.
- grecy 13y agoI don't see why it needs to break the global economy. Shift everything (oil, gold, etc.) to using the Euro or some other "global" currency.
- DasIch 13y agoIt wouldn't break the global economy at all. It would definitely have catastrophic consequences on the US economy though.
- rosser 13y agoWith the dollar still serving as the global reserve currency, it would have implications for everyone. With the US economy still driving the majority of global consumption (though this is admittedly changing), it would have implications for everyone. "Break" is, perhaps, mildly overstating the case. But, unless you live somewhere that doesn't interact with the outside world in any meaningful way, you would without doubt feel the pain of a sudden shift away from USD like that.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoI don't disagree with you. Some time in the future, other tax jurisdictions will decide it is worth the short term pain to get off of the US$. 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$.
- kumarski 13y agoDoes anyone else see the inherent issue and irony in trying to monitor and protect an extremely long undersea cable across the Atlantic?
- falconfunction 13y agoThere is also BRICS cable, and I don't know how it relates to this. http://www.bricscable.com/ http://www.bricscable.com/
- cpncrunch 13y agoWouldn't it be simpler just to use encryption?
- rogerthis 13y agoI 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. How can the grazilian state be trusted?
- huherto 13y agoThe political spectrum in the americas is a lot wider than that. Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador,...,Argentina, Brasil,...,Colombia, México, Chile,...,Canada,California,...,....,....,The Bible Belt. <-- Extreme left ----------------------- Extreme right --> So Brazil is not particularly crazy. It is in the left from the american point of view, but it is not as crazy as Cuba or Venezuela.
- xj9 13y agoOh 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.
- rogerthis 13y agoAnd another commy who has never read Karl Marx.
- _delirium 13y agoI'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).
- jpkeisala 13y agoThis is really great! We are getting better speed to South-America from Europe and maybe it's not even being spied.
- acd 13y agoI feels like this cable will be cheddar cheese to a uboat and some skilled divers. Encryption is probably better as is opensource and open hardware.
- brianbarker 13y agoWith so much focus on the NSA, the other nations will continue increasing their spying capabilities and the game continues with more adversaries.
- nemesisj 13y agoMy 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-americas/ 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.
- igl 13y agoSays the non-democratic European muppet government? Hahaha. This cable goes directly into obamas laptop.
- contingencies 13y agoChina should get in on this game... it borders half the planet.
- aubergene 13y agoThis article by Neal Stephenson on cable laying from around 1994 is a long but still a very good read http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html