Telco assisted GCHQ extensively with tapping submarine fiber optic cables

Telecom company Cable & Wireless, currently owned by Vodafone, has extensively helped British intelligence GCHQ to tap submarine fiber optic cables, new Snowden documents show. GCHQ also had access to 63 submarine fiber optic cables.

According to documents published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, it appears that the British secret service GCHQ tapped numerous important international fiber optic connections in 2009. This would involve at least 63 fiber connections, according to a list of ‘partners’ of GCHQ. The purveyor to the court would have been the company Cable & Wireless: this company would have given GCHQ, and thus its colleagues from the NSA, access to at least 29 fiber optic connections. This gave British intelligence access to 70 percent of all internet data it processed for ‘analysis’.

According to the German newspaper, the collaboration between Cable & Wireless, part of Vodafone since 2012, went so far that GCHQ employees worked full-time at the telecom provider. There were also regular talks between the two sides between 2008 and 2012, and GCHQ is said to have paid out millions of British pounds in ‘compensation’. Vodafone does not deny this, but says in a response that the company must comply with the legal rules drawn up in the United Kingdom with regard to wiretapping requests. Vodafone also wants to report that it has not been able to conclude from archival documents that it has violated German, British or European legislation.

GCHQ also appears to be able to process large amounts of data from the international fiber optic connections for their tapping work. For example, in 2009 the secret service had access to 592 10Gbit/s connections along with 69 so-called egress connections that also achieve speeds of up to 10Gbit/s. In the same year, the British secret service also indicated that it wanted to significantly expand its wiretapping capacity.