[LINK] Brits tap cable in Middle East

[Jan Whitaker]

[Wasn't there an unexplained net outage a few years back in that 
region? Hello?]

UK has secret Middle East web surveillance base: report

Published: August 23, 2013 - 12:08PM

Britain is running a secret internet surveillance station in the 
Middle East, a report says, citing the latest leaked documents 
obtained by fugitive US security contractor Edward Snowden.

The Independent newspaper said it was not disclosing the country 
where the base is located, but said the facility can intercept 
emails, telephone calls and web traffic for the US and other 
intelligence agencies.

The British base taps into underwater fibre-optic cables in the 
region, the newspaper said.

It passes the information back to the British electronic 
eavesdropping agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), 
in Cheltenham, south-west England, which then shares it with the US 
National Security Agency (NSA).

Britain's Foreign Office said "we do not comment on intelligence matters".

The Independent did not say how it obtained the details from the Snowden files.

Snowden, a former NSA contractor, first released details of US and 
British surveillance activities through the Guardian newspaper 
earlier this year. Russia has granted him temporary asylum as he bids 
to avoid prosecution in the US.

British counter-terror police on Thursday launched a criminal 
investigation into documents seized from the partner of Guardian 
journalist Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who broke the Snowden story.

The Guardian said this week that GCHQ experts had on July 20 
supervised the destruction of the hard drives and memory chips on 
which its Snowden material had been saved.

The government has confirmed that British Prime Minister David 
Cameron's most senior policy advisor, Cabinet Secretary Jeremy 
Heywood, was sent to tell the Guardian they had to either destroy or 
return the material or face legal action.

AFP

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This story was found at: 
http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/security-it/uk-has-secret-middle-east-web-surveillance-base-report-20130823-hv1ik.html 



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
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Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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