Sunday, April 08, 2012
Who are they trying to fool?
Britain's GCHQ, equivalent of Isramerica's NSA, is pretending that it needs more money to read everything.
In the first place, spies never complain publicly that they are unable to read a certain type of communication. That simply tells the enemy which type to use.
Second, you can be 100% certain that GCHQ has access to all the net nodes in Britain. A call or message that doesn't pass through Britain will get missed, but that's not the complaint.
And if they really can't get access to all the calls, maybe they should hire some of the technical people from Murdoch's newspapers.
GCHQ has a long reputation for extreme cleverness in technology, spycraft and cryptology. They were at the very top of the spy game in WW2 and Cold War years.
If they're still smart, this complaint would be an attempt to steer "terrorists" toward Skype because GCHQ found that easier to monitor.
If they've declined to the same level of suicidal stupidity as the rest of the Western world, then this is just more evidence of raw incompetence. ¶ 3:24 AM
GCHQ, the Government's listening post, have grown increasingly concerned that modern internet technology has left them unable to intercept calls which use new technology instead of traditional phone systems.
Systems known as Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, route telephone calls over the world wide web. Senior intelligence sources with detail knowledge of the problem said GCHQ had seen their access to telephone intercept information "eroded" by the use of the internet telephone services.
In the first place, spies never complain publicly that they are unable to read a certain type of communication. That simply tells the enemy which type to use.
Second, you can be 100% certain that GCHQ has access to all the net nodes in Britain. A call or message that doesn't pass through Britain will get missed, but that's not the complaint.
And if they really can't get access to all the calls, maybe they should hire some of the technical people from Murdoch's newspapers.
GCHQ has a long reputation for extreme cleverness in technology, spycraft and cryptology. They were at the very top of the spy game in WW2 and Cold War years.
If they're still smart, this complaint would be an attempt to steer "terrorists" toward Skype because GCHQ found that easier to monitor.
If they've declined to the same level of suicidal stupidity as the rest of the Western world, then this is just more evidence of raw incompetence. ¶ 3:24 AM
