A new underwater cable that is to link Brazil with Portugal will protect Latin American internet traffic from US surveillance, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff indicated after meeting the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council.
“We have to respect privacy, human rights and the sovereignty of nations. We don't want businesses to be spied upon,”Rousseff told a joint news conference.
Rousseff was among the world leaders who openly criticized the US after the revelation of the scale of its electronic surveillance program by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. She postponed a scheduled visit to America over a report that the US intelligence agency snooped on her emails and phone.
Not only Brazilian political leaders, but also captains of industry have been reportedly under US surveillance, including the oil giant Petrobras. Critics accused the US of using its intelligence capabilities for economic espionage that has nothing to do with national security.RT
Brazil-Europe undersea cable to hide web traffic from US snooping
Hate to break the news to you guys but Petrobras is state owned:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.businessinsider.com/petrobras-is-brazils-shame-2014-11
Wonder how they are going to pull that off. There’s a lot of water between Brazil and Europe. Police the shiplines above the cable route? Besides, the way it really works is where the trunk hooks up in Europe. That’s where everything gets stepped up, or stepped down. (Think of your neighborhood power station stepping 200,000 kw down to what a house uses.) Snowden discussed how NSA taps into trunks it doesn’t control.
ReplyDeleteMatt, what does state ownership have to do with economic espionage? I don’t get the connection.
ReplyDeleteWell maybe they look at the firm as part of the govt...
ReplyDeleteYou have Trump out there saying "Chiiiina rips us off..." its firms that do it but they are state owned firms so its probably appropriate to say "Chiiiina..." this or "Chiiiina..." that..
US has mostly non-govt owned firms so its different...
Like some Chiiiina based firm recently bought Smithfield Foods down in Virginia.... it was a state-owned firm so the Chinese govt actually now owns Smithfield Foods...
Many people I talk to now wont buy it (we don't anymore we used to like their cured ham and bacon...)
They recently bought Swiss frankenfoods firm Syngenta too:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.reuters.com/article/us-syngenta-ag-m-a-chemchina-idUSKCN0VB1D9
Have these people not heard of encryption?
ReplyDeleteWell Hillary hasn't....
ReplyDeleteBob, if I’m not mistaken the current trunks, or the undersea trunks they’ve been serviced by, are owned by American companies. I used to know this stuff cold, but not anymore, and I’m too lazy to look it up. Encryption is the end user’s responsibility. The fibre-optic pipes just carry the data.
ReplyDelete"The Creepy, Long-Standing Practice of Undersea Cable Tapping”
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/the-creepy-long-standing-practice-of-undersea-cable-tapping/277855/
Encrypted data is gibberish without a key. There are open source algorithms that the government cannot crack. That is the most effective solution to snooping.
ReplyDeleteBob, you’re absolutely right, but ‘data’ travels through the trunks as light. It’s not digital. It’s a country's endpoints that change the incoming light back to something digital, and readable, whether encrypted or not. You can siphon off a copy of that light, which is what NSA does, according to Snowden and what prompted the Brazilian pres to create and protect their own trunkline to Portugal. NSA either taps into that trunk with an actual ship out in the middle of the wild blue yonder, or it gets Portugal to agree to let it do it at the endpoint--there’s an official name for it, but I forget--where they change the light back to digital.
ReplyDeleteMRW, I don't see what difference that makes. Data is encrypted at the source. Whether you are dealing with a stream of 1s and 0s, or an analog stream consisting of a range of values, the encrypted information remains hidden. It's assumed that an adversary has access to the encrypted data.
ReplyDelete