Tag: GCHQ

GCHQ chief to step down by year’s end following Snowden leaks

Iain Lobban the director of GCHQ (Reuters/UK Parliament via REUTERS TV)

The head of GCHQ, Britain’s electronic intelligence agency, will step down by year’s end, the Foreign Office said. Officials denied his departure was linked to public outrage over mass surveillance revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Iain Lobban, 53, has served as GCHQ’s director since June 2008. His departure was officially described as a long-considered move, but comes just a few weeks after he was summoned to answer MPs’ questions about surveillance operations in an unprecedented televised open session of the UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee, along with the heads of MI5 and MI6.

“Iain Lobban is doing an outstanding job as director of GCHQ,” a spokesperson said. “Today is simply about starting the process of ensuring we have a suitable successor in place before he moves on, planned at the end of the year.”

Officials dismissed suggestions his decision was influenced by revelations made by Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, whose leaks revealed details of a massive global surveillance network run by the NSA and other members of the so-called Five Eyes alliance – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

Despite accounting for the bulk of Britain’s three intelligence agencies’ combined budget of £2 billion, GCHQ had previously attracted far less public attention than MI5 or MI6.

It was damaging media revelations regarding wide-scale collaboration between GCHQ and the NSA that resulted in Lobban being called to appear before the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee alongside the heads of MI5 and MI6 in November.

At the hearing, Lobban accused Snowden’s disclosures of seriously damaging Britain’s counter-terrorism efforts, saying extremists had discussed changing their communication methods following the revelations.

Critics, however, have accused GCHQ of working hand-in-hand with the NSA in massively intruding on the private communications of millions of citizens.

In June, the Guardian reported the NSA had secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic, and, by 2010, was able to boast the “biggest internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes alliance.

According to media reports, the NSA and GCHQ had a particularly close relationship, sharing troves of data in what Snowden called “the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”

Around 850,000 NSA employees and contractors with top secret clearance had access to the GCHQ databases, allowing them to view and analyze information garnered from such subtly titled programs as ‘Mastering the Internet (MTI)’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation (GTE).’

Lobban, who first joined GCHQ in 1983, insisted in November that GCHQ did not spend its time “listening to the telephone calls or reading the e-mails of the majority” of British citizens.

Sir Iain’s counterpart at the NSA, General Keith Alexander, alongside his deputy, John Inglis, are also stepping down later this year.

There is also an ongoing campaign pushing for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to resign for lying under oath by telling Congress the NSA did “not wittingly” collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans.

RT, 29.01.2014

January 30, 2014
Israeli Firms in Middle of NSA Spy Scandal

Two Israeli companies, including one exposed by EIR in 2001-02 as under investigation in the U.S. for being part of a massive Israeli espionage network (see EIR, Feb. 1, 2002), have been identified as playing a central role in handling the NSA’s acquisition of call information from major telecommunications companies.

* VERINT Systems, formerly known as Comverse Systems, a U.S.-based subsidiary of the Israeli Comverse Technologies, was reported by author and NSA expert James Bamford to have been designated by the NSA to process all the call information (metadata) obtained from Verizon. By the time it got the NSA contract, Comverse was already well-known as a leading firm in wiretapping, or what it called the “lawful interception market” for law-enforcement agencies. In 2002, about the time NSA launched its Stellar Wind operation, tapping into the major telecoms, former NSA Director Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan joined the Board of Directors of Comverse-Verint.

* NARUS, another Israeli company, similarly processes all the information obtained from AT&T for the NSA. Narus was founded in Israel in 1997, and in 2010 was acquired by Boeing. Narus’s NarusInsight supercomputer system, which was installed in AT&T’s San Francisco Internet facility and identified by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, gave rise to a famous 2006 class action lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, Hepting v. AT&T.

Additionally, AMDOCS, another Israeli telecommunications firm profiled by EIR in 2001-02, specializes in analyzing (i.e. data-mining) customer billing records for major U.S. telecoms; this data is similar to the “metadata” collected by the NSA on all phone calls in the U.S. Some investigators believe Amdocs is also involved in the NSA Stellar Wind program; indeed, it would be surprising if they were not.

Ha’aretz reported on June 8 that both Verint and Narus have ties to both the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Ha’aretz also raises the question of whether Mossad is a party to the intelligence-sharing arrangement between the U.S.’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ, Britain’s Cheltenham-based signals-intelligence agency.

larouchepac.com, June 12, 2013

July 2, 2013
GCHQ needs “ultra, ultra criminals”

Britons face a growing online threat from criminals, terrorists and hostile states, according to the UK’s first cyber security strategy.

Businesses, government and ordinary people are all at risk, it says.

The strategy has been published alongside an updated, wider National Security Strategy.

Its publication is a sign of the growing recognition within government of the need to bolster defences against a growing threat.

In line with a wider focus within the National Security Strategy on not just protecting the state but also citizens, the cyber-strategy encompasses protecting individuals from forms of fraud, identity theft and e-crime committed using technology as well as defending government secrets and businesses.

‘Attack capability’

Launching the strategy, security minister Lord West said: “We know that various state actors are very interested in cyber warfare. The terrorist aspect of this is the least (concern), but it is developing.”

He warned that future targets could include key businesses, the national power grid, financial markets and Whitehall departments.

He said: “We know terrorists use the internet for radicalisation and things like that at the moment, but there is a fear they will move down that path (of cyber attacks).

“As their ability to use the web and the net grows, there will be more opportunity for these attacks.”

He confirmed that the UK government has already faced cyber attacks from foreign states such as Russia and China.

But he denied that hackers had successfully broken into government systems and stolen secret information.

He also said he could not deny that the government had its own online attack capability, but he refused to say whether it had ever been used.

“It would be silly to say that we don’t have any capability to do offensive work from Cheltenham, and I don’t think I should say any more than that.”

‘Naughty boys’

Among those the government has turned to for help on cyber crime are former illegal hackers, Lord West added.

He said the government listening post GCHQ at Cheltenham had not employed any “ultra, ultra criminals” but needed the expertise of former “naughty boys” he said.

“You need youngsters who are deep into this stuff… If they have been slightly naughty boys, very often they really enjoy stopping other naughty boys,” he said.

Officials said e-crime crime is estimated to costs the UK several billion pounds a year.

Two new bodies will be established in the coming months as part of the strategy.

A dedicated Office of Cyber Security in the Cabinet Office will co-ordinate policy across government and look at legal and ethical issues as well as relations with other countries.

The second body will be a new Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) based at GCHQ.

This will bring people together from across government and from outside to get a better handle on cyber security issues and work out how to better protect the country, providing advice and information about the risks.

“CSOC’s aim will be to identify in real time what type of cyber attacks are taking place, where they come from and what can be done to stop them”, according to a Whitehall security official.

Experts say the “forensics” of detecting who is behind a cyber attack and attributing responsibility remains extremely difficult.

Officials said it would require input from those who had their own expertise in hackers. “We need youngsters,” an official said.

The range of potentially hostile cyber activity – from other states seeking to carry out espionage through criminal gangs to terrorists – is daunting.

Critical information

At one end of the spectrum, military operations – such as Russia’s conflict with Georgia last year – are now accompanied by attacks on computer systems.

The UK’s critical national infrastructure is also more reliant on technology than it was even five years ago and terrorists who have used the internet for fundraising and propaganda are also believed to have the intent – if not yet the capability- to carry out their own cyber-attacks.

Officials declined to give a figure of how many attacks on government computer networks take place each day.

In a speech in 2007, the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, explicitly mentioned Russia and China in the context of a warning that that “a number of countries continue to devote considerable time and energy trying to steal our sensitive technology on civilian and military projects, and trying to obtain political and economic intelligence at our expense. They do not only use traditional methods to collect intelligence but increasingly deploy sophisticated technical attacks, using the internet to penetrate computer networks.”

Officials said they were not aware of any “key pieces of information” that had gone missing yet but said that British companies had lost critical information.

The new Cyber Security Operations Centre will work closely with the designated parts of the critical national infrastructure and wider industry and officials say that business are keen for the government to take a lead but also share as much information as possible.

US President Barack Obama has been carrying out a similar re-organisation for defending US computer networks and British officials said the two countries were co-ordinating closely not least because of the intimate relationship between GCHQ and its US equivalent.

British officials believe that their government systems may also have fewer vulnerabilities than their US counterparts partly because they moved online later and have fewer connections between the internal government system and the rest of cyberspace to monitor.

Officials in the US and UK are also thought to be working on forms of offensive cyber-warfare capability but officials are unwilling to go into any details of what this might involve.

Some Comments:

CSOC’s aim will be to identify in real time what type of cyber attacks are taking place, where they come from and what can be done to stop them

Whitehall security official

It would be silly to say that we don’t have any capability to do offensive work from Cheltenham, and I don’t think I should say any more than that

Lord West, security minister

BBC

June 25, 2009
US intelligence rivalry flares over British connection

John Stokes

The CIA station in London is at the center of a bitter fight between different branches of the US intelligence community in Washington DC.

For years, the CIA has had the right to appoint the station chief who runs US intelligence operations in London and liaises with MI6 and GCHQ. Now, the National Security Agency is arguing that they and not the CIA should run intelligence operations in the UK because they have more people on the ground and the work they do has far greater value to both countries.

NSA have found useful allies in both Admiral Denny Blair, the Director of National Intelligence and General Jim Jones, the National Security Adviser who have been very receptive to the argument that intelligence form should follow function and reflect the realities of the 21st century.

Last month, Blair wrote a memo to US intelligence chiefs saying that in future the DNI would appoint Heads of Stations overseas. It was a clear directive from the man who runs all US intelligence and is appointed by the President and Congress to do so. However, Leon Panetta, who heads the CIA and is the former Chief of Staff to President Bill Clinton, wrote his own letter to top CIA officials saying they could disregard Blair’s note.

Panetta is a famous Washington bruiser and is well known for his take no prisoners style but such a confrontation has infuriated Blair who sees it as a direct challenge to his authority and battle has been joined. For once, Panetta may have misjudged the political winds as Congress is pushing hard for real intelligence reform and the CIA has fewer friends and less influence on Capitol Hill these days.

It is no coincidence that those pushing for change in the Obama administration have a military background and that the NSA is run by one of their own, General Keith Alexander. It’s also true that for decades NSA has chafed under CIA’s apparent seniority and the two agencies have been arch rivals for generations. As recently as the Bush administration a major joint operation between CIA and NSA which all involved agreed was vital to the future of US security was stopped after a senior CIA official refused to implement the project which he thought gave unnecessary influence to NSA.

The information revolution has placed further strains on the relationship. Twenty years ago, there was a clearer division of labour with NSA intercepting data on the move (email, faxes, phone calls) while the CIA targeted data at rest (documents, burglaring buildings). But recently the CIA has made a major push into the data gathering business arguing that the ones and zeros of the computer age are data and thus are fair game whether at rest or on the move.

There are thousands of Americans based in Britain who work for NSA and work closely with GCHQ. By comparison, the CIA station, based in the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, is important but a mere shadow of the NSA’s presence. Reality on the ground suggests that NSA will win this fight.

Spectator

10th June 2009

June 10, 2009