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A NEW RAFT of documents released by Edward Snowden to a German newspaper allegedly details UK authorities’ access to Ireland’s internet traffic.
However, the Government has remained silent on the issue this morning.
The documents, published earlier this week by Süddeutsche Zeitung with the Irish connections identified by The Irish Times, revealed an extensive list of submarine communication cables that the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has access to.
One of these is SOLAS, a 232km cable that stretches from Kilmore Quay in Wexford to Oxwich Bay in the United Kingdom.
Owners of the cable contacted by The Irish Times denied any knowledge of the activity.
Two other cables, ESAT1 from Kilmore Quay to Sennen Cove and ESAT2 from Southport, also appear on a list of cables.
Earlier this week, as part of an inquiry into the murder of UK solider Lee Rigby, it was revealed that UK authorities collect so much data that they are unable to access or monitor it all.
“However, the resources required to process the vast quantity of data involved mean that, at any one time, GCHQ can only process approximately *** of what they can access,” the report read.
As detailed in this inquiry earlier this week, some security services do have access to internet traffic to facilitate investigations.
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The Smithwick Tribunal relied unquestioningly on MI5 information without ever considering anything else – and Callinan and Shatter were out like a rehearsed shot !
Paddy is a bit too smart those ould shenanigans now so he is !
Patrick, this government is the same as all others that went before it: it regards our sovereignty in the same way as it regards us i.e. with utter contempt!!
The government probably gave them the go ahead spineless lap dog muppets that they are ,the same blueshirt fraud labour clowns done nothing about the Dublin Monaghan bombings in 1974.
.
Can we just call a moratorium on the Father Ted references please? They pop up on every single page here. It was a good show – and it’s about 15 years old. Move on.
This is a disgrace!, it’s an illegal act against an independent state and it’s citizens, I recommend people call their constituency office and ask their TD what is going to be done about this. The British Ambassador should be told to make a statement immediately
Sure they have to monitor the sinister element orchestrating poor dumb Paddy’s resistance to the water tax and theft of his natural resorces that the Dame keeps telling them about.
Tapping govts is business as usual, you think G2 does not keep tabs on British ministers dark secrets? The Brits have had every phone of every cabinet member tapped since way back when. It’s not always for tapping your ‘enemies’ like people wonder why the yanks tapped Merkel, it could be anything from doing it on behalf of their companies to get a contract (the line between corporate and govt being very blurry these days esp with the power of money / donations in politics) to getting an inside scoop on what negotiating strategy she’ll use at trade talks, prob the same reason the Brits tap our cabinet.
Why the general population? That’s where it gets creepy, in a lot of security service circles, since the tech came around there has been a ”collect everything .. you never know what you might need it for” atittude, that’s a direct quote from former NSA head. Now you can see how even with security being the motive, if you collect it all, how open to abuse that is…
Dermot
First of all you should persuade us that you’re Irish so we can evaluate your moronic demand for the Taoiseach to carry our his sworn duty in respect of the closing of an embassy!
Secondly you should let us know where you reside so that any such evaluation takes into account your mental stability and appropriate care.
In order to humor you oar has you could indicate where this swearing took place and who was present. You might indicate the form of word used and any information about the ceremonial nature of this event.
International Law has a number of issues with the use of any form of military assault on the embassy of a foreign State. You might usefully advise us as to which legal tenets you rely upon in terms of your advice/ instructions to the Taoiseach.
Dermot………have you lost the plot entirely or just somewhat on this occasion?
Dermot, i may be wrong here, but I’m not entirely sure it’s accurate to state that the “sworn duty” of the Taoiseach is to invade Britain? I’m open to correction though…
Adam ……
whether it is it or not I don’t think Enda knows or cares what it is ….and that is the whole point of the silence isn’t it ?
Simon Coveney and Frances Fitzgerald should be spitting fire – unless of course they use titbits from the MI5 to their advantage which would be fine except heroin is on the increase not decrease ….
The govt should shut off their access as best they can but we need to find out which of the two is happening, are they doing it without or with the govts permission, either way it’s illegal.
Our own agencies G2 and Special Branch do not engage in mass surveillance, and only recently very strict wiretapping laws were passed by this govt so I doubt they know about it. There are ways they can monitor our traffic anyway but we should do whatever we can to disrupt it.
Our agencies give them unfettered cooperation with AlQaeda and other terror groups that operate here, there is no excuse for wiretapping us other than the main reason the US does it: economic espionage.
If the govt knew about this on any level then they will be out on their asses very very soon.
Firstly, this should not come a a surprise to you. The U.K authorities can and do monitor our communications for both political and economic advantage. This is actually old news as this 2008 ECHR case highlights:-
In the appropriately named Liberty v. The United Kingdom the European Court of Human Rights has held that a system of mass surveillance operated by the UK government to spy on all telephone calls, faxes and emails to and from Ireland was in breach of the right to privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights
The case, brought by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, Liberty and British-Irish Rights Watch dealt with a system operated by the Ministry of Defence which monitored, between 1990 and 1997, up to 10,000 simultaneous telephone channels coming from Dublin to London and on to the continent. During this time the MoD intercepted all public telecommunications, including telephone, facsimile and e-mail communications, carried on microwave radio between two of British Telecom’s radio stations (at Clwyd and Chester), a link which carried much of Ireland’s telecommunications traffic. Those telephone calls, faxes and emails were then stored and filtering using search engines and keyword lists before being passed to intelligence analysts.
So you see Brian, this kind of surveillance is going on along time. Irish Governments have been aware of it and I am sure that there is a limit to the amount of sensitive data that can be sent via email etc.
What can the Government do about it? Well not alot really. Be aware of it and taper how you send sensitive material.
It’s not a surprise to me, it’s a surprise that they are tapping economic and political data, because that’s business as usual as I said above, we do it too. It’s quite another to do mass surveillance, USA style, without much filtering, they’ve never done that before to Ireland because the tech did not even exist for it 10 years ago, collecting everything nearly was not feasable until v v recent advances in IT tech.
We need more detail on what if any filtering they are using, are they just continuing to mine economic and political data, as they always did, just using a diff technique or are they monitoring the general population. The latter would be odd, there are all sort of genuine national security reasons to do certain kinds of mass surveillance in your own country and sinister ones in terms of supressin dissent, but to do it in someone elses is odd. I know they worry about us being an AQ base, a justified worry given we have been so used, but casting a net as wide as they appear to be is not on.
There really is norhing strange about sharing communications networks, we don’t know how much Irish comms are being monitored and for most people it really doesn’t matter.
Chris – it’s illegal , it’s invasion of privacy – it’s perverted and paranoid ….so if you approve then you must approve of such behaviour or be involved in it …and don’t think the soft middle of road postings is fooling anyone ….
I was just waiting for neo-con blue-shirt Chris Kirk to start telling us again that ‘this is completely normal carry on’ I mean just listen to him; ‘we don’t know how much Irish comms are being monitored and for most people it really doesn’t matter’….. talk about an Orwellian capitulation, just lie down and take it Kirk is that it? where’s your back bone and sense of national pride?
They don’t do keyword filters with those words all it would do is give them 1m+ news articles and comment sections. They search for stuff they know to be terrorist code word or code word combos.
See filtering for that stuff I think everyone understands, but that they are going down the US route, collecting EVERYTHING ….that’s way too wide a net cast and way too open to dispute. Another thing worries me, I recently became aware theres a lot of ”cross spying”, to get around their own local laws the UK and US spy on each others populations and cross match their info…if the Irish Govt is involved in some sort of twisted deal like that to engage British security services to do mass surveillance…then the GUBU era and Charlie Haughey tapping a journalists phone is going to look like petty theft in comparison to the size of the scandal…
Now lets not give the conspiracy theorists this one. Remember their past predictions on Ukraine causing WWIII and an ebola outbreak rampaging through Europe, remember their track record.
The real motives are two fold:
1. Overzealous ‘securocrats’ as SF calls them
2. Political and economic espionage
..but the motives the conspiracy theorists give are not so pedestrian, they range from a world govt to murdering 5/6ths of the wold population and controlling the rest through microchips and contrails…
A broken clock being kinda sorta right about just one of the 100s of crazy things they come out with one time does not a credible source make.
Ryan it was actually WHO (world health organisation) and all news stations which were pumping out scaremongering that ebola would majorly break out in Europe and predicted 10,000 new cases of the disease a week…not conspiracy people who were saying the complete opposite..which turned out right.
It was the EU, NATO and the Americans that said the Ukraine situation could result in WW3…
It means Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Microsoft, Yahoo and other data processors in Ireland get their data through cables that are monitored by GCHQ.
It also indicates, that however hard the Government pretend that we are ready for cloud computing, we’re not. And unless we see more direct cables landing here, we will never be.
Direct to where?
It has become evident via Wikileaks that every govt spies on every other govt they can, along with their own citizens.
It is also not just for military or other security reasons but also for commercial advantage. It is a sad state of affairs and an unfortunate fact of life. Righteous indignation will not achieve anything constructive.
If you have somthing private to send or receive, encrypt it. Strongly. And anonymise via Tor.
The only reason to bypass your neighbouring country would be if you see danger in relations with them breaking down or possibility of going to war with them.
Joking aside. We need to protect ourselves from extremism, drug trafficing, human trafficing, european wide child abuse etc. If Britain has the ability to help us monitor the situation then it should be cautiously welcomed.
Windom – this is an Irish site – there are no Islamic extremists here and if there are then they have dollars in their cupboards – toddle of with your bullshit good lad !
Can you say that for certain Dermot?
Where is the cold hard evidence to prove that no such extremist cells exist in the Republic or the North?
Afterall China, Russia, US, UK, Belgium, Austrailia etc are really worried about the extremism that exists there. Why would be any different?
Pol the guy that was on the Late late Show as some sort of hero freedom fighter for Syria was supposed to have half a million dollars stolen from his house in Dublin – he was not an Irish extremist – he was a C.I.A. operative ….
The north could be a different matter – the muslims in Northern Ireland have a reason to dislike their government !
..why would we be any different – we don’t send troops to the middle East – we have no beef with them and they have no beef with us – except perhaps that we haven’t produced politIcians who have the balls to stand up to the injustice- probably too distracted going through british sourced data !
Remamber one thing last night on the R.T.E. we had a report that Dublin was the safest place to access free wifi …how ironic (sic) the timing – Mr. Backhurst and all being a fellow country man of Richie Boucher isn’t lost on us either !
I think we all must cool off and stop talking sh*te. Secret Services have been monitoring ALL types of OUR communication for SECURITY REASONS and simply to know whats going on in our kitchens and bedrooms. Those who feel surprised and shocked and angry, please don’t waste your precious time because nothing, I repeat NOTHING will be changed. I will be surprised if Brits and Americans were not spying on their own citizens, don’t mention the Arab countries and Russkies.
I think we don’t know the full extent to which we are monitored. Governments and Media have well brainwashed us the public so why some ppl feel shocked or surprised?
This article is yesterday news. For our governments we are just numbers, our democracy is an illusion that serves the interests of the richest elite and we should stop talking about being an independent state, IMF which is owned by Rothschilds family ( owns half a world) cares only about how the elite can multiply its wealth.
The fact that water charges were introduced is a direct consequence of IMF requirements – don’t fool yourself thinking that Edna can have a slight possibility to maneuver and take decisions. All decided in Berlin and in IMF headquarters.
It is no wonder the British ‘Intelligence’ services need to know what is going on as yet another of their fear porn dramas in support of it’s military campaigns overseas is completely unraveled.
Chris, you are a clear example of how little the current Government and their party members are not listening to or trying to understand what the people consider important or what the people consider to be good governance.
Every time one of you open your mouths or write comments like you just did, another voter switches allegiance. Well done man, keep it up. FG/Labour/FF have overtaken Ian Paisley as the main instruments by which SF gain in popularity. Go raibh míle maith agaibh :)
What a load of crap. This article is just trying to stir up a English-V-Irish argument. One of main transatlantic cable between Europe and America goes through Ireland. You can bet any amount of money that not only is the UK tapping it, so to is Ireland, and France, Germany, Russia and god knows anyone else! Big woop, countries with spy agency’s are spying. What ever will the journal.ie think up next?
They want to hack us. Fine let them. We should retaliate and develop a nasty virus or something or drop a political bombshell like re opening that case court case that amnesty international want us to open about British government torture in the north that will cause them havoc. To ignore this and let it go unpunished will only invite more of it.
GSOC and US homeland are monitorin us to fo ck for years nothing new there
China are monitoring the US and Russian is monitoring everyone except Antarctica
Do people think it’s a coincidence all the major IT companies are USA
So I’d like to say to the Oxford numptie reading this
Po g mo tho in
Would this solve the mystery of GSOC being bugged I wonder? UK spying make sense as they are extremely accessible from us and with common security a nutter might get through easily. I reckon govt were aware but ignored it on basis of it would only cause them more trouble. Well now it has.
Has Leo nothing to say about this??? It’s nothing to do with the Health Service so he should give us his tuppence worth as per normal…
*silence of the gaels*
I’m not sure if this point is being missed or willfully ignored, but as much as it’s an Irish cable, it’s also a UK cable. The British government is tapping a British internet cable which happens to terminate in Ireland
Ryan its fantastic to read someone who’s head isnt buried in the sand like so many in this country. Your notes on the line between corporate and gvt, and the US main goal of economic espionage is particularly refreshing. Its just nice to know theres people out there who can see the truth as i do, it is hiding in plain sight, its just sad how people actually choose to not look. Our own govt is made of economic backhand artists too, agin their own people.
It’s a wire, with one end in Ireland and one end in England. The English end of the wire is no doubt subject to English law, and accordingly I’m sure what they are doing is fully legal (from their perspective).
It’s wrong and should be challenged. But Its likely sure we can do nothing unless we turn off the internet.
i don’t feel this is so top secret or confidential. any company wanting fibre connectivity to another country would want to know diverse fibre lines undersea etc…before ordering from the telecom company. if one wanted this information it is easy to find it out.
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