Ride the Lightning

NSA Surveillance Goes Worldwide: Foreign Cable Owners Cut Deals

July 10, 2013

Now why would we think that the NSA would only spy on communications in the U.S.? According to a recent Ars Technica story, the NSA is using a proxy telecommunications company to manage the information gathered by local telecom companies in foreign countries, creating internal corporate cells with access to foreign-owned fiber optic cables.

Over the weekend, the Brazilian newspaper O Globo and the UK newspaper The Guardian published articles alleging that the NSA was collecting and storing the e-mail and telephone records of millions of Brazilians through a program called FAIRVIEW. Wonderful irony in the naming. According to The Guardian, that program allows the U.S. to partner with “a large US telecommunications company, the identity of which is currently unknown, and that company then partners with telecoms in the foreign countries. Those partnerships allow the U.S. company access to those countries' telecommunications systems, and that access is then exploited to direct traffic to the NSA's repositories.”

A similarly broad surveillance has been reported on German citizens, with Der Spiegel alleging “the NSA systematically monitors and stores a large share of the country's telephone and Internet connection data,” which grabs “up to 20 million telephone calls and 10 million Internet data exchanges” on normal days.

Yet another weekend article in The Washington Post talked about how the U.S. has put pressure on foreign buyers of undersea fiber optic cable systems to allow the U.S. to maintain access to the communications that pass through the cables.

Using fiber optic network provider Global Crossing as an example, the paper reported that a decade ago, the originally American firm prepared to be sold to an Asian firm, but the U.S. worried about losing the potential to tap into the network when necessary. The U.S. stalled the sale for months while a team of lawyers from various agencies negotiated a deal with the new owners.

The deal was encapsulated in a publicly available “Network Security Agreement.” This document served as a template for other deals over the past decade, as foreign investors increasingly acquired pieces of the world’s telecommunications infrastructure. The FCC enforces these requirements during a network sale, using its own group of lawyers, dubbed "Team Telecom." (Well, it's better than FAIRVIEW).

Global Crossing's agreement stipulated that surveillance requests had to be handled by U.S. citizens with the appropriate clearance and “sworn to secrecy” and that the firm had to have a “Network Operations Center” on American soil that could be accessed by government officials “with 30 minutes of warning.”

I wonder how much of diplomatic relations will now effectively become cyberrelations. Foreign governments have got to be having conniptions over recent revelations. They may have known about the tip of the iceberg, but I think few realized how much data was being gathered abroad by the U.S.