Maybe people of interest to GCHQ were using Belgian telephones.
Belgium: Oi, Brits, explain why Belgacom hack IPs pointed at you and your GCHQ
GCHQ’s rumoured hacking operation against Belgacom came back into the spotlight yesterday after a local newspaper revealed more tantalising snippets from a Belgian judicial investigation into the attack. Originally having come to light thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures from American spy agency files he …
COMMENTS
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Friday 26th October 2018 10:00 GMT Peter2
GCHQ's job is to intercept communications, break the encryption and hand plain text usable information over to the people in charge.
The USA compromised the UN communications, it would be terminally naive to expect that the GHCQ wouldn't have targeted the EU parliament and EU commission's communications.
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Friday 26th October 2018 10:30 GMT Teiwaz
The USA compromised the UN communications, it would be terminally naive to expect that the GHCQ wouldn't have targeted the EU parliament and EU commission's communications.
This is why the UK isn't that popular. We send snooty MEPs over who have a 'don't like foreigners attitude' and hack them instead of asking nicely, then boast about our good relations and partnerships.
No wonder we're not trusted with Space related contracts now we're leaving if that was our track record while a member.
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Friday 26th October 2018 11:52 GMT I ain't Spartacus
It's funny though. When there's a desperate need for intel on terrorism in Europe, our security services are dead popular. And strangely the same is true when it comes to the requirement for planes and troops to guard Eastern Europe.
I suspect your problem is that you need a more nuanced view of international relations.
Was Merkel really pissed off when it turned out the NSA were hacking her mobile? If so, was she in fact annoyed with her intel people for letting it happen? Or the US for trying?
We employ spies to read other people's mail. It's dashed ungentlemanly, but sometimes very useful. So people take a public position when it's revealed - but that's not always what they're really thinking.
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Tuesday 20th November 2018 08:57 GMT FlamingDeath
Which security service are you referring to?
Is it the security services presented to you by their PR teams?
Or is it the security services that formulates relationships with t̶e̶r̶r̶o̶r̶i̶s̶t̶s moderate rebels to carry out false flag attacks and proxy wars at the bequest of our mentally unstable deepstate
The phrase "Hearts & Minds™" means something very different to me than what I suspect it means to you
If you think our security services are good people, you're wrong. A lot of them are bonafide sociopaths
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Friday 26th October 2018 12:03 GMT Steve Channell
Belgian terrorists
Before we go all Snowdon about mass surveillance, it is worth remembering that the terrorists that attacked Paris originated in Brussels, where the security services are useless (much like everything run in that City).. and British Intelligence is the only such service in Europe not tarnished by association with the Gestapo or KGB.
If they happen to pick up on the wittering of Politicians... all well and good, somebody should have an idea of what is going to happen...
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Friday 26th October 2018 12:46 GMT BebopWeBop
Re: Belgian terrorists
and British Intelligence is the only such service in Europe not tarnished by association with the Gestapo or KGB.
Are you so sure of that? I seem to remember much of British Intelligence being run by the KGB.And Philby, Blunt et al were just the ones they found.....
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Friday 26th October 2018 15:16 GMT Peter2
Re: Belgian terrorists
Are you so sure of that? I seem to remember much of British Intelligence being run by the KGB.And Philby, Blunt et al were just the ones they found.....
I think what he means is that British Intelligence is an honest spy outfit that covertly seeks information to pass onto parts of Her Majesties Government, whereas both the KGB and the Gestapo (though he probably means stasi here) had something of a habit of torturing information out of people they didn't like, or re-educating them in a Gulag in Siberia. Or just killing them.
By contrast, the most dodgy conduct uncovered about GCHQ is them discovering that somebody is smuggling drugs into the country in a particular vehicle and somebody in GCHQ then phones customs up and tells them to do a "random" search on that vehicle with specially trained sniffer dogs, and to exercise their selective amnesia by forgetting that GCHQ phoned.
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Friday 26th October 2018 14:51 GMT Teiwaz
Re: Belgian terrorists
Before we go all Snowdon about mass surveillance, it is worth remembering that the terrorists that attacked Paris originated in Brussels, where the security services are useless
[Hands to cheeks in shock] Of course how could I forget, the ever efficient British were able to step in on the toes of the useless Belgians and stop that....
Oh, wait, they didn't.
and British Intelligence is the only such service in Europe not tarnished by association with the Gestapo or KGB.
Ah, yes. The 'it could never happen here' mentality. The perfect blinkered viewpoint that is almost guarenteed to ensure it will at some point this century if thinking doesn't change.
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Friday 26th October 2018 18:24 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: Belgian terrorists
British Intelligence is the only such service in Europe not tarnished by association with the Gestapo or KGB.
ROFL.... Seriously ROFL...
I guess you are not old enough to remember Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and the other KGB spies that worked for British Intelligence...
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Friday 26th October 2018 19:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Belgian terrorists @Steve Davies 3
ROFL.... Seriously ROFL...
I think you're missing the point of the argument. The infiltration of British intelligence by the KGB wasn't voluntary on the part of the British agencies. However, rather too many of the European intelligence agencies co-operated either voluntarily, or to serve their own interests.
By your logic, the Belgians "co-operated" with GCHQ by virtue of being hacked. That doesn't work for me, although I'll grant you that additional facts might yet show it to be true.
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Friday 26th October 2018 21:23 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Belgian terrorists
British Intelligence is the only such service in Europe not tarnished by association with the Gestapo or KGB.
British Intelligence's association with the KGB is so close that when their people want to retire or fancy a change, we offer them a job. Oleg Gordievsky, for example.
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Friday 26th October 2018 09:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bungling Brits ...
The first rule of spying on your allies is to never get caught spying on your allies.
Looks like the rest of the world has an(other) stick with which to beat the UK. Luckily the UK doesn't need any support from around the world, despite Russia queering the WTO, Australia insisting on zero-tariffs, and Argentina deciding now is a very good time to talk Falklands before talking trade.
Because if you did need that support, having been caught with your hands in someone elses till (so to speak) is probably the worst hand you could have dealt yourselves. It's not as if you're the US, is it ?
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Friday 26th October 2018 11:37 GMT I ain't Spartacus
No. It doesn't tell us who ordered what, or even what they were after. The NSA know about most things GCHQ do. As is true in reverse. This is long-term intelligence cooperation that is older than most people alive - let alone outlasting most people's careers. I'm sure they keep secrets from each other - but they've been working so closely together since World War II that the cooperation is probably habit at almost every level of the organisations.
The target of this operation was supposedly comms in the MIddle East and Africa. Though I'm sure they took time to spy on other stuff while they were there. They're professionally nosy bastards after all...
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Friday 26th October 2018 10:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: If you believe that, I have ...
To be fair, we are constantly advised in these forums that hacks from China might not be Chinese, or those from Russia aren't actually Russian, and so on, so why should hacks from the UK necessarily be British? Did they leave little jpegs of bowler hats, and evidence of innumerable requests for cups of tea everywhere or something? :-)
Nb: Not that I actually think GCHQ didn't do this one - wouldn't surprise me at all [1]
[1] I have to say something like this or I'll probably be accused of being part of the UK-trollfactory that masquerades as members of the Upper Worthington Railway Modeling Society's Afternoon Tea Arrangements committee [2].
[2] Unless it's a frightfully clever double bluff! [3]
[3] Do you all think that a dozen extra scones for this weekend's get together should be sufficient?
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Friday 26th October 2018 11:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: If you believe that, I have ...
"UK-trollfactory that masquerades as members of the Upper Worthington Railway Modeling Society's Afternoon Tea Arrangements committee"
And that's your annual bonus down the drain, tovarishch. Don't forget to wear rubber gloves when opening doors. You're not supposed actually to give away the plot.
...perhaps GCHQ has been so infiltrated by the GRU that, as in the Philby days, nobody knows who's spying on who any more.
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Friday 26th October 2018 11:40 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: If you believe that, I have ...
[3] Do you all think that a dozen extra scones for this weekend's get together should be sufficient?
Shit! Shit! Shit! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!
Oh sorry. Wrong code. That's the code for prepare for disinformation or distraction of journalists in the next news cycle. "The macaroons are looking particularly delicious" is the code for all-out nuclear war.
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Friday 26th October 2018 12:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: If you believe that, I have ...
Clearly the Upper Worthington Railway Modeling Society's Afternoon Tea Arrangements committee is a genuine committee.
The ones you need to look out for are the Railway Modeling Society of Upper Worthington's Afternoon Tea Arrangements committee.
Thanks. Mine's the one with Judean people on the front.
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Friday 26th October 2018 10:48 GMT werdsmith
Re: Really?
If you believe that, I have a wonderful bridge I can sell you..
Hi there, my name’s McCulloch, I’ll buy your facing stones from your old bridge (which I’ve been to look at and had surveyed) and I’ll use it in my new Lake Havasu City and make millions of $$$$ profit from it thank you.
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Friday 26th October 2018 10:15 GMT Wellyboot
Other angles
UK & Belgium have a very long standing (currently via EU & NATO) security relationship.
Perhaps we were spying on Belgium because their security service (like ours) has inconvenient rules about spying on its own people.
Perhaps as the state hosting both the EU & NATO headquarters there are a lot of 3rd party countries doing sneaky beaky stuff that we both are quite keen to keep tabs on.
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Friday 26th October 2018 11:48 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: Other angles
As I understand it, Belgium's security services haven't been all that cooperative historically. Although I don't know if that's because they don't cooperate - or just don't have the information to share. Certainly lots of people popped out of the shadows after the Paris and Brussels attacks to complain about pisspoor intelligence sharing from Belgium. But I think that's because they weren't actually collecting all that much info on their internal terrorist networks - which have emerged as being quite extensive since.
So I don't know if the Belgians weren't playing ball, hence we hacked them. Or perhaps they were even too polite to read the mail going through Belgiacom and so had nothing to share.
It was nice of GCHQ to wait for the year I cancelled my Belgacom mobile contract, before they started the hack... Like I believe that they weren't hacking them before. Echelon was a big story for about 6 months, when I was living in Brussels. And I've no sympathy, given what the buggers charged me - they could at least have spent some of it on security...
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Friday 26th October 2018 12:28 GMT rg287
Re: Other angles
Perhaps as the state hosting both the EU & NATO headquarters there are a lot of 3rd party countries doing sneaky beaky stuff that we both are quite keen to keep tabs on.
I have no doubt that there's an element of this. Lower level NATO <Classified> documents will be in the Kremlin before they've been read by everyone on the official circulation list. It's blatantly obvious that you'd want to be keeping an eye on who is talking to who, or sharing what and where - and if Belgian spooks aren't doing it (or aren't sharing), then you do it yourself.
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Friday 26th October 2018 12:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Other angles
"Lower level NATO <Classified> documents will be in the Kremlin before they've been read by everyone on the official circulation list."
This has probably got worse since we invited a number of countries into NATO that were were formerly part of the Soviet Union and where a substantial chunk of their citizens are of Russian origin, some of whom may side with Moscow.
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Friday 26th October 2018 19:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Other angles
This has probably got worse since we invited a number of countries into NATO that were were formerly part of the Soviet Union
Well, the Yanks were the architects of NATO expansion in the hope of weakening Russia, so they can't really complain about any downsides. They'd have evaluated the possible consequences beforehand, and presumably accepted all the downsides.
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Monday 29th October 2018 16:53 GMT mwnci
Re: Other angles
100% reciprocal arrangement - "Err....Mr Smith, would you mind keeping an eye on this gentleman"..."Why certainly Mr Peeters, we've certainly had some concerns about that gentleman in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek for a while"..."Why James, thank you, these National Laws on surveillance are so tedious".."Don't worry old chap, we are on the ball".
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Friday 26th October 2018 10:43 GMT Dan 55
Go El Reg!
GCHQ has a long-standing policy of refusing to comment on its actions, though a sample of the meaningless boilerplate it issues on all such occasions can be read towards the end of this 2014 article.
If they just use the opportunity to reinforce the NLP du jour (e.g. strong and stable), they don't deserve a place in the article.
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Friday 26th October 2018 19:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Yawn
The newsworthy bit is that they got caught, which is less common.
Not these days. Pretty commonplace for them to get caught, and in may instances (eg Skripal) they wanted to be caught.
Old fashioned spying continues much as it always has, and never sees the light of day. What we see in the press isn't the stuff that went wrong, its the stuff that one - or both - sides wanted us to see.
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Monday 29th October 2018 21:09 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Yawn
"Old fashioned spying continues much as it always has, and never sees the light of day. "
The vast majority of spying and intelligence gathering is reputed to take place in the newspaper reading rooms of public libraries with absolutely no cloak and dagger stuff or clandestine meetings involved at all.
Old men read papers, take notes and see what stories on the back pages simply stop being talked about - there are far more clues in that than in anything that might be said, or kept secret all along.
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Friday 26th October 2018 12:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
All true.....but.........
...........it's the flagrant hypocrisy that I can't stand!!
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BAD....if the Russians or Chinese or the Equifax hackers are doing it..........
.....but EXCELLENT if it's GCHQ.
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There are NO 'GOOD GUYS' out there.
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....AND one of these days some trivial stupid mistake could cause a real war....not just a "cyber" event!
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Friday 26th October 2018 15:28 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: All true.....but.........
Your quote is wrong. Von Clausewitz said that "Warfare is diplomacy by another means". But as I understand it, that's a mis-translation. His actual meaning was that warfare is just another of the various tools that make up your diplomatic options.
Also I don't think that cyberattacks are neccessarily war by another means. It depends what you do. If you blow up a power station that might be an act of war - if you use a cyberattack to disable it, then you could argue that's the same thing.
As for spying, you're both wrong. Spying is mostly about avoiding war. That's the reason that diplomats do so much of it, and are punished so lightly when caught. Note that after the attempted murder of the Skripals a bunch of Western governments got annoyed and kicked out a bunch of Russian spies posing as diplomats. Spies that they'd known about for years. But had continued to allow to operate, because they knew who they were and so could try to spy on them while they were spying. But also because we knew the Russians would retaliate by kicking out our spies working under diplomatic cover in Moscow.
This is why missions like BRIXMIS were allowed to operate freely in East Germany, throughout the Cold War. Because in exchange we allowed Russians to wander West Germany, looking at our military exercises - and thus both were reassured that there were no immediate preparations for war - and nobody ever pressed the nuclear panic button.
Diplomatically the penalties for getting caught eavesdropping are red faces all round, and being summoned to the Foreign Ministry for an interview without coffee - and the poor ambassador getting ranted at.
I cannot think of a passive spying operation that has got even close to risking a war - let alone actually starting one.
The one I can remember where the British government were actually embarrassed was in the 90s. Where our genuine diplomats had been asked to help SIS out in some skullduggery or other. And so real FCO diplomats got PNG'd for spying, who were actually guilty of it. As opposed to the odd case where the KGB screwed up and deported some poor sod who wasn't a spy - or often where we'd deport more of their spies than we had spies for them to deport - so ordinary diplomats got used to make up the numbers.
In general the Russians don't employ local nationals in their embassies. So a lot of the GRU people aren't posing as diplomats, but are there as drivers / secretaries / cleaners / office managers. Which means they've got more nationals to deport - and probably more spies in place. Whereas most countries employ locals for those jobs, as it's so much cheaper.
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