<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<br>
<font face="Verdana">That someone could stoop so low!! This is so
very cheap... These guys have lost all sense of even basic
decency. And then US and UK also want to be global leaders on
Internet freedom.... From reading the below, there is no reason
that the emails and other forms of communication of civil society
groups trying to develop statements or other kinds of advoacy/
political strategies may not </font><font face="Verdana">be </font><font
face="Verdana">routinely accessed by 'them' - the champions of
'Internet freedom'....<br>
<br>
parminder <br>
<br>
<br>
</font>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On Tuesday 18 June 2013 06:32 PM, Diego
Rafael Canabarro wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CA+MV=uGCPhYgV__yVMAqapK1Vfe-1ETCVLQRxKGVzxx6kj_3Vg@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<p>GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20
summits</p>
<p>Exclusive: phones were monitored and fake internet cafes set up
to gather information from allies in London in 2009</p>
<p>Ewen MacAskill, Nick Davies, Nick Hopkins, Julian Borger and
James Ball<br>
The Guardian, Monday 17 June 2013<br>
Documents uncovered by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden,
reveal surveillance of G20 delegates' emails and BlackBerrys.
Photograph: Guardian</p>
<p>Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20
summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored
and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their
British government hosts, according to documents seen by the
Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes
which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read
their email traffic.</p>
<p>The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit
on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009
meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is
likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will
want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in
2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week.</p>
<p>The disclosure raises new questions about the boundaries of
surveillance by GCHQ and its American sister organisation, the
National Security Agency, whose access to phone records and
internet data has been defended as necessary in the fight
against terrorism and serious crime. The G20 spying appears to
have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an
advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing
allies such as South Africa and Turkey.</p>
<p>There have often been rumours of this kind of espionage at
international conferences, but it is highly unusual for hard
evidence to confirm it and spell out the detail. The evidence is
contained in documents – classified as top secret – which were
uncovered by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and seen by
the Guardian. They reveal that during G20 meetings in April and
September 2009 GCHQ used what one document calls
"ground-breaking intelligence capabilities" to intercept the
communications of visiting delegations.</p>
<p>This included:</p>
<p>• Setting up internet cafes where they used an email
interception programme and key-logging software to spy on
delegates' use of computers;</p>
<p>• Penetrating the security on delegates' BlackBerrys to monitor
their email messages and phone calls;</p>
<p>• Supplying 45 analysts with a live round-the-clock summary of
who was phoning who at the summit;</p>
<p>• Targeting the Turkish finance minister and possibly 15 others
in his party;</p>
<p>• Receiving reports from an NSA attempt to eavesdrop on the
Russian leader, Dmitry Medvedev, as his phone calls passed
through satellite links to Moscow.</p>
<p>The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in
principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime
minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including
briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British
ministers.</p>
<p>A briefing paper dated 20 January 2009 records advice given by
GCHQ officials to their director, Sir Iain Lobban, who was
planning to meet the then foreign secretary, David Miliband. The
officials summarised Brown's aims for the meeting of G20 heads
of state due to begin on 2 April, which was attempting to deal
with the economic aftermath of the 2008 banking crisis. The
briefing paper added: "The GCHQ intent is to ensure that
intelligence relevant to HMG's desired outcomes for its
presidency of the G20 reaches customers at the right time and in
a form which allows them to make full use of it." Two documents
explicitly refer to the intelligence product being passed to
"ministers".</p>
<p>One of the GCHQ documents. Photograph: Guardian</p>
<p>According to the material seen by the Guardian, GCHQ generated
this product by attacking both the computers and the telephones
of delegates.</p>
<p>One document refers to a tactic which was "used a lot in recent
UK conference, eg G20". The tactic, which is identified by an
internal codeword which the Guardian is not revealing, is
defined in an internal glossary as "active collection against an
email account that acquires mail messages without removing them
from the remote server". A PowerPoint slide explains that this
means "reading people's email before/as they do".</p>
<p>The same document also refers to GCHQ, MI6 and others setting
up internet cafes which "were able to extract key logging info,
providing creds for delegates, meaning we have sustained
intelligence options against them even after conference has
finished". This appears to be a reference to acquiring
delegates' online login details.</p>
<p>Another document summarises a sustained campaign to penetrate
South African computers, recording that they gained access to
the network of their foreign ministry, "investigated phone lines
used by High Commission in London" and "retrieved documents
including briefings for South African delegates to G20 and G8
meetings". (South Africa is a member of the G20 group and has
observer status at G8 meetings.)</p>
<p>Another excerpt from the GCHQ documents. Photograph: Guardian</p>
<p>A detailed report records the efforts of the NSA's intercept
specialists at Menwith Hill in North Yorkshire to target and
decode encrypted phone calls from London to Moscow which were
made by the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and other
Russian delegates.</p>
<p>Other documents record apparently successful efforts to
penetrate the security of BlackBerry smartphones: "New converged
events capabilities against BlackBerry provided advance copies
of G20 briefings to ministers … Diplomatic targets from all
nations have an MO of using smartphones. Exploited this use at
the G20 meetings last year."</p>
<p>The operation appears to have run for at least six months. One
document records that in March 2009 – the month before the heads
of state meeting – GCHQ was working on an official requirement
to "deliver a live dynamically updating graph of telephony call
records for target G20 delegates … and continuing until G20 (2
April)."</p>
<p>Another document records that when G20 finance ministers met in
London in September, GCHQ again took advantage of the occasion
to spy on delegates, identifying the Turkish finance minister,
Mehmet Simsek, as a target and listing 15 other junior ministers
and officials in his delegation as "possible targets". As with
the other G20 spying, there is no suggestion that Simsek and his
party were involved in any kind of criminal offence. The
document explicitly records a political objective – "to
establish Turkey's position on agreements from the April London
summit" and their "willingness (or not) to co-operate with the
rest of the G20 nations".</p>
<p>The September meeting of finance ministers was also the subject
of a new technique to provide a live report on any telephone
call made by delegates and to display all of the activity on a
graphic which was projected on to the 15-sq-metre video wall of
GCHQ's operations centre as well as on to the screens of 45
specialist analysts who were monitoring the delegates.</p>
<p>"For the first time, analysts had a live picture of who was
talking to who that updated constantly and automatically,"
according to an internal review.</p>
<p>A second review implies that the analysts' findings were being
relayed rapidly to British representatives in the G20 meetings,
a negotiating advantage of which their allies and opposite
numbers may not have been aware: "In a live situation such as
this, intelligence received may be used to influence events on
the ground taking place just minutes or hours later. This means
that it is not sufficient to mine call records afterwards –
real-time tip-off is essential."</p>
<p>In the week after the September meeting, a group of analysts
sent an internal message to the GCHQ section which had organised
this live monitoring: "Thank you very much for getting the
application ready for the G20 finance meeting last weekend … The
call records activity pilot was very successful and was well
received as a current indicator of delegate activity …</p>
<p>"It proved useful to note which nation delegation was active
during the moments before, during and after the summit. All in
all, a very successful weekend with the delegation telephony
plot."<br>
<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
</body>
</html>