US, UK Spy Agencies Snooping on Middle East Via Red Sea Cables
The mushrooming of fiber optic cable networks in the Middle East has provided a tool to Western intelligence agencies to make inroads into the region’s sensitive data and communications traffic.
The Five Eyes, a signals intelligence (SIGINT) alliance of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, has been prying on the region since decades, according to new findings.
The key players in this “unholy network” include the US’s National Security Agency (NSA), and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
The Middle East region, owing to its strategic importance and sinister agendas of Western regimes including the US and UK, remains a breeding ground of surveillance for the West.
Apart from conventional forms of surveillance like tapping phone lines, the region is also a hotbed of mass surveillance due to complex matrix of fiber optic cables.
According to a report in Middle East Eye, spy agencies have tapped into fibre optic cables to intercept vast volumes of data, from phone calls to the content of emails, to web browsing history and metadata. Financial, military and government data also passes through cables.
Such intercepted data is sifted by analysts, while filters extract material based on the NSA and GCHQ’s 40,000 search terms – subjects, phone numbers and email addresses – for closer inspection.
In the area spanning the Red Sea and Iran, there are no terrestrial fiber optic cables crossing the Arabian peninsula, the report notes. All internet traffic going from Europe to Asia either passes through the Caucuses and Iran, using the Europe Persia Express Gateway (EPEG), or via Egyptian and Red Sea routes.
Egypt is a main choke point, handling traffic from Europe to the Middle East, Asia and Africa, and vice versa. The 15 cables that cross Egypt between the Mediterranean and Red Sea handle between 17 percent to 30 percent of the world population’s internet traffic, or the data of 1.3 billion to 2.3 billion people, the report notes.
The Five Eyes alliance has information-sharing arrangements in place with some European countries and Japan and South Korea to intercept data from Russia and China. The NSA also has a relationship with Sweden, since it is a landing point for all cable traffic from Russia’s Baltic region.
In contrast, the US has less formal information-sharing relationships with the Middle East region including Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE.
Source: Press TV