The fibre optic cables originate near the southern French city of Marseille and continuing through Pakistan and India. PHOTO: FILE
The US National Security Agency (NSA) has collected sensitive data on key telecommunications cables between Europe, north Africa and Asia, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday.
Der Spiegel quoted NSA papers dating from February and labelled ‘top secret’ and ‘not for foreigners’ describing the agency’s success in spying on the so-called Sea-Me-We 4 undersea cable system.
The fibre optic cables originate near the southern French city of Marseille and links Europe with North Africa and the Gulf states, continuing through Pakistan and India to Malaysia and Thailand.
“Among the companies that hold ownership stakes in it are France Telecom, now known as Orange and still partly government-owned, and Telecom Italia Sparkle,” Der Spiegel said.
It said NSA specialists had hacked an internal website belonging to the operator consortium to mine documents about technical infrastructure including circuit mapping and network management information.
“More operations are planned in the future to collect information about this and other cable systems,” Der Spiegel quoted the NSA documents as saying.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 30th, 2013.
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freedom of steal.