Vodafone reveals existence of secret wires that allow state surveillance - Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jun/06/vodafone-reveals-secret-wires-allowing-state-surveillance

Vodafone, one of the world’s largest mobile phone groups, has revealed the existence of secret wires that allow government agencies to listen to all conversations on its networks, saying they are widely used in some of the 29 countries in which it operates in Europe and beyond.

The company has broken its silence on government surveillance in order to push back against the increasingly widespread use of phone and broadband networks to spy on citizens, and will publish its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report on Friday . At 40,000 words, it is the most comprehensive survey yet of how governments monitor the conversations and whereabouts of their people.

The sheer scale of this is shocking to me. And look at those metadata numbers for Australia! How the fuck is that justifiable?!

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The United Kingdom, with a population of about 63 million, made 514k
requests, and Australia, with a population of about 22 million, made 685k requests - which equates to roughly one in every 32 citizens.

Good point made on the r/australia thread regarding the ratio of requests to population for UK vs AU. Just abhorrent.

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This along with all the NSA spying stuff gives me a grim outlook on the internet security at the moment. If anything, it should make corporations more enthusiastic in spending money developing more security technologies which will hopefully benefit the public. But it’s still very depressing.
The new’s in America of net neutrality being compromised by Comcast isn’t very good either.