2.
The nature and scale of bulk surveillance under the s8(4) Regime
38.
In
its
Observations,
the
Government admits
that
it
“intercepts
communications in ‘bulk’” at “the level of communications cables” (§1.21).
The ISC report similarly found that “[b]ulk interception is conducted on
external communications” and that, “GCHQ’s bulk interception is used [(a)]
to investigate the communications of individuals already known to pose a
threat; or [(b)] to generate new intelligence leads, for example to find
terrorist plots, cyber attacks or other threats to national security”.13 The
ISC’s choice of terminology was deliberate. It explained that since GCHQ’s
“bulk interception” systems are used to access an “extremely large” number
of individuals’ communications, “‘bulk’ remains an appropriate term to use
when describing this capability”.14
39.
The Government claims that “the resources required to process the data
involved means that at any one time GCHQ in fact only accesses a fraction
of that small percentage of bearers it has the ability to access”
(Observations, §1.23). But even interception of a small number of fibre
optic cables – and the Snowden disclosures suggest the UK is intercepting
more than 200 cables landing in the UK – would give the Government
access to a very large amount of data.15 The TAT-14, for example, is a
transatlantic cable system, consisting of four pairs of fibres – two active,
two backup – with landing stations in the US, UK and a number of other
European states.16 The capacity of the TAT-14 is 3.15 terabit per second,
which would be equivalent to roughly 34 petabytes of data transiting the
system every day.17 To put that into perspective, in 2008, Google processed
ISC Report, pp 25, 113 para N.
ISC Report, para 59.
15 Witness Statement of Eric King, 8 June 2014, para 128 and the sources referred to therein
(lodged with the Court in the List of Accompanying Documents in the original Application) (“King
Witness Statement”).
16 Nearly all fibre optic cables have at least two fibres, known as a pair – one fibre is used to
carry data in one direction and the other fibre is used to carry data in the opposite direction.
17 TAT-14 Cable System: Sprint Network Administration System, https://www.tat-14.com/tat14/.
Reply Annex No. 36.
13
14
21