UPDATED --- Vodafone Releases Information on How It, and Other Communications Companies, Assist Governments In Spying On Citizens

UPDATE AT BOTTOM OF POST

From the Telegraph:

Government agencies are able to listen to phone conversations live and even track the location of citizens without warrants using secret cables connected directly to network equipment, admits Vodafone today. 

The company said that secret wires have been connected to its network and those belonging to competitors, giving government agencies the ability to tap in to phone and broadband traffic. In many countries this is mandatory for all telecoms companies, it said. 

Vodafone is today publishing its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report which will describe exactly how the governments it deals with are eavesdropping on citizens. It is calling for an end to the use of “direct access” eavesdropping and transparency on the number of warrants issued giving access to private data. 

The company said that the 29 countries it operates in have different laws that demand that they restrict or block certain access to customers, or allow governments to directly access information about them. Refusal to comply with those laws was “not an option”, it said, as those countries could then stop them from operating within its borders. 

In some countries this means giving access to the content of phone calls and other electronic communications, or access to metadata such as the number of calls made, the numbers they were made to and the location of the caller when those calls were placed. 

In some countries, not including the UK, they are made to provide a "direct access" cable straight into their network to allow governments to siphon off any data they wish, without having to issue a warrant.

In this article above, they talk about "telephone" lines, and "listening" in on calls. But let's face it, this means internet communications, cell phone communications, texting, photographs, and knowing your whereabouts at all times.

UPDATE 

From an Anonymous commenter, posted at freeRepublic last night, some food for thought:

What scares me about the depth of hatred is what they may well have the means to do.

It’s been said before that the NSA has the capability of not only catching the embarrassing or wrong stuff that people do on their computers or phone, but also of planting “evidence” on other people’s computers.

Creating “proof” of crimes or indiscretions that never really happened. That’s a huge way of targeting honorable people, whose honesty threatens you.

Now another capability has arisen. According to Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his team, the regime has the capability of altering the internal properties of documents so that they can effectively rewrite history. They can create a document today that has internal properties “proving” that it was in existence in August of 2009 - like maybe the August 2009 classified report on the Bergdahl case.

The regime can keep the classified report hidden until they’ve come up with the narrative they settle on, and then create a report that matches that narrative, with internal properties “proving” that this is really the report that existed in Aug of 2009.

Already there are different sources who allegedly (according to the NYT) remember contradictory details about that classified report.

One remembers there being mention of a note Bergdahl left behind, another doesn’t. Some are saying Bergdahl ran off a couple times before this time and the military was at fault for not disciplining him.

It’s all setting up the possibility that the claims of these guys who remember will be “proven wrong” by a fabricated classified report.

All they need is somebody in the media (like the NYT with its anonymous sources) to claim that there’s an anonymous source who “remembered” a particular claim, and then that “memory” can be “confirmed” when it shows up in the fabricated “authentic” classified report.

And if the regime wants to, they can alter the mental health/behavioral records of these brave men also.

The HUD guy who called these guys psychos may have been projecting what the regime is developing as the narrative for the records.

Pelosi’s daughter called Bergdahl’s group “dysfunctional”.

That also could be a narrative being developed - and having somebody “remember” that the classified report had Bergdahl deserting several times before and nobody doing anything about it could be preparation for that.

The “cool people” have poo-poohed the significance of Obama’s past document fraud and the whole system overlooking blatant fraud, but if people would think about what this really means - if the regime is able to create fabricated documents that can still meet the legal requirements to “prove” that they were authentic, created long ago - they would realize that the regime can literally change history to frame whoever they want to frame.

And people like these brave men are the ones they might consider it worth their time to frame in that way.

What would stop them? How is the current system going to protect these heroes from the warfare against them by the foreign enemy combatant in the White House and the cancerous minions with which he has filled the entire bureaucracy?

By poo-poohing the crimes of this regime we set up people like these brave heroes to be victims of this regime’s crimes.

We play right into the hands of the regime by ignoring the crimes they’ve already committed and the abilities they can use on others at will.

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