Egypt crash shows mass surveillance can be crucial: Analysts
Paris — Intelligence that first suggested an attack may have brought down a Russian passenger jet over Egypt last week largely justifies the mass surveillance carried out by US and British spies, experts said Friday.
While accumulating massive amounts of intercepted telephone and electronic communications and satellite imagery can hardly ever prevent an attack, it can help to shed light afterwards on what happened, they said.
The Times and the Daily Telegraph reported Friday that the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Britain’s GCHQ had intercepted telephone calls recorded before the catastrophe.
They concluded from the intercepts that it was possible that an attack by the Egyptian branch of the Daesh group, known as Sinai Province, had brought down the plane after it took off from Sharm El-Sheikh.
On Friday, a source close to the investigation said the black boxes recovered from the Saint Petersburg-bound jet point to a bomb attack, apparently confirming suspicions expressed by US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
“What the NSA is doing is effectively trawler fishing, trawling all the information,” a former head of the French intelligence services told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The technique is known as “bulk collection.” “They take everything they can. The ideal thing is to be able to connect all that up and to put it together with other types of information to be able to prevent anything happening.
“(But) experience shows that preventing this kind of thing is very difficult, even impossible.”
“In saying (he suspected a bomb), Obama simply read out the note that the intelligence services had prepared for him,” he continued.
“They will say: ‘We got this or that, we compared it with this or that and everything leads us to believe that’... After that it is up to the politicians.” — AFP
