The Sea-Me-We-4 cable connects Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and ‘top secret’ reports from the NSA have allegedly been discovered, claiming that the US agency has been successfully spying on the route.
France Telecom Orange and Telecom Italia Sparkle hold stakes in the Sea-Me-We-4 and the German newspaper said that the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit successfully collected network management information on the cable system in February this year.
The document was reportedly labeled ‘not for foreigners’, and stated that: “more operations are planned in the future to collect more information about this and other cable systems.”
The German newspaper said that the NSA had hacked an internal website in order to retrieve information on the cable’s technical infrastructure.
In June this year, the NSA was accused of collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers.
