NSA and GCHQ told to stop pretending that law doesn’t apply to them after revelations that they gained access to Dutch manufacturer Gemalto’s encryption keys

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Rights groups around the world have called for urgent action to protect private communications after it was revealed that US and British spies hacked into the world’s largest sim card manufacturer and gained unfettered access to billions of mobile phones around the globe.

The National Security Agency (NSA) and its British equivalent, GCHQ, hacked into Gemalto, a Netherlands sim card manufacturer, stealing encryption keys that allowed them to secretly monitor voice calls and data, according to documents newly released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The breach, revealed in documents provided to the Intercept, gave the agencies the power to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, which experts said violated international laws.

Sim card database hack gave US and UK spies access to billions of cellphones Read more

Rachel Logan, Amnesty UK’s legal director, said: “This mass sim hacking allegation seems be just the latest disturbing revelation about how GCHQ has overreached. These spooks must stop pretending the law doesn’t apply to them.

“We keep seeing the intelligence agencies claiming everything’s fine and then being caught out when challenged in court.”

Mark Rumold, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said there was no doubt that the spy agencies had violated Dutch law and were in all probability violating laws in many other territories when they used the hacked keys.

“They have the functional equivalent of our house keys,” he said. “That has serious implications for privacy not just here in the US but internationally.”

The NSA campus in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

The scale of the hack and its international reach is likely to reopen wounds in the diplomatic community. The Obama administration faced intense criticism from Germany, Brazil and other nations following the Snowden leaks and has been working hard recently to repair the damage.

Previous documents disclosed by the Guardian showed Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, was the target of an NSA spying campaign, a revelation that has soured US-German relations. Brazil’s president Dilma Rousseff has already accused the NSA of violating international law.

“It’s a big breach,” Matthew Green, a cryptologist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, told the Guardian. “The problem is that the attacks could still be ongoing.”



The World Wide Web Foundation, founded by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, said the hack was “another worrying sign that these agencies think they are above the law”.

Gemalto, the company targeted by the spy agencies, produces 2bn sim cards per year for clients including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon. The Netherlands company operates in 85 countries around the world and provides cards to some 450 wireless network providers globally.

The stolen encryption keys would allow intelligence agencies to monitor mobile communications without the approval or knowledge of telecoms companies and foreign governments.

Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Guardian the hack would allow spies to “put an aerial up on the embassy in Berlin and listen in to anyone’s calls in the area”.

Calls made on 3G and 4G mobile networks are encrypted. But with the keys, which a GCHQ slide described as living “in the phone”, spies could access any communication made on a device unless its owner uses an extra layer of encryption.

Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “These actions completely undermine the UK’s moral authority when talking about the importance of freedom of the internet and the discouragement of state-sponsored cyber-attacks.

“Failures to properly address these allegations makes a mockery of the trust that the public is supposed to have in both the government and the spy agencies.”