The more they "uncover" the more it sounds like hysteria and propaganda.
Looks like a run of cables we have on quite literally every single street in the country... Put on a high viz jacket and you could lift the access cover there and do whatever you want to all those cables carrying super secret data.
Exactly. If I wanted to tap into cables somewhere I'd use a shell company owned by a shell company to buy some nondescript house next to where they run and extend the basement a bit, not have plans on file for my fecking national embassy saying "Cable tap room here".
And even if they did tap into one of a million random fibre links, all they're going to see is a bunch of encrypted data streams, which they can completely ignore because the remarkably cheap cleaning company that services the target company's offices is bringing them the plaintext every evening.
Whatever they said on the unredacted plans, which had it listed. Storage and ventilation equipment wasn't it? Makes sense for some otherwise-unusable back room. And it wasn't the "sole secret room", a large section of the plans were redacted, possibly because, oh I dunno, they were worried about GCHQ using the information to get access to the embassy? It's an embassy, not a public shopping mall, it's normal to not publish all the internal details.
Come to think of it, my aunt's house has extensive cellars, including one back room used for storage that backs up onto the street where the local fibre link runs. Terribly clever of her ancestors to anticipate this when they built the place.
The plans, which are redacted in all publicly available versions, can only be revealed because The Telegraph has uncovered the unredacted documents.
The drawings show that a single concealed chamber will sit directly alongside fibre-optic cables transmitting financial data to the City of London, as well as email and messaging traffic for millions of internet users.
I wonder why the Chinese put this secret room on the plans at all. Especially since they could have delayed its build until its location was concealed by the completed floor above.
Looks like a run of cables we have on quite literally every single street in the country... Put on a high viz jacket and you could lift the access cover there and do whatever you want to all those cables carrying super secret data.