More UK spy secrets

LONDON: The UK runs a secret monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept large numbers of telephone calls, e-mails and internet traffic that it shares with intelligence agencies in the US. The Independent newspaper reported yesterday the station was part of a £ 1 billion (R15.9bn) global eavesdropping project run by the UK to intercept digital communications, citing leaked documents from former US National Security Agency ( NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

The London-based Independent, which did not say how it obtained the information from the Snowden documents, said the British had tapped into the underwater fibre-optic cables which pass through the Middle East.

Data gleaned from the monitoring station, whose exact location the Independent said it would not reveal, is then passed on to the UK’s eavesdropping agency GCHQ in Cheltenham, England, and shared with the NSA.

Britain’s foreign ministry and a spokesman for GCHQ declined to comment.

Snowden’s leaks have embarrassed both the UK and US by laying bare the extent of their surveillance programmes. London and Washington say their spies operate within the law and that the leaks have damaged national security.

A network of worldwide cables passes from the UK and US through the Mediterranean, running via the Suez canal linking India and the Far East.

In the Middle East, underwater cables from the sea link into a number of points on land including Tel Aviv, Athens, Istanbul, Cyprus and several Egyptian cities.

Britain’s monitoring station in the Middle East was set up under former foreign secretary David Miliband, who served in that post between 2007 and 2010. – Reuters