Laid bare, how spies f ight to protect Britain from attack
EDWARD Snowden became one of the world’s most wanted men in early June when he broke cover as the agent who leaked top-secret documents from the US National Security Agency.
His initial revelations detailed how the NSA harvested private information from the computer systems of companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype and YouTube using a secret US surveillance program called Prism.
The Guardian then claimed the NSA supplied intelligence to GCHQ – accusing agents at the UK’s listening post of attempting to bypass UK law.
The British spy agency compiled 19 intelligence dossiers from the system in a single year, sidestepping the need to obtain a court order.
On June 18, the newspaper claimed UK intelligence agents hacked into the communications of politicians and senior officials from Turkey, South Africa and Russia during the G20 summit in London in 2009 – prompting a furious backlash ahead of the G8 meeting in Moscow. Snowden also revealed how GCHQ was able to hoover up vast amounts of personal information, including websites visited, emails sent and received, text messages, calls and passwords, using a state-of-the-art programme called Tempora.
The surveillance operation centres on using probes to access a network of fibre-optic cables coming into and out of the country. Telecoms firms allegedly involved in Tempora include BT, Verizon and Vodafone Cable.
The Guardian then revealed that the NSA was providing millions of pounds of funding each year to GCHQ to allow it to trawl for personal data. One document leaked by Snowden and dating from 2010 suggested GCHQ must ‘pull its weight’ to meet the NSA’s ‘minimum expectations’.
Snowden also made the highly damaging revelation that the US government had hacked computers in mainland China and Hong Kong for years – threatening to consign relations between the super-powers to the deep freeze.
US intelligence chiefs responded to the leaks with fury. NSA director Keith Alexander told the US Senate the top-secret surveillance programmes had disrupted at least 50 terror plots.
The Washington Post reported the NSA had acted illegally on ‘thousands’ of occasions over the harvesting of personal data, and Foreign Secretary William Hague was forced to the Commons to insist any suggestion the British intelligence agencies had colluded with the NSA to act outside the law was ‘fantastical’.