BT, Vodafone set up spy hubs for US, UK in Oman: Report

Telecommunications companies BT and Vodafone have helped British and American intelligence organizations set up spy bases on the borders of Yemen and Oman, a report says.

According to an article published in the Independent, all telephone conversations and electronic messages were collected from undersea cables in the Middle East and sent to Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The data extracted from the undersea cables is reportedly processed by the GCHQ and then shared with the US National Security Agency (NSA)’s operatives.

According to a report by British technology website the Register, BT and Vodafone were paid millions of pounds per year to help the NSA and British intelligence organizations.

The report also said that the NSA as well as the GCHQ and a British agency called the National Technical Assistance Center (NTAC) — established in 2001 for data decryption and analysis — paid for BT and Vodafone Cable’s optical fiber communications network in the UK.

According to the Register, the site of the Internet spying base, operated by the GCHQ, is said to be in the village of Seeb, about 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) northwest from the Omani capital Muscat.

The report claimed that the Seeb base is just one of three GCHQ sites in Oman, saying a base near the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, codenamed Timpani, monitors communications from Iraq, and another site, codenamed Clarinet, is located in the south of Oman and strategically close to Yemen.

It also referred to statements by US whistleblower Edward Snowden about these spy bases.

According to a recent revelation by Snowden, the NSA has been collecting millions of electronic images from the Internet for its facial-recognition program. The images are collected from emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications.

In June 2013, Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked two top secret US government spying programs under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries.

Snowden is now in Russia after Moscow granted him asylum in August 2013 for one year.