UK intelligence agency spying on ME data: Independent

A British newspaper has revealed that the British intelligence agency is spying on “vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic” in the Middle East on behalf of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States.

The Independent reported on Friday that the UK is running a secret internet-monitoring station, which is “able to tap into and extract data from the underwater fiber-optic cables passing through” the Middle East.

“The information is then processed for intelligence and passed to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham and shared with the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States.”

The Independent said that the information was contained in the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The revelation added that the secret station “can access submarine cables passing through the region” and send into giant computer storage “buffers” and then sifted for data of special interest.

“Information about the project was contained in 50,000 GCHQ documents that Snowden downloaded during 2012,” the newspaper said.

The massive surveillance operations by the NSA was uncovered in June, when former US intelligence contractor, Snowden, leaked two top secret US government spying programs, under which the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are spying on millions of American and European phone records and the Internet data from major Internet companies.

The 30-year-old NSA leaker, who was granted political asylum in Russia on August 1, is wanted in the United States, where he faces charges of “espionage” and “theft of government property.”

Earlier this week, British Prime Minister David Cameron pushed British paper The Guardian newspaper to destroy the classified documents it received from former NSA contractor.

Cameron ordered his top civil servant Sir Jeremy Heywood to collect sensitive material which has been leaked to the paper.

Multiple sources, including the paper’s editor Alan Rusbridger, said Heywood had been tasked by the British PM to warn The Guardian to either “hand over the documents or destroy them if it did not want to face legal action”.