The work done by Nicky Hager on Echelon has long established that the anglophone countries have worked together to spy on their "allies"
NSA
leaks: US and Britain team up on mass surveillance
Latest
revelations from Edward Snowden show that the state risks crossing
ever more ethical and legal boundaries
22
June, 2013
Twelve
years ago, in an almost forgotten report, the European parliament
completed its investigations into a long-suspected western
intelligence partnership dedicated to global signals interception on
a vast scale.
Evidence
had been taken from spies and politicians, telecommunications experts
and journalists. In stark terms the report detailed a decades-old
arrangement which had seen the US and the UK at first – later
joined by Canada, New Zealand and Australia to make up the the
so-called "Five Eyes" – collaborating to access
satellites, transatlantic fibre-optic cables and radio signals on a
vast scale.
This
secretive (and consistently denied) co-operation was itself the
product of a mutual agreement stretching back to the first world war,
expanded in the second, and finally ratified in 1948 in the so-called
UKUSA agreement.
The
problem for the authors of the Brussels report was that it had based
its analysis on scattered clues and inferences. "It is only
natural," its authors asserted ruefully, "that secret
services do not disclose details of their work … The existence of
such a system thus needs to be proved by gathering as many clues as
possible, thereby building up a convincing body of evidence."
Despite
the limitations of such detective work, the parliamentarians came to
a deeply troubling conclusion: the "Five Eyes" were
accessing the fibre-optic cables running under the Atlantic.
Not
only that, the report concluded tentatively, but it was the UK
specifically among the five partners – and GCHQ in particular –
which it suspected had been given primary responsibility for
intercepting that traffic.
"The
practical implication," the report surmised, "is that
communications can be intercepted at acceptable cost only at the
terminals of the underwater cables which land on their territory.
"Essentially
they can only tap incoming or outgoing cable communications. In other
words, their access to cable communications in Europe is restricted
to the territory of the United Kingdom."
That
GCHQ was at the very heart of secret efforts to tap into the internet
and cable-carried telephony was finally confirmed in the most
dramatic terms on Friday by the latest batch of documents to be
leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward
Snowden, who is now being sought by the US government for alleged
theft and breaches of the Espionage Act.
Those
documents, published by the Guardian, not only describe the UK's lead
role in tapping the cables carrying global internet traffic –
enjoying the "biggest internet access" of the Five Eyes –
but its efforts to suck up ever-larger amounts of global data to
share with its partners, and principally with the US.
From
a handful of cables at the beginning, the UK is now able, according
to the documents, to access some 200 on a daily basis and store the
information contained within for up to 30 days for analysis,
including up to 600m "telephone events" each day.
GCHQ's
own excitement at the scope of its reach is evident in the documents,
in which there is an excited reference to an ability to collect
"massive amount of data!" and to "producing larger
amounts of metadata (the basic information on who has been contacting
whom, without detailing the content) than NSA".
Up
to the late 1980s, in excess of 90% of all international
voice-and-data traffic, including diplomatic cables, was being
carried by satellite and microwave networks. That began to change
rapidly in 1988 when AT&T finished laying the first undersea
fibre-optic fibre cable from New Jersey to the UK.
Even
before that project was completed, the NSA was already experimenting
how to gain access to the cables, efforts that would lead to the US
making its first attempts to bug one in the mid-1990s with an
underwater vehicle.
Now,
the documents seem to suggest, access is achieved through some degree
of co-operation – voluntary or otherwise – from the companies
operating the cables or the stations at which they come into the
country. And in addition to confirming details of how the partnership
functions, the latest disclosures from Snowden also describe in
detail what appears to be one of its latest iterations – Project
Tempora, initiated some four years ago.
The
direct descendent of earlier UKUSA treaty programmes, Project
Tempora's purpose remains the hoovering up of the largest amount of
signals intelligence, principally in the form of metadata. Then, as
now, it appears the priorities are not only related to national
security but also economic advantage – interventions which can be
justified under UK law by reference to the ill-defined notion of
"economic wellbeing".
In
one sense, GCHQ is simply trying to keep up with the dizzying pace of
technological development over recent decades. As the most recent
batch of leaked documents has made clear – interception – like
drugs-testing in sport – has tended to lag one step behind
technology.
"It
is becoming increasingly difficult for GCHQ," the authors of one
memo write, "to acquire the rich sources of traffic needed to
enable our support to partners within HMG [Her Majesty's government],
the armed forces, and overseas.
"The
rapid development of different technologies, types of traffic,
service providers and networks, and the growth in sheer volumes that
accompany particularly the expansion and use of the internet, present
an unprecedented challenge to the success of GCHQ's mission.
Critically we are not currently able to prioritise and task the
increasing range and scale of our accesses at the pace, or with the
coherence demanded of the internet age: potentially available data is
not accessed, potential benefit for HMG is not delivered."
But
the dangers lie in the various legal and ethical thresholds being
crossed in the race to catch up with the proliferating forms of
communication. If that report from almost a decade and a half ago was
prescient in one area, it was over the human rights, privacy and
legal concerns that were raised by the ambitions of western
intelligence. Those issues have only been brought into sharper focus
as signals intelligence gathering has moved ever more forcefully into
capturing the worldwide web.
According
to the leaked Snowden documents, the latest attempts to improve
interception of internet communications began in earnest in 2007. The
first experimental project was run at GCHQ's outpost at Bude in
Cornwall.
Within
two years it would be judged enough of a success to allow analysts
from the NSA to have access to the new project, which by 2011 would
be capturing and producing more intelligence data in the UK than the
NSA did in the US.
Other
documents underline how the decades-old intelligence arrangement has
worked, not least how within the UKUSA treaty different roles have
been subcontracted to partners – for both practical and regulatory
reasons.
In
one document, the NSA's chief Lt Gen. Keith Alexander asks pointedly:
"Why can't we collect all the signals all the time? … Sounds
like a good summer project for Menwith" — a reference to
GCHQ's Menwith Hill eavesdropping site in northern England.
On
the legal front – as GCHQ's own lawyers boasted in advice to its US
partners – Cheltenham had an advantage to its US partners: "We
have a light oversight regime compared with the US".
Such
potential subcontracting has long been at the heart of international
legal concerns over how surveillance material is shared between the
Five Eyes. The suspicion is that individual states within the
agreement can produce material for partners that might be illegal to
gather in the other collaborating states, including the US.
Shami
Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: "The big point we
should recognise is that states tend to have a broader licence to
snoop abroad and a tighter one at home. What we are seeing in
arrangements like this is states' ability to subcontract their dirty
work to others."
Then
there is the question of oversight. The UK government claims that the
interception in such a broad fashion is authorised by ministers under
at least 100 certificates issued under section 8(4) of the Regulation
of Investigatory Powers (Ripa) which allows sweeping an
indiscriminate trawls of data. But Alex Bailin QC, an expert on
surveillance at the Matrix Chambers, is sceptical. "We are told
there is proper oversight but the question is whether ministers
simply sign these certificates. But I wasn't even aware section 8(4)
existed until Friday."
Like
Chakrabarti, Bailin suspects that intelligence agencies are
subcontracting out surveillance to foreign partners. "The
reality is that Ripa is incredibly complex and full of legal
loopholes that permit this kind of thing. The real question is
whether the act is actually fit for purpose when you are dealing with
interception like this."
The
European parliament's thesis has been confirmed by the Guardian's
revelations. Now the legal and ethical scrutiny can begin in earnest.
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