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Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).
The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.
One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.
On Sunday, Britain's The Guardian said that at a 2009 G20 summit of world leaders in London, Britain's counterpart to the NSA, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), electronically monitored foreign delegations. The reports are based on documents from Snowden, and include some pretty interesting details, including that GCHQ and MI6 set up and lured foreign delegates into internet cafes specially rigged to record keystrokes and intercept emails, and that the Brits managed to crack into some delegates' BlackBerrys.
In this case, the point of the eavesdropping wasn't anything you'd find in a John le Carré novel. No, says The Guardian, it appears to have been set up "for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings," which were geared toward global economics. That is, diplomatically speaking, an unfair advantage, and lots of countries will be annoyed by the report. But the only "named targets" the newspapers identifies are "long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey."
[source UNDERGROUND WORLD NEWS]
