Google – AFP, Maureen Cofflard (AFP), 18 November 2013
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The
activities of GCHQ, Britain's secret eavesdropping agency, have come
under
intense scrutiny since former US analyst Edward Snowden said it was one
of the
main players in mass telecommunications surveillance (AFP/File, Thomas Coex)
|
London —
The activities of GCHQ, the secret eavesdropping agency, have come under
intense scrutiny since former US analyst Edward Snowden said it was one of the
main players in mass telecommunications surveillance.
GCHQ is at
the heart of Britain's "special relationship" with the United States
when it comes to spying, according to Snowden's blizzard of leaks.
The
Government Communications Headquarters -- a giant, ring-shaped building
nicknamed "the doughnut" -- is situated in the spa town of Cheltenham
in southwest England.
Computer
specialist Snowden, 30, worked for the US National Security Agency in 2012 when
he downloaded a vast cache of NSA documents, including 50,000 about GCHQ.
The
material from the fugitive, now living in Russia under temporary asylum, has
been published in various newspapers, with The Guardian leading the way in
Britain.
The
documents claim the NSA was secretly funding GCHQ to the tune of £100 million
($160 million, 120 million euros) over the last three years.
David
Ormand, GCHQ's director from 1996 to 1997, did not confirm that figure but
admitted that the US and Britain were mutually beneficial partners.
"We
have the brains; they have the money," said Ormand told BBC radio.
"It's a collaboration that's worked very well."
Eric
Denece, a former intelligence analyst who is now director of the Centre
Francais de Recherche sur le Renseignement (French Centre for Research on
Information), said GCHQ, which employs 5,500 people, was "basically 10 times
smaller than the NSA and has twice the size of France's capacity".
In terms of
budget, GCHQ receives three times the amount France receives, but is dwarfed by
the US centre, he told AFP.
One of
Snowden's revelations was that Britain was running a secret Internet monitoring
station in the Middle East, intercepting phone calls and online traffic, with
the information processed and passed to GCHQ.
The report
claimed it is part of a £1 billion (1.2 billion euros, $1.6 billion)
surveillance project codenamed "Tempora", whose aims include
"mastering the Internet".
Based on
Snowden's leaks, The Independent newspaper said Britain had a listening post on
the roof of its embassy in Berlin.
GCHQ also
tapped into more than 200 fibre-optic telecommunications cables, including
transatlantic ones, and was handling 600 million "telephone events"
each day, according to Snowden.
"They
are worse than the US," Snowden told The Guardian.
Called to
appear before a parliamentary committee earlier this month in response to the
Snowden leaks, GCHQ director Iain Lobban insisted the agency was not conducting
snooping en masse on the British public.
He said
they were looking for "needles in the haystack", not the hay itself.
"We do
not spend our time listening to the telephone calls or reading the e-mails of
the majority," he said.
Former
chief Omand told the BBC: "GCHQ is primarily a foreign intelligence
agency. It is not a domestic intelligence agency."
Snowden's
documents showed that the amount of personal data available to GCHQ from
Internet and mobile phone traffic had increased by 7,000 percent in the past
five years -- but 60 percent of all Britain's 'refined' intelligence still
appeared to come from the NSA.
GCHQ and
the NSA work together under the UKUSA Agreement, formed in 1946 between Britain
and the United States. Canada, Australia and New Zealand soon joined, forming
what is called the "Five Eyes" electronic eavesdropping alliance.
A former
British spy told AFP on condition of anonymity that cooperation in
eavesdropping dates back as far as World War I, and constitutes one of the
chief pillars of the so-called "special relationship" between London
and Washington.
"Cooperation
between the two countries, particularly, in sigint (signals intelligence), is
so close that it becomes very difficult to know who is doing what," he
said.
"That's
not sinister... it's just organisational mess."
Denece said
there was "task-sharing" between British and US intelligence
services.
He cited
the two G20 meetings in Britain in 2009, when the United States spied on
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev while the British spied on the Turks and the
South Africans, according to Snowden's documents.
The expert
said the Americans were in charge of "intercepting bandwidth and satellite
eavesdropping", while "listening on the ground and computer
interception is done by the British".
GCHQ has
made no direct comment on the allegations.
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