The policy was revealed in documents stolen by the former CIA contractor Edward Snowden, according to the Guardian and Channel 4 News. Photo: EPA
- American security services agreed a deal with the British government which allowed them to collect and store phone, internet and email records of innocent UK citizens
The Telegraph
By Tom Whitehead
20 November 2013
Millions of innocent British citizens may have been spied on by the US after an agreement with Tony Blair's Government, it was claimed last night.
Secret memos suggested a deal was approved that allowed the American National Security Agency to store and analyse the phone, email and internet records of Britons who were "incidentally" caught up in surveillance operations.
One document suggests that the US were even prepared to carry out such surveillance without notifying their UK partners, despite assurances intended to make them think they would.
The policy was revealed in documents stolen by the former CIA contractor Edward Snowden, according to the Guardian and Channel 4 News.
It suggests a dramatic change in an agreement between the US and UK which dates back to 1946 that the two countries would not spy on each other's citizens.
One Tory MP last night said those in charge at the time need to explain what was agreed to.
A memo from June 2007 suggests that Britain agreed the Americans could "unminimise" British landline numbers as early as 2004.
Previously, data on people "incidentally" caught up in any dragnet on individuals that were not suspected of any wrongdoing was supposed to be "minimised", meaning deleted.
The new policy was said to have been extended to data from mobile, email, fax and internet data in the same way in the latter days of the Blair administration, it was claimed.
The NSA is said to have used the UK data to conduct so-called "pattern of life" or "contact-chaining" analyses - looking at the communications of a friend of the person or a friend of a friend- making the potential scope for collection enormous.
The memo states: "Sigint [signals intelligence] policy … and the UK Liaison Office here at NSAW [NSA Washington] worked together to come up with a new policy that expands the use of incidentally collected unminimized UK data in Sigint analysis.
"The new policy expands the previous memo issued in 2004 that only allowed the unminimizing of incidentally collected UK phone numbers for use in analysis.
"Now SID analysts can unminimize all incidentally collected UK contact identifiers, including IP and email addresses, fax and cell phone numbers, for use in analysis."
A separate secret memo, dated from 2005, suggested that the data mining could go on without the permission or knowledge of the UK or others in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence relationship - Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
It was claimed different parts of the memo would be shown to the UK, which suggested permission would be sought, while other parts that contradicted that were kept only for the eyes of the NSA.
The document, titled 'Collection, Processing and Dissemination of Allied Communications', had separate classifications from paragraph to paragraph, it was reported.
Those marked "NF", for No Foreign, were to be kept strictly within the agency.
The memo stated that the Five-Eyes agreement "has evolved to include a common understanding that both governments will not target each other's citizens/persons".
But in the next sentence – marked not to shared with foreign partners – it was stated that governments "reserved the right" to conduct intelligence operations against each other's citizens "when it is in the best interests of each nation".
"Therefore," the draft memo said, "under certain circumstances, it may be advisable and allowable to target second party persons and second party communications systems unilaterally, when it is in the best interests of the US and necessary for US national security."
The US and UK authorities declined to comment on the reports, as did Jack Straw, who was Foreign Secretary until 2006, and Margaret Beckett, who was Foreign Secretary in 2007.
Conservative MP Richard Ottoway, who is a member of the National Security Strategy Committee, said: “It is not acceptable for countries to snoop on the citizens of another country without authority.
“Having said that as I pointed out at the outset we know that all these countries have got the capacity to do it and when they are concerned about security and serious crimes they actually do conduct surveillance exercises.
“But it is, it would be a crime for British agencies to approach the American agencies to say can you snoop on X, Y and Z without a warrant, without authority.
“So, those who were in charge at the time have to be asked what it is they agreed to.”
Mr Ottoway, who was also a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee from 2005 until 2010, added: “Quite clearly the intelligence community of both the United States and the United Kingdom and indeed a number of other counties around the world have the capacity to listen to people’s phone conversations and the key question is, what was authorised and what was not authorised and those are the questions that we actually have to ask to the authorities and I hope we will get the answers."
original article found here
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