Yet inside GCHQ there is still anxiety that the organisation will fall behind. One of the team responsible for managing TEMPORA sets out how the agency’s ‘mission role’ grew. New techniques had given GCHQ access to huge amount of new data or ‘light’ – emails, phone calls and Skype conversations. ‘Over the last five years, GCHQ’s access to “light” [has] increased by 7,000 per cent.’ The amount of material being analysed and processed had increased by 3,000 per cent, he said – an astonishing figure. The agency was ‘breaking new ground’ but also struggling to keep up. ‘The complexity of our mission has evolved to the point where existing management capability is no longer fit for purpose.’
An internal review for 2011/2012 also warns: ‘The two major technology risks that GCHQ has to face next year are the spread of ubiquitous encryption on the internet and the explosion in the use of smartphones as mobile internet devices. Over time, both of these technologies could have significant effect on our current tradecraft.’
The agency predicts that by 2015, 90 per cent of all internet traffic will come from mobile phones. There were already 100 million smartphones around the world in 2012. The mobile was the ‘most prolific customer product ever invented’. GCHQ was launching a new project to ‘exploit mobile devices’, the document said. It meant ‘getting intelligence from all the extra functionality that iPhones and BlackBerrys offer’. GCHQ’s end goal was: ‘to exploit any phone, anywhere, anytime’.
TEMPORA and allied projects may be impressive. But in inventing them, the western espionage agencies seemed oblivious to the larger picture: that the state was now indiscriminately collecting the communications of millions of people, without their knowledge or consent.
In the past, British spooks attached crocodile clips on copper wires to eavesdrop on the phone calls of thieves and villains or Irish Republican terrorists. These were individual targets approved on individual ministerial warrants: the identifiable bad guys. Now, though, the NSA and GCHQ were hoovering up data from everyone on a Brobdingnagian scale. This included data from a majority of people who were entirely innocent.
Officials insist they don’t have the analysts to sift through all this private correspondence. One told the Guardian: ‘The vast majority of the data is discarded without being looked at… we simply don’t have the resources.’ He said: ‘If you had the impression we are reading millions of emails, we are not. There is no intention in this whole program to use it for looking at UK domestic traffic – British people talking to each other.’ The head of GCHQ, Sir Iain Lobban, publicly repeats the spies’ favourite analogy of a ‘vast haystack of data’, containing needles.
The haystack does, of course, consist of the communications of both Britons and foreigners. GCHQ’s mass sweepings included among other things the contents of cables linking the international data centres belonging to Google and Yahoo, where they passed across British territory.
The British spies quote obscure UK legislation dating from 2000, which permits unrestrained foreign intelligence-gathering. They say this Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) allows them to bulk-collect all ‘external’ internet communications. ‘We turn somersaults to obey its spirit and letter,’ one said. The word ‘external’ is interpreted – some would say twisted – to mean anything tapped from a cable that has at least one foreign end. Because of the way internet links work, this means that anyone in Britain who sends an email is often also talking to GCHQ. Not something the ordinary paying customer who signs up to BT and Google can find on their contract, even in the very smallest print.
Both the British and the Americans can make secret searches inside this ‘haystack’ of mass data for patterns of behaviour, for contact chaining of groups of friends and for target individuals. Secret letters signed by British foreign secretaries – the first was Labour’s David Miliband in 2009, the next the Conservatives’ William Hague – apparently authorise queries made with a view to investigating foreign political intentions, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, serious financial crime and the UK’s ‘economic wellbeing’. How is this policed? Government lawyers have since demonstrated in British cases that the word ‘terrorism’ is capable of being interpreted very widely.
When GCHQ staff succeed in supplying their US partner with valuable intelligence, they brag about it. This happened, they say, on at least two recent occasions: the first involved underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who in 2009 tried to blow up an airliner bound for Detroit. The second took place five months later when Faizal Shahzad, a 30-year-old US citizen who was born in Pakistan, attempted a car bombing in New York’s Times Square.
The NSA was ‘delighted’ with GCHQ’s ‘unique contributions’ against the US bombers. There is no clue as to what these exact contributions were. For its part, the NSA helped GCHQ with the investigation following the devastating 7/7 atrocities in London in 2005. It was the worst attack in London since the second world war. Four suicide bombers blew up three Tube trains and a bus, killing 52 people.
GCHQ denies routinely circumventing the Five Eyes’ own self-denying rules and carrying out spying on US citizens on the NSA’s behalf. And the NSA denies providing the same ‘revolving door’ service when it comes to collecting intelligence on UK nationals.
Unfortunately, Snowden’s documents appear to give the lie to such claims. He unearthed NSA memos from 2005 and 2007 implying that sometimes the two agencies do target each other’s citizens. The NSA is allowed to include Britons in its mass surveillance databases, ‘when it is in the best interest of both nations’. Furthermore, a procedure is detailed under which the NSA will even spy on UK citizens behind the backs of the British. ‘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.’
So the Five Eyes’ claim that the gentlemanly western partners do not spy on each other seems simply false. All these dismaying disclosures and the subsequent international uproar meant that – as the leakers and journalists involved were soon to discover – their boldness was making the secret spymasters on both sides of the Atlantic very angry indeed. Snowden himself, Glenn Greenwald and the British reporters back in London at the Guardian were all shortly to feel the effects of that rage.
9
YOU’VE HAD YOUR FUN
‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’
Up on the otherwise silent third floor of Kings Place, a late-night cleaner steered his Hoover around the group clustered at a computer. He was busy chatting in Spanish on his mobile as he passed, and did not seem to register their unease at the sight of him.
Under the eye of deputy editor Paul Johnson, a painfully slow assembly and formatting process was taking place through the night, not to the normal online Guardian network, but on to a big orange LaCie external hard drive – one of the few unused items on the premises capable of holding scores of gigabytes. The stuff was Snowden’s – thousands of highly classified leaked documents in a heavily encrypted form.
It included more than 50,000 files belonging to British intelligence. GCHQ had apparently exported them over to the US, and allowed them to fall into the hands of this junior US private contractor. But one of the reasons for Johnson’s nervousness was that possession of these documents back in Britain presented special – and scary – legal problems.