GCHQ and joint US-UK spying
- By Zhao Jinglun
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E-mail China.org.cn, November 13, 2013
GCHQ operates under the guidance of the Joint Intelligence Committee and is led by its director Sir Iain Lobban. Its ambition is shown in two principle components: mastering the internet and global telecoms exploitation aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. A key innovation has been its ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fiber-optic cables for up to thirty days so that it can be sifted and analyzed. That operation is codenamed Tempora. GCHQ's technical capacity to tap into the cables has made it an intelligence super power.
One NSA document revealed that Washington recently closed some of the one hundred Special Collection Services (SCS) locations it operates in embassies around the world and transferred some of the work to GCHQ, which is based in Cheltenham. In 2010, the SCS was known to operate nineteen facilities in Europe, including stations in both Berlin and Frankfurt.
Documents provided by Snowden reveal that embassy spying bases codenamed "stateroom" operations are run by the U.S., Britain, Canada and Australia together with New Zealand, the so-called "Five Eyes" -- the core of an international eavesdropping coalition. GCHQ boasts the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes.
By last year, GCHQ was handling 600 million "telephone events" every day, had tapped more than two hundred fiber optic cables, and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time. U.K. officials claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA".
The issue of GCHQ's eavesdropping came to a head in Germany as early as June. The Guardian reported that the German government expressed the growing public anger of its citizens over Britain's mass program of monitoring global phone and internet traffic and directly challenged U.K. ministers over the whole basis of GCHQ's Project Tempora surveillance operation.
German justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger sent letters to the British justice secretary Chris Grayling and home secretary Theresa May, stressing the widespread concern in Germany and demanding to know the extent to which German citizens have been targeted. That was the first major challenge to Cameron's government to publicly justify its mass data-trawling operation.
In answer to the criticism, William Hague, the British foreign secretary, said that Britain should have nothing but pride in its "indispensable "intelligence-sharing relationship with the U.S.
Thomas Oppermann, the leading German social democrat, said of the Project Tempora makes it sound as if George Orwell's surveillance society has become a reality in Britain.
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