LONDON — British and American spy agencies monitored the email and phone calls of foreign diplomats at two major international summits in London, according to a new set of classified documents provided by Mr Edward Snowden, the former United States National Security Agency (NSA) contractor turned whistle-blower.
The latest disclosures, appearing in The Guardian, came the night before a meeting of leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised nations in Northern Ireland, attended by some of those who were intelligence targets four years ago.
The newspaper reported on Sunday night that Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British eavesdropping agency that works closely with the NSA, monitored the email and phones of representatives from other countries at two London conferences in 2009 hosted by then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It was a time when nations were trying to win a broad deal aimed at staunching the global financial crisis.
It also reported that the US intercepted the communications of Mr Dmitry Medvedev, then the Russian President and now its Prime Minister.
The source materials — whose authenticity could not immediately be determined — appeared to be a mixed bag. The Guardian described one as “a PowerPoint slide”, another as “a briefing paper” and others simply as “documents”.
They indicated that British intelligence agents had gone as far as setting up fake Internet cafes and tapping into foreign diplomats’ BlackBerry messages and calls.
Professor Richard Aldrich, a specialist in international security at the University of Warwick, said the logos of the NSA and Canadian intelligence on one of the British documents suggested that they were accessible to Mr Snowden “under the auspices of a joint programme”. He said British and American diplomats and politicians got a real-time feed of intelligence on their counterparts at major summit meetings.
Speaking at the G-8 summit yesterday, Prime Minister David Cameron declined to address the issue.
“We never comment on security or intelligence issues and I am not about to start now,” he said. “That would be breaking something that no government has previously done.”
The GCHQ also declined to comment on the report.
The Guardian’s latest reports offered a rare window into the everyday electronic spying that the agency does in close cooperation with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Mr Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian in Washington, said the reports have “confirmed long-standing suspicions that the NSA’s surveillance in this country is far more intrusive than we knew”.
But he said the reports of spying on world leaders, while distressing to the eavesdroppers because they will make their targets more wary, contained no surprises.
“This is just what intelligence agencies do — spy on friends and enemies alike,” he said. “Only because the shroud of secrecy that covers all of NSA operations is so thick does a glimpse like this come as a shock.”
Mr Snowden, 29, who left the NSA station in Hawaii this spring and is now thought to be hiding in Hong Kong, has delivered hundreds of NSA documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post.
Their initial reports covered the routine collection of data on all phone calls handled by major American telephone companies and an NSA programme called PRISM, which collects the email and other Web activity of foreigners using major Internet services like Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.
While some members of Congress have raised questions about the sweep of the NSA’s collection of data on Americans, leaders of both parties have defended the programmes and denounced Mr Snowden before The Guardian published its latest report.
Appearing on Fox News Sunday, former Vice-President Dick Cheney praised the agency and called Mr Snowden a criminal and a traitor. “I think it’s one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States,” he said.
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, appearing on CBS’ Face the Nation, said leaking information about American surveillance “in effect gives the playbook to those who would like to get around our techniques and our practices and, obviously, that’s not in our interest in the long haul”. AGENCIES
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