The NSA Had Permission to Spy on Brits

In the latest twist of a story that just keeps unravelling, The Guardian has revealed that the NSA had permission from intelligence officials in the UK to spy on British citizens—even if they didn’t suspect them of doing anything wrong.

You’d be forgiven for reacting to the news with a shrug and an eye-roll. After everything that’s come out of the files leaked by Edward Snowden, it hardly comes as a surprise to be presented with more evidence that, yes, everyone’s been spying on everyone else. But this latest revelation deserves a moment’s reflection.

As The Guardian explained, this is “the first explicit confirmation that UK citizens have been caught up in US mass surveillance program.” That’s a big deal, or at least it should be. While we already know the NSA has been involved in spying on countries like Germany and France, until now we hadn't heard much about surveillance among the “Five Eyes” countries, which include the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. And unlike, say, tapping Angela Merkel’s phone, it was done with permission from the target country.

So what exactly has been going on? The Guardian and Channel 4 News reported that a 2007 memo they explored in a joint investigation described an agreement between the NSA and GCHQ (the UK's equivalent) giving the US agency permission to keep personal data on British individuals that was collected “incidentally.” That means the Brits in question weren’t initial targets of operations; their data was just picked up along the way.

The information collected consisted of “contact identifiers,” and included IP and email addresses, and fax and cell numbers. The NSA would still need a warrant to access the content of emails and calls, but could use the metadata for “contact chaining”—to map connections between contacts.

It’s unclear where the buck stops with this one. The agreement was signed off by British intelligence officials, but whether they discussed this with government ministers is unknown. We also don’t know if the UK was conducting any similar operations against US citizens (though I wouldn’t bet against it).

On top of all that, however, a second memo—which appeared to be a draft and was dated 2005—suggested the NSA had plans to spy on British citizens without permission, too. Again, that’s a pretty hefty revelation. Until now, the NSA and GCHQ have seemed quite cosy partners, and it's generally understood that countries in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance don't monitor each other's citizens—at least not without permission.

If the US did in fact break that pact, these apparently friendly relationships are cast in a rather colder light. It doesn’t look like we’re going to run out of knots to untangle in the matted web of surveillance controversy any time soon.