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June 28, 2013 EIR National 39

June 24Recent revelations, based on NSA documents

disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, showing

the extent o collaboration between the U.S. National

Security Agency (NSA), and Her Majestys General

Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), raise again

the question o British control over vital U.S. intelli-

gence unctions, and whether the British, as well as the

NSA, are targetting U.S. citizens.

Taken together with the issue o Anglo-Dutch domi-

nation o the U.S. and global nancial system, the moreundamental question to be posed, is whether the United

States can claim to still be a sovereign nation, when it

unctions as a junior partner o the British imperial ac-

tionperdous Albionwhich remains steadast in

its determination to destroy the United States as a con-

stitutional republic.

And what does this say about those so-called U.S.

presidentsspecically, George W. Bush and Barack

Obamawho implement this imperial policy?

A secondary question is, how can there be any o-

cial oversight o such an operation, which is con-trolled, in large part, rom abroad? On top o the act

that an estimated 70% o all U.S. intelligence is priva-

tized, i.e., contracted out to private contractors such as

Booz Allen Hamiltonand probably an even higher

percentage or the NSAthe massive interconnec-

tions between NSA and GCHQ, and the act that so

much o NSAs data collection comes rom, and goes

to, GCHQ, makes a mockery o any claim that the NSA

spying program is subject to strict Congressional and

court oversight.

Special RelationshipTen days beore the London Guardian started pub-

lishing documents obtained rom Snowden showing

the vast scope o GCHQ telecommunications snooping

and sharing with the NSA, the Guardians Deence and

Security Blog published a blockbuster piece by Richard

Norton-Taylor and Nick Hopkins, titled Intelligence-gathering by British state out o control. It begins:

Among all the uncertainties and denials over the

interception o communications by GCHQ and Ameri-

cas National Security Agency some things should be

crystal clear.

The bilateral relationship between GCHQ and the

NSA is uniquely special. It is the core o the special

relationship. The two agencies are truly intertwined.

That statement in itsel should immediately ring a

bell with anyone who has readEIRs chronology o the

development o the Bush-Cheney-Obama surveillancedragnet in our June 14, 1013 issue. The third entry under

The British-U.S. Arrangement noted the 1947 signing

o the U.K.-U.S.A. Security Agreement (UKUSA),

which, we noted, represented President Harry Trumans

treasonous policy o establishing an Anglo-American

special relationshipa repudiation o FDRs policy.1

1. EIR, June 14, 2013.

The NSA: Is ItAmerican, or British?by Edward Spannaus

EIRNational
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2013/4024%20obm_spy_dragnet_chron.htmlhttp://www.larouchepub.com/other/2013/4024%20obm_spy_dragnet_chron.htmlhttp://www.larouchepub.com/other/2013/4024%20obm_spy_dragnet_chron.html


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40 National EIR June 28, 2013

As Norton-Taylor and Hopkins explain: There are

NSA liaison ocers assigned to GCHQ in Cheltenham,

and GHQC ocers at the NSAs headquarters in Fort

Meade, Maryland. They note that the RAF base

known as Menwith Hill, in North Yorkshire, is the

NSAs largest listening post outside the U.S., consistingo a satellite station or monitoring oreign military

trac, but also plugged into Britains telecommunica-

tions network.

They cite a 1994 GCHQ sta manual which dis-

cussed the importance o GCHQs contribution to the

alliance with its partners, and stated: This may entail

on occasion the applying o UK resources to the meet-

ing o US requirements. This, o course, has been

going on or a long time: Norton-Taylor and Hopkins

recall that in the late 1960s, GCHQ had cooperated in

the illegal eavedropping on U.S. civil rights and anti-war activists. With the help o a US-unded GCHQ

listening station at Bude on North Cornwall, the two

agencies did each others dirty work, getting around

their domestic laws by spying on each others citizens.

Always ritualistically denied, this U.S.-British ar-

rangement, using each other to spy on their own citi-

zens, has been going on or decades.EIR reported some

o the ways this worked, in an April 2000 report on the

Echelon controversy.2 One loophole, described by

Puzzle Palace author James Bamord and others, works

as ollows:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

(FISA), passed in 1978, speaks o acquisition,which is undened in the statute. To ll this gap,

the NSA has dened it as interception by the

National Security Agency through electronic

means o a communication. Thus, inormation

acquired by Britains GCHQ, or one o the other

UKUSA parties, and then passed to U.S. agen-

cies, is notcovered under the act.

We also noted that a U.S. Justice Department report

in 1976 had reported that CGHQ-acquired data was

given to the NSA or use in its MINARET program oU.S. domestic surveillance; this was then passed on to

other U.S. agencies such as the FBI.

Norton-Taylor and Hopkins give another example

o GCHQ cooperating with the NSA in a 2002-03 Bush

Administration-Tony Blair dirty tricks campaign o

2. Patrick Radden Keee, Chatter: Dispatches rom the Secret World o

Global Eavesdropping (2005).

Creative Commons/Tom Blackwell

Menwith Hill, in North Yorkshire, the NSAs largest listening post outside the U.S., consists o a satellite station or monitoringoreign military trafc, and is plugged into Britains telecommunications network.
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2000/%20eirv27n15-20000414/eirv27n15-20000414_044-british_key_in_echelon_controver.pdfhttp://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2000/%20eirv27n15-20000414/eirv27n15-20000414_044-british_key_in_echelon_controver.pdf


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bugging the homes and oces o UN diplomats rom

the swing states, whose support was needed i the

U.S. and Britain were to be able to ram through a UN

Security Council resolution authorizing the invasion o

Iraq. This was revealed by a GCHQ whistleblower

named Katherine Gun, against whom criminal charges

were brought, and later dropped, so that evidence o the

illegal spying would not come out in a courtroom.

According to Bamord, the NSA tasked Britain and

the other members o the UKUSA, or Five Eyes alli-

anceCanada, Australia, and New Zealandwith

eavesdropping on the diplomats. (Under the post-war

UKUSA agreement, the parties divided the world

among themselves, at least or purposes o surveil-

lance.)

Norton-Taylor and Hopkins make an obvious point

Senators Challenge Value ofNSA Surveillance Programs

This statement was released on June 19, 2013.

Washington, D.C.U.S. Senators Ron Wyden(D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) issued the ol-

lowing statement, responding to comments made by

members o the Intelligence Community about the

value o certain NSA surveillance programs. Both

Senators sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Over the past ew days the Intelligence Commu-

nity has made new assertions about the value o re-

cently declassied NSA surveillance programs. In

addition to the concerns that we have about the

impact o large-scale collection on the civil liberties

o ordinary Americans, we are also concerned thatthe Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)

Section 702 collection program (which allows col-

lection o phone or internet communications, and in-

volves the PRISM computer system) and the bulk

phone records collection program operating under

Section 215 o the USA PATRIOT ACT are being

confated in a way that exaggerates the value and

useulness o the bulk phone records collection pro-

gram.

Based on the evidence that we have seen, it ap-

pears that multiple terrorist plots have been disruptedat least in part because o inormation obtained under

section 702 o FISA. However, it appears that the

bulk phone records collection program under section

215 o the USA Patriot Act played little or no role in

most o these disruptions. Saying that these pro-

grams have disrupted dozens o potential terrorist

plots is misleading i the bulk phone records collec-

tion program is actually providing little or no unique

value.

The Intelligence Community notes that the mas-

sive collection o phone records under Section 215

has provided some relevant inormation in a ew ter-

rorism cases, but it is still unclear to us why agencies

investigating terrorism do not simply obtain this in-

ormation directly rom phone companies using aregular court order. I the NSA is only reviewing

those records that meet a reasonable suspicion

standard, then there is no reason it shouldnt be able

to get court orders or the records it actually needs.

Making a ew hundred o these requests per year

would clearly not overwhelm the FISA Court. And

the law already allows the government to issue emer-

gency authorizations to get these records quickly in

urgent circumstances. The NSAs ve-year retention

period or phone records is longer than the retention

period used by some phone companies, but the NSAstill has not provided us with any examples o in-

stances where it relied on its bulk collection author-

ity to review records that the relevant phone com-

pany no longer possessed.

In act, we have yet to see any evidence that the

bulk phone records collection program has provided

any otherwise unobtainable intelligence. It may be

more convenient or the NSA to collect this data in

bulk, rather than directing specic queries to the var-

ious phone companies, but in our judgment conve-

nience alone does not justiy the collection o thepersonal inormation o huge numbers o ordinary

Americans i the same or more inormation can be

obtained using less intrusive methods.

I there is additional evidence or the useulness

o the bulk phone records collection program that we

have not yet seen, we would welcome the opportu-

nity to review it.


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42 National EIR June 28, 2013

about oversight o GCHQ and NSA

in Britain, which is equally valid or

the U.S.: Ministers and commis-

sioners (ormer senior judges) ap-

pointed to monitor GCHQs activi-

ties cannot possibly know the content

or the quantity, o all the data the

agency collects on a daily basis.(Which reminds us o what ormer

NSA employee and whistleblower

William Binney has said regarding

Congressional oversight, that Con-

gress is being given techno-babble

. . . even when they get briengs, they

still dont understand.)

Tempora: A Joint GCHQ-NSAProject

Further indication o the vastscope o sensitive personal inorma-

tion being obtained by GCHQ and

shared with the NSA, came on June

21, as the Guardian published an-

other round o stories, based on ad-

ditional NSA documents disclosed by Edward

Snowden.

In early June, the rst set o Snowden documents

showed that the NSA had obtained direct access to In-

ternet data by tapping directly into the servers o Inter-

net giants such as Microsot, Google, Yahoo, etc.,through a program identied as PRISM, which report-

edly began in 2007 under the Bush-Cheney Adminis-

tration.

Around the same time, in 2007, according to the

Guardian, GCHQ launched a top-secret project called

Mastering the Internet, to determine how to better

process the vast amounts o data it was collecting every

day. As part o this, one experimental project was run

out o the GCHQ station at Bude in Cornwall. (Bam-

ord, in his 2008 bookThe Shadow Factory, says that

the NSA actually helped to nance and build the Budestation in the 1960s.) By 2010, this was being reerred

to in ocial documents as a joint GCHQ/NSA re-

search initiative.

One o its core programs or storing and analyzing

this data, is known as Tempora. It processes up to 600

million telephone events a day, and 39 million giga-

bytes o Internet trac. This includes, according to the

Guardian, voice recording, the content o emailsin

other words, contentas well as metadata.

Another Guardian story published the same day

shed some light on the source o all this data that the

CGHQ and NSA are attempting to process. At some

point, probably around 2007-08, GCHQ tapped into the

trans-Atlantic ber-optic cables that carry streams otelecommunications data rom the U.S. to Europe.

Under Tempora, all o this product is shared with the

NSA.

Not only are there 300 analysts rom GCHQ, and

250 rom NSA, who are assigned to sit through the

data, but, the Guardian reports, 850,000 NSA employ-

ees and private contractors with top-secret clearances,

have access to the GCHQ database.

No wonder NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander,

during a June 2008 visit to Menwith Hill, was prompted

to ask: Why cant we collect all signals all the time?Sounds like a good summer project or Menwith.

Yes, this is the same Alexander, who, ater having

been caught lying about the very existence o these pro-

grams, has repeatedly declared, in his most solemn

tone, that NSA cannot access the content o Americans

communications without a court order, and who assures

us that NSA surveillance programs are subject to the

most stringent oversight rom all three branches o the

NSA Director Keith Alexander, who has lied repeatedly about even the existence othe NSA surveillance program, asked, during a June 2008 visit to Menwith Hill:Why cant we collect all signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project or

Menwith.


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U.S. government. Not to mention President Obamas

requent claim, that Nobody is listening to the content

o peoples phone calls.

U.K.: Worse Than the U.S.By 2010, two years into the program, the U.K. had

regained its predominant position among the Five

Eyes UKUSA alliance, able to boast that it had thebiggest Internet access o the ve partners, and that it

was now producing larger amounts o metadata than

the NSA.

By 2011, GCHQ had attached taps to more than 200

Internet links, each carrying data at 10 gigabits a second.

This is a massive amount o data! an internal GCHQ

slide show gushed. In the Summer o 2011, GCHQ

brought NSA analysts into the trials o the Tempora

program at Bude, and in the Fall o 2011, the program

was ully launched and shared with the NSAwith the

implication that NSA was now relegated to the status oa junior partner to the British.

And or what purpose? It has little to do with catch-

ing terrorists: That little airy tale is only designed or

the gullible. The 1994 Intelligence Services Act, the

current charter or GCHQ, mandates the agency to

work in the interests o national security, with particu-

lar reerence to the deence and oreign policies o Her

Majestys government in the United Kingdom; in the

interests o the economic well being o the United

Kingdom; or in support o the prevention and detection

o serious crime.The economic well being clause o this mandate

is clearly taken quite seriously. In mid-June, the Guard-

ian revealed that the GCHQwith the assistance o the

NSAwas listening in on diplomats at the April 2009

meeting o the G20 group o nations, and again at a

meeting o nance ministers ve months later. GCHQ

and NSA went so ar as to set up a ake Internet cae

where they could eavesdrop on diplomats discussions

and e-mails. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was

reported to be interested in gathering intelligence on re-

actions to his plans to use public unds to bail out col-lapsing British banks.

Is this what the NSA is involved in, under the guise

o detecting terrorism?

The Guardian reports that some o the Snowden

documents indicate that key elements o the Tempora

ltering process were designed by the NSA. And, it

asks, why did the NSA not just attach probes to the

North American end o the trans-Atlantic cables? In-

stead, the NSA has exported its computer programs and

250 o its analysts to operate the system rom the UK.

Initial inquiries by the Guardian have ailed to ex-

plain why this has happened, but US legislators are

likely to want to check whether the NSA has sought to

bypass legal or policy requirements which restrict its

activity in the US. This will be particularly sensitive i

it is conrmed that Tempora is also analysing internal

U.S. trac.

The Guardian also notes that its interviews with both

a U.K. source, and with Snowden, raise a number o ques-

tions, including whether the Tempora program: Allows

the NSA to engage in bulk intercepts o internal US

trac which would be orbidden on its own territory.

The result o all this? GCHQ and the NSA are con-

sequently able to access and process vast quantities o

communication between entirely innocent people,

concludes the Guardian.

In disclosing the NSA documents pertaining to theGCHQ, Snowden told the Guardian that he wanted to

show that, Its not just a US problem. The UK has a

huge dog in this ght. They are worse than the US.

[email protected]

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