British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged To Play In NSA's Data Pools

Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes "Britain's electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters, has long presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency's massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. But according to a top-secret document in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA's vast troves of private communications and sought 'unsupervised access' to its data as recently as last year – essentially begging to feast at the NSA's table while insisting that it only nibbles on the occasional crumb."

Comments

"Secretly Begged"

[bondsbw]

Isn't that pretty much the same as talking to yourself?

Re:Britain is but a client state of Uncle Sam

[TechyImmigrant]

The "Great" in Great Britain never meant great as in supa-dupa.

It derives from the French "Grande" as in "big", referring to the Island of Britain as the larger part or Brittany, with the smaller part being Brittany in the North of France. This goes back to the Norman conquests, where the French though they owned it, but once they got there, the locals quickly absorbed them into the borg and they decided they were British after all.
 

Re:Going over my head, perhaps, but.....

[AHuxley]

It really depends on how you see the role of the GCHQ vs the NSA.
The NSA had the computers and total control over sealed parts of shared US/UK bases. The GCHQ had the global locations and very ,very skilled staff but no real way into NSA global efforts even within the UK.
The Falklands, UK role in former Yugoslavia showed an even more clear lack of good UK crypto use or true UK global reach.
At any point in time the NSA could shut out or totally turn off the GCHQ product stream depending on US policy or political mood.
The UK likes to talk of its special relationship and joint facilities but knows a lot of other nations are now on the special US helper list (for NSA locations, "shared" sites) and other nations expect nothing back from the NSA unlike the UK.
The UK will always recall Diego Garcia in the 1970's and UK only efforts in Cyprus (and many other UK only regions) as been sticking points with the USA.
The result is a lack of sharing in both directions been used as a tool. NSA/GCHQ sites, Polaris, Super Antelope and Diego Garcia all showed the very real limits to US/UK relations in the past.
Now the UK is left with the result of the past budgets cuts from the 1960-80's and is totally dependant on the USA and NSA in many key ways. The US can offer all to the UK, some or none. The UK has its own sites for Ireland, and the Middle East but lacks its own NSA like total global reach.
The upper levels of the UK gov have also gotten a taste for the NSA product over decades. What this new news shows is a new hint at the decades old dance between the NSA, US gov and a UK addiction to total information awareness with limited funds.
So for years you had the useful sock puppets talking of the Anglosphere and that "special relationship" forged in past wars been about total trust and sharing.
Reality is much more complex per US political decade, UK budget related cuts and is very much controlled by the USA.
The UK faces losing a world wide database of realtime calls, voice prints, faxes, emails, networking and banking intel via the US and having to fall back on UK only efforts.
With only UK sites for Ireland, the Middle East and help from New Zealand, Australia, Canada it would be "dramatic" form the UK perspective after enjoying the global NSA efforts and long term storage.

Re:Going over my head, perhaps, but.....

[Xest]

Sure but GCHQ is only part of the intelligence picture, MI6 is one of the single greatest HUMINT organisations in the world, putting the CIA to shame, and second only to perhaps the likes of Israel's Mossad.

Britain's immigrant built cultural links with countries like Pakistan and previous laissez faire attitude to middle eastern and asian terrorist organisers living in exile has allowed it to build up impressive intelligence assets that many countries could only dream of. The equation changed slightly since al qaeda affiliates decided to bite the hand that fed it, but it's far from over. There's a reason groups like the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is based in London and comes up with perhaps the most accurate analysis of casualties in the world in the conflict there. Although the likes of Mossad's tradecraft skills tend to outweigh those of MI6, the network of activists, and agents MI6 has contacts with and links to is pretty much unparalleled.

This isn't to say the CIA hasn't made massive in-roads since 9/11, and didn't have areas of expertise before (like in Afghanistan, vs. the soviets - but guess who helped get the CIA in touch with the jihadis back then in Pakistan in the first place?).

The foundations of MI6 and it's broad and pretty much unrivalled network can be put down to the idea that whilst Britain's empire involved a break up with other nations, it still made sure it never lost contact on the ground.

Britain still has a lot of value to the US, the US would be far more prone to internal terrorist attacks without human intelligence from MI5, and MI6 through their broad network of contact with activists living in the UK. Part the reason that the Boston bombings were a succesful attack is because Chechnya is one of the few areas where Britain doesn't have such substantial ability to cooperate.

Regarding GCHQ specifically though, the UK is a major global telecommunications hub, for the NSA programmes to be effective it needs support from major hubs in every continent. The UK is their European partner, they'd struggle to find another with both the willingness, resources, and telecommunications links. To have the European aspect of their global spying program go dark would be a massively crippling blow to the whole programme so even there there is still some hefty leverage.

Re:Britain is but a client state of Uncle Sam

[Sockatume]

It's not cognate with the French word, it's simply a translation of the meaning. "Great" in English means "large or immense".