14 DAY TRIAL // The GCHQ will soon have to provide an urgent report about revelations that the phone, Internet and email records of British citizens have been collected, stored and analyzed by the United States’ National Security Agency, as revealed by new leaks.
The parliamentary intelligence and security committee, the watchdog tasked with looking over the British intelligence agencies, is seeking an answer from the GCHQ, the committee’s chairman, Sir Malcolm Rifkind said, the Guardian reports.
“As with any significant stories concerning any of the intelligence agencies, we will require and receive a full report from them on this,” he said.
The reaction comes following revelations that the NSA had been allowed by the British officials to handle data on local citizens in 2007, although it previously was only allowed to hold onto landline numbers that were inadvertently collected.
The American intelligence agency then used the data to create a pattern of life or contact-chaining analysis as far as three hops away from a target of interest.
According to explanations given by officials, two hops represents all the people a specific target is in contact with, while three hops represents all the people each of the previous individuals got in contact with. An analysis indicates this could mean as many as five million people for the regular Facebook user.
The worst part about the revelation is that the vast majority of those that got spied on were completely innocent and the data was “incidentally collected.” The list includes mobile phone numbers, fax numbers, email and IP addresses.
According to an earlier memo, however, the NSA had already been spying on Brits, or at least intended to, as well as all the other state members of the Five-Eyes, which theoretically agreed to share intelligence, but not to spy on one another.