14 DAY TRIAL // Phone, Internet and email records of innocent British citizens have been analyzed and stored by the American National Security Agency after the UK approved a secret deal, new leaked documents indicate.
Some voices in the UK showed some hope back when it was revealed that the GHCQ was actually working alongside the NSA to spy the world that the data of British citizens was left out of the deal, especially since the general understanding of the “Five-Eyes” was that member countries didn’t spy on each other.
Well, the Guardian and Channel 4 News teamed up and released information from another document leaked by Edward Snowden indicating that the NSA got the explicit agreement from the UK authorities to collect all types of data. According to a memo, an agreement was reached in 2007, allowing the agency to “unmask” and store personal data about Brits, something that had previously been off limits.
The Snowden file, however, reveals that the NSA was given free hand to analyze and retain mobile phone numbers, fax numbers, email and IP addresses from UK citizens that got swept up.
The communications the NSA was allowed to collect starting with 2007 were “incidentally collected,” which means that none of the citizens was actually the subject of an ongoing investigation or the initial target of surveillance operations. Basically, they were innocent.
The US intelligence agency used the data to create a “pattern of life” or “contact-chaining analyses.” The agency looked up what’s been called “three hops” away from a target of interest.
“Two hops” represent the people a target gets in contact with, while “three hops” represents all the people each of the previous individuals got in contact with. According to a Guardian analysis, this meant that for a single Facebook user, for instance, that meant information form some 5 million people got collected.