Many ties bind the US to unsavory government around the world, but perhaps Washington’s most perverse strategic affixment isn’t with a military dictator, strongman, or banana republic.
Documents provided to the Guardian by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden reveal that the Government Communications Headquarters, a British intelligence agency, has conducted mass surveillance on journalists, and listed independent muckrakers as a security threat.
“Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency,” reporter James Ball wrote in a story published Monday.
Ball noted that the communications “were available to all cleared staff on the agency intranet. There is nothing to indicate whether or not the journalists were intentionally targeted.”
Other documents, however, showed that the GCHQ targeted journalists and reporters who “represent a potential threat to security.” Assessments prepared by British spies listed reporters alongside “terrorism” and “hackers” as “threat sources.”
If the National Security Agency was revealed to have done the same, it is likely that even some of its most ferocious defenders would admit that the US intelligence community has gotten out of hand.
Yet not a single mass espionage apologist thinks the US should end its spying partnership with the UK – an alliance known as the “Five Eyes,” because it also includes Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
News that the Brits are spying on their own, as well as American journalists, shouldn’t be particularly surprising, given past discoveries about the GCHQ’s creepy approach to surveillance. Her Majesty’s spies have praised psychological operations–including misbehavior online under an assumed identity–as a means of discrediting their domestic “enemies.”
But the latest revelations are particularly troubling given the extent of information sharing between the US, the UK, and the rest of the Five Eyes.
It was reported in June 2013, that the GCHQ produces larger amounts of metadata than the NSA, and has far fewer restrictions on how it may use the collected information. The Guardian reported that “Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: ‘We have a light oversight regime compared with the US.’”
When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for in the data, “would-be American users were told it was ‘your call.’”
For journalists in the US, unlike in the UK, the First Amendment broadly protects news-gathering activities. The difference between the two countries was made all too apparent to the world when British agents walked into The Guardian’s London offices, following publication of stories based on documents leaked by Snowden, and demanded that editors destroy hard drives containing state secrets. Unfortunately, laws in the US shielding journalists from government spookery too often wither under the banner of “national security,” as journalists, like James Risen and Julian Assange, and sources, like John Kiriakou and Thomas Drake, can attest. If American spooks can share information with their British counterparts as both parties please, Constitutional protections are eroded in the US even further.
The NSA denies that it uses Five Eyes partners to conduct the sort of domestic surveillance that it’s forbidden from doing by statute, like spying on New York Times journalists without a warrant. But then again, the agency has denied a lot of things. And the alliance, and all the information sharing that comes with it, whether passed around or not, still exists, casting doubt on just how committed the US government is to protecting its own journalists from itself.
It’s difficult enough for Washington to act like it’s committed to promoting human rights and free expression around the world as tear gas canisters emblazoned with “Made in the USA” rain down on protestors in Egypt. It should be equally as difficult for the US to promote privacy rights for its citizens and freedom for its journalists as long as it continues intimately cooperating with the UK, which has never bothered to afford its press any robust protections.
Until the ties are broken, Americans should assume that there should be no distinction between what UK spies are doing and what US spies are doing. And whenever there’s a future headline exposing abusive GCHQ surveillance, one can’t help but consider that the US government is culpable as well.
