US Asked British Spy Agency To Stop Guardian Publishing Snowden Revelations (theguardian.com) 27
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The US National Security Agency (NSA) tried to persuade its British counterpart to stop the Guardian publishing revelations about secret mass data collection from the NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, according to a new book. Sir Iain Lobban, the head of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), was reportedly called with the request in the early hours of June 6, 2013 but rebuffed the suggestion that his agency should act as a censor on behalf of its US partner in electronic spying.
The late-night call and the British refusal to shut down publication of the leaks was the first of several episodes in which the Snowden affair caused rifts within the Five Eyes signals intelligence coalition, recounted in a new book to be published on Thursday, The Secret History of Five Eyes, by film-maker and investigative journalist Richard Kerbaj. According to Kerbaj, Lobban was aware of the importance of the particularly special relationship between the US and UK intelligence agencies but thought "the proposition of urging a newspaper to spike the article for the sake of the NSA seemed a step too far." "It was neither the purpose of his agency nor his own to deal with the NSA's public relations," Kerbaj writes.
In October 2013, the then prime minister, David Cameron, later threatened the use of injunctions or other "tougher measures" to stop further publication of Snowden's leaks about the mass collection of phone and internet communications by the NSA and GCHQ. However, the DA-Notice committee, the body which alerts the UK media to the potential damage a story might cause to national security, told the Guardian at the time that nothing it had published had put British lives at risk. In the new book, Kerbaj reports that the US-UK intelligence relationship was further strained when the head of the NSA, Gen Keith Alexander, failed to inform Lobban that the Americans had identified Snowden, a Hawaii-based government contractor, as the source of the stories, leaving the British agency investigating its own ranks in the search for the leaker. GCHQ did not discover Snowden's identity until he went public in a Guardian interview. "It was a chilling reminder of how important you are, or how important you're not," a senior British intelligence insider is quoted as saying in the book. The book also alleges that members of Five Eyes were outraged by the revelations but weren't prepared to challenge the Americans "out of anxiety that they could be cut off from the flow of intelligence," reports the Guardian. Only the British representatives openly questioned U.S. practices, although they too "decided to bite their tongues when it came to frustration with their U.S. counterparts..."
Sir Kim Darroch, the former UK national security adviser, is quoted in the book as saying: "The US give us more than we give them so we just have to basically get on with it."
The late-night call and the British refusal to shut down publication of the leaks was the first of several episodes in which the Snowden affair caused rifts within the Five Eyes signals intelligence coalition, recounted in a new book to be published on Thursday, The Secret History of Five Eyes, by film-maker and investigative journalist Richard Kerbaj. According to Kerbaj, Lobban was aware of the importance of the particularly special relationship between the US and UK intelligence agencies but thought "the proposition of urging a newspaper to spike the article for the sake of the NSA seemed a step too far." "It was neither the purpose of his agency nor his own to deal with the NSA's public relations," Kerbaj writes.
In October 2013, the then prime minister, David Cameron, later threatened the use of injunctions or other "tougher measures" to stop further publication of Snowden's leaks about the mass collection of phone and internet communications by the NSA and GCHQ. However, the DA-Notice committee, the body which alerts the UK media to the potential damage a story might cause to national security, told the Guardian at the time that nothing it had published had put British lives at risk. In the new book, Kerbaj reports that the US-UK intelligence relationship was further strained when the head of the NSA, Gen Keith Alexander, failed to inform Lobban that the Americans had identified Snowden, a Hawaii-based government contractor, as the source of the stories, leaving the British agency investigating its own ranks in the search for the leaker. GCHQ did not discover Snowden's identity until he went public in a Guardian interview. "It was a chilling reminder of how important you are, or how important you're not," a senior British intelligence insider is quoted as saying in the book. The book also alleges that members of Five Eyes were outraged by the revelations but weren't prepared to challenge the Americans "out of anxiety that they could be cut off from the flow of intelligence," reports the Guardian. Only the British representatives openly questioned U.S. practices, although they too "decided to bite their tongues when it came to frustration with their U.S. counterparts..."
Sir Kim Darroch, the former UK national security adviser, is quoted in the book as saying: "The US give us more than we give them so we just have to basically get on with it."
Spycatcher2 (Score:2)
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The US should release the Russia Report in retaliation!
NSA is a Russian plant. (Score:1)
The NSA was created when a bunch of Russian spies were almost caught by top-level FBI agents, but then succeeded in bluffing them with something like "oh, da comerade, our rank is so top secret even you are not privy," and the FBI fell for it.
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we can always ignore things said by anonymous coward, as they are likely disinfo employees using the anonymous coward feature to conceal their user I.D. to frustrate tracking of disinfo employees.
Right?
Um. Anyone surprised? (Score:3)
is anyone here choking on their cup of tea to learn that the US government tried to suppress the worst US intelligence leak in the last two generations?
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>to learn that the US government tried to suppress the worst US intelligence leak in the last two generations
They knew they couldn't stop it.
So they were just testing how loyal the other Five Eyes members were.
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Russia's hands?
Are you an idiot or merely misinformed?
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So obviously they'll be doing exactly the same illegal shit to the best of their ability, but by indirect means. I mean, we're talking spooks here - they only care about being able to cover their shit up, not about morality or anything that normal people are bound by.
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The interesting part, to me at least, is that the British refused at first and then apparently changed their minds. If you check YouTube there is video of them pointlessly destroying laptops, right down to turning every chip on the motherboard to dust. Of course the journalists made sure that wasn't the only copy and that they could continue publishing anyway.
CIA (Score:5, Insightful)
While on the surface the USA is a nice democracy, with apple pie and church on Sunday, under the covers they are despotic war mongering coo makers and drug runners. The main game though is keeping oil priced in USD which is why Saudi Arabia can furnish most of the 9/11 attackers causing a war in Iraq with Saddam Hussein who was an ex CIA asset. You couldn't make this shit up!
The CIA has long been the private army of big businesses bidding.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2... [counterpunch.org]
https://content.time.com/time/... [time.com]
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It is still current.
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it's funny how insightful comments never hide behind anonymous coward.
A lot like extraordinary rendition logic (Score:2)
The concept here is that if the NSA had done this in the United States, there would have been a court case and the courts would likely have sided with newspapers, invoking the First Amendment.
But once again since this is overseas, the government is pushing for things that would never be legal here; it is curious that they tried to pressure the British though.
We know during war things happen that would never be legal on this soil; it'd be interesting to see a full accounting of what the US gets away with, or
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Who was US President (Score:2)
back then? Didn't he have a strong dislike for the Brits?
OMG, stop calling governments by country names! (Score:2)
The headline for grownups is, "US Spy Agency Asked..., claims ____".
And even attributing it to the agency isn't quite supported in the article, since it doesn't mention whether the request was official or unofficial, or name who made it.
Th
land of the free ? (Score:2)
Yet centuries later it is the US asking the UK to hide it's affronts to freedom.
A new low.