American whistleblower Edward Snowden’s latest leaks reveal that GHCQ, the British Government’s electronic intelligence arm, intercepted communications of “foreign politicians and officials” who attended the G-20 summit and a meeting of Finance Ministers in london in 2009.
Those who attended the summit meeting, held in April 2009, included Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while President Pranab Mukherjee, in his capacity as Finance Minister at that time, attended the ministerial meeting in September that year.
The Guardian, which published the new disclosures on the eve of Britain playing host to a G-8 summit in Northern Ireland, reported that the evidence on GHCQ’s interception of phone calls and monitoring of emails of foreign delegates is contained in top-secret documents uncovered by Snowden and “seen” by it.
While the British targets included allies such as Turkey and South Africa, the Guardian reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) had also attempted to eavesdrop on the then Russian President Medvedev during the conference as his phone calls passed through satellite links to Moscow.
GCHQ, or the Government Communications Headquarters, is the designated centre of Britain's signal intelligence activities.
The documents leaked by Snowden reportedly show that GCHQ used "ground-breaking intelligence capabilities" to intercept the communications of visiting delegations.
"G20 spying appears to have been organised for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey," the paper said.
According to the report, a team of 45 analysts received a live round-the-clock summary of who was phoning who at the summit. The GCHQ set up Internet cafes for delegates in hopes of intercepting e-mails and capturing keystrokes. One briefing slide explained how intelligence agencies could read delegates' e-mails "before/as they do", providing "sustained intelligence options against them even after conference has finished".
The spying measures reportedly included penetrating the security on delegates' BlackBerrys to monitor their email messages and phone calls.
In Washington, Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said he was aware of the Guardian's latest report but declined to comment on it. "What we should be focused on is how irresponsible and egregious these recent leaks are," he told CNN. "It's impossible to know exactly how much damage is being done by these disclosures, but they will have an effect on our counterterrorism efforts."
Former Vice-President Dick Cheney, who appeared on Fox News, came out in praise of NSA. Calling Snowden a criminal and a traitor, Cheney said: "I think it's one of the worst occasions in my memory of somebody with access to classified information doing enormous damage to the national security interests of the United States."
Commenting on the latest disclosures, Matthew M Aid, a noted Washington-based intelligence historian, told The New York Times that there were no surprises about this spying on world leaders. "This is just what intelligence agencies do - spy on friends and enemies alike," he said, even as he demanded a public discussion about "proper limits" on the National Security Agency, given the disclosures that its surveillance has been "far more intrusive than we knew".