NSA surveillance: more revelations

NSA surveillance: more revelations as EU leaders meet in Brussels

Italian magazine reports allegedly vast scale of US and British spying, and Le Monde publishes another NSA document

Lizzy Davies in Rome and Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

As European leaders met in Brussels on Friday, fresh revelations about NSAsnooping continued to emerge, with an Italian magazine focusing attention on the allegedly vast scale of US and British surveillance of telephone and email communications in Italy.

The weekly L'Espresso magazine said it had learned that documents obtained by the whistleblower Edward Snowden showed the intensive monitoring of Italian telecoms networks by both the NSA and GCHQ.

Through their "more modern and more invasive" Tempora programme, the magazine wrote, the British intelligence services were allegedly able to collect large amounts of data, which they then shared "in total collaboration" with their close allies at the NSA.

L'Espresso published no new documents, but said it had ascertained that Italy - and particularly Sicily - had become a focus of activity because of its strategic location between Europe, north Africa and the Middle East.

It said that GCHQ had access to three fibre-optic telecommunications cables - SeaMeWe3, SeaMeWe4, and the Europe Asia segment of the so-called FLAG cable - which between them had three landing points in Sicily.

Writing that the priorities of Tempora, first revealed by the Guardian in June , were wide-ranging, L'Espresso claimed they included establishing "the political intentions of foreign governments", trade deals, and information to help support Britain's economic wellbeing.

L'Espresso wrote: "The British authorities' licence to spy is very large and allows for businesses, politicians and statesmen to be kept under control."

The extent to which Italy's own intelligence services were aware of these alleged activities was unclear, the magazine reported, claiming that the Italians had a "third party agreement" with the British but giving no further details.

In a statement to Italy's parliamentary committee for the intelligence and security services and for state secret control (Copasir), Italy's intelligence services denied they had made an agreement with GCHQ for the interception of data from the cables.

In France, the daily newspaper Le Monde published an internal NSA documentwhich it said showed the "tensions and distrust between Paris and Washington".

The document, a preparatory note before a visit to the NSA by two top French intelligence officials in April 2013, shows that French officials suspected the US could have been behind a now well-known cyber-attack on the French presidential computer network at the Elysée in May 2012.

The hacking incident occurred just before the second round of the French presidential election, when Nicolas Sarkozy was still in power. Le Monde stated that the two French officials went to ask their US counterparts at theNSA for an explanation.

The NSA document states that no US intelligence agency or of its close allies in Britain and Canada were behind the electronic attack.

The Elysée tightened its cybersecurity after the May 2012 incident, in which suspected detectors had been installed allowing access to information from the presidency and the hacking of presidential computers. "The attack was not part of an act of sabotage which was to be made public, but of the desire to be permanently installed invisibly at the centre of the presidency", an expert on the case told Le Monde.

It added: "To attempt, or to appear, to prove their good faith, the NSA planned to send two analysts from NTOC [the NSA's crisis centre] in March to assist the French in finding the attacker. On the eve of their departure, France cancelled the visit and hardened its tone, demanding that [French intelligence officials] Bernard Barbier and Patrick Pailloux be given a hearing at the NSA on 12 April 2013.

"The internal NSA document notes that at no point did the French transmit the elements at their disposal concerning the possible responsibility of the Americans. Doubtless because the French want to see how the NSA responds when they presented their findings."

The NSA document shows that the US maintained it had no role in the cyber-attack.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/25/nsa-surveillance-more-revelations-spying-eu