LONDON - Britain runs a secret monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept large numbers of telephone calls, emails and internet traffic that it shares with intelligence agencies in the United States, the
Independent reported on Friday.
The station is part of a 1 billion pound ($1.56 billion) global eavesdropping project run by Britain to intercept digital communications, the newspaper said, citing leaked documents from former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The London-based
Independent, which did not say how it got access to the information from the Snowden documents, said the British had tapped into the underwater fiber-optic cables which pass through the Middle East.
Data gleaned from the monitoring station, whose exact location the
Independent said it would not reveal, is then passed onto Britain's eavesdropping agency (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, England, and shared with the US National Security Agency.
