British agency said to top U.S. in spying on the Internet

LONDON - British spies are running an online eavesdropping operation so vast that internal documents say it even outstrips the United States’ international Internet surveillance effort, The Guardian newspaper reported Friday.

The paper cited British intelligence memos leaked by former National Security Agency contractor EdwardSnowden to claim that U.K. spies were tapping into the world’s network of fiber-optic cables to deliver the “biggest Internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes - the name given to the espionage alliance composed of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

How much data the Brits are copying off the fiber-optic network isn’t clear, but The Guardian said the informationflowing across more than 200 cables was being monitored by more than 500 analysts from the National Security Agency and its U.K. counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters.

The newspaper said Government Communications Headquarters was using probes to capture and copy data as it crisscrossed the Atlantic between western Europe and North America.

It said that, by last year, the agency was in some way handling 600 million telecommunications every day - although it did not go into any further detail and it was not clear whether that meant that Government Communications Headquarters could systematically record or even track all the electronic movement at once.

The agency declined to comment Friday.