UK spies accused of using 'dirty tricks' to trap targets
Iran Press TV
Sun Feb 9, 2014 3:12PM GMT
New Leaks show that British spies have employed "dirty tricks" to trap nations, hackers, terror groups, arms dealers and suspected criminals.
The latest leaks by American whistleblower Edward Snowden, obtained by the NBC News on Friday, detail strategies used by a secret British spy unit called the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group (JTRIG).
According to the documents coming from presentations prepped in 2010 and 2012 for the United States' National Security Agency (NSA) cyber spy conferences, the JTRIG is assigned to "destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt" adversaries by "discrediting" them through misinformation and hacking their communications.
Releasing computer viruses, jamming phones and computers, using sexual "honey traps," conducting cyber operations, and leading propaganda campaigns are reported to be among the JTRIG's techniques to spy on adversaries.
The propaganda missions include mass messaging and "pushing stories" on social media websites such as YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook.
The cyber operations also consist of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, in which a website's host computers are bombarded with requests for information causing it to crash.
Meanwhile, it was revealed that "Ambassadors Reception" was used as a "very effective" computer virus by British spies "in a variety of different areas."
A programme called "Royal Concierge" was also found to be employed to track the location of foreign diplomats via hotel reservation systems.
Moreover, the documents said the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is currently conducting espionage activities that were once exclusively in the realm of British spy agencies MI5 and MI6.
"GCHQ has no clear authority to send a virus or conduct cyber-attacks. Hacking is one of the most invasive methods of surveillance," said Eric King, a lawyer who teaches IT law at the London School of Economics.
In June 2013, Snowden leaked two top secret US government spying programs, which revealed that the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had been eavesdropping on millions of American and European phone records and internet data.
The scandal took even broader dimensions later, when the former NSA contractor revealed information about the organization's espionage activities targeting friendly countries.
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