GCHQ plan to spy on 'any phone, anywhere, any time'

British spy agency building the technology to spy on anyone, anywhere, whenever it wants

British spy agency GCHQ is being paid £100m to spy on behalf of the US secret services, and is developing the capability to spy on "any phone, anywhere, any time".

That is the claim arising from the latest set of documents to be released in The Guardian from the US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden.

It claims that "GCHQ is pouring money into efforts to gather personal information from mobile phones and apps, and has said it wants to be able to "exploit any phone, anywhere, any time".

Snowden has described the UK secret services as "worse than the US". The NSA uses GCHQ to conduct spying operations on US citizens and people around the world, circumventing American legal restrictions that prevent the US government from spying on its own citizens.

According to the documents, the US paid £15.5m to develop a surveillance site in Bude in north Cornwall to tap the communications on the transatlantic cables that carry a large proportion of the world's internet traffic.

The documents, claims The Guardian, reveal that the US pays GCHQ £100m per year to spy on its behalf and to develop ever-more sophisticated means of spying on global internet users' web traffic. This data, which includes emails, telephone and other private conversations, is then stored by the NSA in the US in a searchable database accessed by its staff every day.

The spying programmes are so extensive that some staff, according to the documents, have even expressed moral and ethical reservations over the surveillance work that they are involved in.

Furthermore, other staff have suggested that they are now wading through so much data that "mission management ... is no longer fit for purpose".