US snooping claims ‘nonsense’, says UK

British foreign secretary William Hague has denied his country’s spies were using a controversial US internet monitoring programme to dodge tough legal checks on their activities. While Hague refused to confirm or deny allegations that emerged on Saturday regarding the country’s listening post, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), having links to the Prism spy scheme, but described them as ‘fanciful’ and ‘nonsense’. 

‘As someone who knows GCHQ very well ... the idea that in GCHQ people are sitting working out how to circumvent a UK law with another agency in another country is fanciful. It is nonsense,’ he told BBC, confirming he would make a statement to the House of Commons on the issue on Monday. 

‘The net effect is that if you are a law-abiding citizen of this country going about your business and personal life, you have nothing to fear about the British state or intelligence agencies listening to the content of your phone calls or anything like that,’ he added. 

The UK government has come under pressure to respond to allegations that Prism has allowed GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process for obtaining personal material such as emails, photographs and videos, from internet companies based outside the UK. GCHQ is to report to MPs over the allegations surrounding its access to Prism, with parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) expecting the report by Monday. 

The existence of Prism system was disclosed in reports by Guardian and Washington Post and is believed to give US National Security Agency (NSA) and FBI easy access to the systems of nine of the world’s top internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.