The UK ex-spy said to be behind accusations of Russian hacking in favour of Donald Trump in the US is “some runaway crook from the MI6”, Russia’s foreign minister says.
Sergei Lavrov said Russia did not have to prove it was not behind the hacking.
Ex-UK spy Christopher Steele is said to have prepared memos published last week alleging Mr Trump’s election team colluded with Russia which also had salacious videos of his private life.
Mr Trump says the claims are “fake”.
Mr Steele, who runs a London-based intelligence firm, was highly regarded by his bosses when he worked for the British foreign spy agency MI6, sources have told the BBC.
He has been widely named as the author of a series of memos – which have been published as a dossier in some US media.
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The allegations claim Russia has damaging information about the US president-elect’s business interests, and salacious video evidence of his private life, including claims of using prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow.
US intelligence agencies considered the claims relevant enough to brief both Mr Trump and President Barack Obama.
Mr Trump accused US intelligence of leaking the content from a classified briefing – a claim denied by James Clapper, director of National Intelligence.
Asked by a German journalist during a news conference in Moscow, the Russian foreign minister said he was not going to prove why the allegations were “not true”.
“I thought that the presumption of innocence was in force in Germany as in other countries. So you prove it,” Mr Lavrov said.
“These are convulsions of those who realise that their time is running out,” Mr Lavrov said. “That is why various fakes are being fabricated.”
The hacking scandal dominated the US election campaign, with US spy agencies concluding Russia was behind the hacking and release of Democratic Party emails intended to damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
Iain Lobban the director of GCHQ (Reuters/UK Parliament via REUTERS TV)
The head of GCHQ, Britain’s electronic intelligence agency, will step down by year’s end, the Foreign Office said. Officials denied his departure was linked to public outrage over mass surveillance revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Iain Lobban, 53, has served as GCHQ’s director since June 2008. His departure was officially described as a long-considered move, but comes just a few weeks after he was summoned to answer MPs’ questions about surveillance operations in an unprecedented televised open session of the UK parliament’s intelligence and security committee, along with the heads of MI5 and MI6.
“Iain Lobban is doing an outstanding job as director of GCHQ,” a spokesperson said. “Today is simply about starting the process of ensuring we have a suitable successor in place before he moves on, planned at the end of the year.”
Officials dismissed suggestions his decision was influenced by revelations made by Snowden, a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, whose leaks revealed details of a massive global surveillance network run by the NSA and other members of the so-called Five Eyes alliance – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Despite accounting for the bulk of Britain’s three intelligence agencies’ combined budget of £2 billion, GCHQ had previously attracted far less public attention than MI5 or MI6.
It was damaging media revelations regarding wide-scale collaboration between GCHQ and the NSA that resulted in Lobban being called to appear before the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee alongside the heads of MI5 and MI6 in November.
At the hearing, Lobban accused Snowden’s disclosures of seriously damaging Britain’s counter-terrorism efforts, saying extremists had discussed changing their communication methods following the revelations.
Critics, however, have accused GCHQ of working hand-in-hand with the NSA in massively intruding on the private communications of millions of citizens.
In June, the Guardian reported the NSA had secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic, and, by 2010, was able to boast the “biggest internet access” of any member of the Five Eyes alliance.
According to media reports, the NSA and GCHQ had a particularly close relationship, sharing troves of data in what Snowden called “the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”
Around 850,000 NSA employees and contractors with top secret clearance had access to the GCHQ databases, allowing them to view and analyze information garnered from such subtly titled programs as ‘Mastering the Internet (MTI)’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation (GTE).’
Lobban, who first joined GCHQ in 1983, insisted in November that GCHQ did not spend its time “listening to the telephone calls or reading the e-mails of the majority” of British citizens.
Sir Iain’s counterpart at the NSA, General Keith Alexander, alongside his deputy, John Inglis, are also stepping down later this year.
There is also an ongoing campaign pushing for Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to resign for lying under oath by telling Congress the NSA did “not wittingly” collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans.
The British intelligence services must persuade public they are working on their behalf and not against them, revealing Julian Assange and Edward Snowden as the “self-seeking twerps” they are, Dame Stella Rimington has said.
Dame Stella, the former head of MI5, said openness about the role of the intelligence services would help public trust, after revelations about how information is gathered.
Speaking at the Henley Literary Festival, she added it may now be time for more “oversight” of the issue to reassure the public that the interception of communication was in their best interests, The Telegraph stated.
She said the “main issue” which now needed to be addressed is the “question of intrusion by our security services into everybody’s lives”, which the likes of Assange and Snowden use as an excuse to share secrets.
“It’s very important for our intelligence services to have a kind of oversight which people have confidence in,” she said.
“So that we can be quite sure that in giving them these powers we know they are being properly supervised in the way they are using them.
“I think that it may mean it is now the time to look again at the oversight. I have every confidence that the oversight is good and they’re not trying anything of the things they’re not supposed to.
“But it may be that we need something more complex to convince the nation our intelligence services are actually acting on their behalf and not acting against them.
“Assange and Snowden would be seen to be what I believe they are, which is self-seeking twerps.”
She added the service was now facing one of its most difficult periods ever, with “spreading extremism that is sucking in young people and providing them with some kind of ethic and ethos that is difficult for all of us to understand”.
Dame Stella, 78, also spoke of the difficulties of combining her former role with motherhood, disclosing she had feared for the safety of her daughters after her identity was revealed.
Speaking of the nature of state surveillance, she added: “My own opinion on this is that intelligence, in an increasingly complex and sophisticated world, has to be able to go where the threat is,” she said.
“In that the people who are seeking to harm us are increasingly sophisticated and are using more sophisticated ways of communicating in order to conceal their plans.
“Our intelligence services have to be given the tools to go there too in order to react.”
Security breach by ‘hacktivists’ reveals email addresses of 221 British military staff and 242 Nato officials
Ed Pilkington in New York and Richard Norton-Taylor
Nato secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. More than 200 of his staff have been exposed by Anonymous 'hacktivists'. Photograph: Olivier Hoslet/EPA
Thousands of British email addresses and encrypted passwords, including those of defence, intelligence and police officials as well as politicians and Nato advisers, have been revealed on the internet following a security breach by hackers.
Among the huge database of private information exposed by self-styled “hacktivists” are the details of 221 British military officials and 242 Nato staff. Civil servants working at the heart of the UK government – including several in the Cabinet Office as well as advisers to the Joint Intelligence Organisation, which acts as the prime minister’s eyes and ears on sensitive information – have also been exposed.
The hackers, who are believed to be part of the Anonymous group, gained unauthorised access over Christmas to the account information of Stratfor, a consultancy based in Texas that specialises in foreign affairs and security issues. The database had recorded in spreadsheets the user IDs – usually email addresses – and encrypted passwords of about 850,000 individuals who had subscribed to Stratfor’s website.
Some 75,000 paying subscribers also had their credit card numbers and addresses exposed, including 462 UK accounts.
John Bumgarner, an expert in cyber-security at the US Cyber Consequences Unit, a research body in Washington, has analysed the Stratfor breach for the Guardian. He has identified within the data posted by the hackers the details of hundreds of UK government officials, some of whom work in sensitive areas.
Many of the email addresses are not routinely made public, and the passwords are all encrypted in code that can quickly be cracked using off-the-shelf software.
Among the leaked email addresses are those of 221 Ministry of Defence officials identified by Bumgarner, including army and air force personnel. Details of a much larger group of US military personnel were leaked. The database has some 19,000 email addresses ending in the .mil domain of the US military.
In the US case, Bumgarner has found, 173 individuals deployed in Afghanistan and 170 in Iraq can be identified. Personal data from former vice-president Dan Quayle and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger were also released.
Other UK government departments have been affected: seven officials in the Cabinet Office have had their details exposed, 45 Foreign Office officials, 14 from the Home Office, 67 Scotland Yard and other police officials, and two employees with the royal household.
There are also 23 people listed who work in the houses of parliament, including Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North, Lady Nicholson and Lord Roper. Corbyn said he had been unaware of the breach, adding that although his email address was public he was disturbed by the idea that his password could be cracked and used to delete or write emails in a way that “could be very damaging”.
Nicholson, speaking on a phone from Iraq, said she had no idea that her personal information had been hacked. She said she was very unhappy that private individuals had had their fundamental right to privacy violated. “To expose civil servants is monstrously unfair,” she said. “Officials in sensitive areas like defence and the military could even be exposed to threats. Guarding data like this is extremely difficult, but it’s not impossible, and we should do a great deal more.”
The hacking has had a big impact because Stratfor offers expert analysis of international affairs, including security issues, and attracts subscribers from sensitive government departments.
The British victims include officials with the Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO) responsible for assessing intelligence from all sources, including MI6 secret agents.
A former deputy head of Whitehall’s strategic horizons unit is listed. The unit is part of the JIO based in the Cabinet Officeand was set up four years ago to give early warning of potential serious problems that might have an impact on Britain’s security or environment.
The extent of the security risk posed by the breach is not known. Bumgarner said officials who did not take extra precautions in securing passwords through dual authentication or other protection systems could find email and other databases they use being compromised. “Any foreign intelligence service targeting Britain could find these emails useful in identifying individuals connected to sensitive government activities,” he said.
British officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were aware of the hacking but it did not pose a risk to national security. Passwords for their communications within Whitehall would be different from any used to access the Stratfor sites. Whitehall communications would also be protected by extra security walls, officials said.
However, they added that their personal communications could be at risk if individuals used the same password as they used to access Stratfor for their bank accounts and other personal communications.
A government spokesman said: “We are aware that subscriber details for the Stratfor website have been published in the public domain. At present, there is no indication of any threat to UK government systems. Advice and guidance on such threats is issued to government departments through the Government Computer Emergency Response Team.”
Stratfor has taken down its website while it investigates the security breach. The company says it is “working diligently to prevent it from ever happening again”.
This is just the latest action to hit the headlines by hackers associated with Anonymous. The group, whose loose collection of members are scattered around the world and linked through internet chatrooms, has previously targeted Visa, MasterCard and PayPal in protest at the companies’ refusal to accept donations for the WikiLeaks website.
Foreign Secretary William Hague is to stress the Government’s commitment to “drawing a line” under the alleged involvement of Britain’s intelligence agencies in the torture of terror suspects held overseas.
In a rare speech on the use of secret intelligence, Mr Hague will praise the agencies as “vital assets” which protect lives and make a “critical contribution” to safeguarding UK national interests.
He will, however, acknowledge that Britain’s reputation had been damaged by a series of claims that MI5 and MI6 officers had been complicit in the extraordinary rendition of terror suspects leading to their detention and torture overseas.
“The very making of these allegations undermined Britain’s standing in the world as a country that upholds international law and abhors torture,” he will say, according to advance extracts of his speech.
“As a Government we understand how important it is that we not only uphold our values and international law, but that we are seen to do so.”
Mr Hague will point to the establishment of the detainee inquiry under Sir Peter Gibson and the recent green paper proposals to enable the greater use of secret intelligence material in court cases as evidence of the Government’s commitment to tackle the issue.
“We are confident that taken together these changes represent the most comprehensive effort yet to address the complex issues thrown up by the need to protect our security in the 21st century, and to do so in a way that upholds our values and begins to restore public confidence,” he will say.
“So this will be our Government’s approach: drawing a line under the past, creating the right legislative framework so that the interests of national security and justice are reconciled, and drawing on the talents and capabilities of the intelligence agencies to support foreign policy and our national security.”
Both approaches have been controversial. Lawyers representing detainees have said they will boycott the Gibson inquiry complaining the hearings will largely be secret and it will not seek evidence from other countries involved.
The green paper has been criticised by human rights groups who have warned that it will lead to greater secrecy in the justice system, making it more difficult to hold the authorities to account for alleged abuses.
Intelligence helped Gaddafi regime track and apprehend dissidents, according to files seized from Tripoli offices
Cherry Wilson
Files found in Tripoli offices claim MI6 and the CIA were complicit in human rights violations by the Gaddafi regime. Photograph: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters
British and US intelligence agencies built up close links with Muammar Gaddafi and handed over detailed information to assist his regime, according to secret files found in Libyan government offices.
The documents claim that MI6 supplied its counterparts in Libya with details on exiled opponents living in the UK, and chart how the CIA abducted several suspected militants before handing them over to Tripoli.
They also contain communications between British and Libyan security officials ahead of Tony Blair’s visit in 2004, and show that British officials helped write a draft speech for Gaddafi when he was being encouraged to give up his weapons programme.
The discovery was made by reporters and members of Human Rights Watch in the private offices of Moussa Koussa, the former foreign minister and head of Libyan intelligence, who defected to Britain in February. He is now believed to be in Qatar.
According to the documents, Libya’s relationship with MI6 and the CIA was especially close between 2002 and 2004, at the height of the war on terror. The papers give details of how No 10 insisted that the 2004 meeting between Blair and Gaddafi took place in his bedouin tent, with a letter from an MI6 official saying: “I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is that the journalists would love it.”
They also show how a statement made by Gaddafi during the time in which he pledged to give up his nuclear programme and destroy his stock of chemical and biological weapons was put together with the help of British officials. A covering letter states: “For the sake of clarity, please find attached a tidied-up version of the language we agreed on Tuesday. I wanted to ensure that you had the same script.”
Other letters seem to reveal that British intelligence gave Tripoli details of a Libyan dissident who had been freed from jail in Britain. One US document stated the CIA was in a position to deliver a prisoner into the custody of Libyan authorities.
The papers, which have not been independently verified, also suggest the CIA abducted several suspected militants from 2002 to 2004 who were subsequently handed over to Tripoli. Human Rights Watch has accused the CIA of condoning torture.
“It wasn’t just abducting suspected Islamic militants and handing them over to the Libyan intelligence,” said Peter Bouckaert, director of Human Rights Watch’s emergencies division. “The CIA also sent the questions they wanted Libyan intelligence to ask and, from the files, it’s very clear they were present in some of the interrogations themselves.”
Foreign secretary, William Hague, said he could not comment on security matters. Further documents found at the British ambassador’s residence in Tripoli, and obtained by a Sunday newspaper, concerned the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. A memo written in January 2009 by Robert Dixon, head of the North Africa team at the Foreign Office, and sent to then foreign secretary David Miliband, warned that Gaddafi’s ministers said there would be “dire consequences” for the UK-Libya relationship in the event of Megrahi’s death in custody.
