Britain has pulled out agents from live operations in “hostile countries” after Russia and China cracked top-secret information contained in files leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, the Times reported.
Security service MI6, which operates overseas and is tasked with defending British interests, has removed agents from certain countries, the newspaper said, citing unnamed officials at the office of British Prime Minister David Cameron, the Home Office and security services.
Snowden downloaded more than 1.7 million secret files from security agencies in the United States and Britain in 2013, and leaked details about mass surveillance of phone and internet communications.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said: “As to the specific allegations this morning, we never comment on operational intelligence matters so I’m not going to talk about what we have or haven’t done in order to mitigate the effect of the Snowden revelations, but nobody should be in any doubt that Edward Snowden has caused immense damage.”
An official at Cameron’s office was quoted, however, as saying that there was “no evidence of anyone being harmed.”
A Home Office source told the newspaper that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not grant Snowden asylum for nothing.
The Russian and Chinese governments were not immediately available for comment.
The revelations about the impact of Snowden on intelligence operations comes days after Britain’s terrorism law watchdog said the rules governing the security services’ abilities to spy on the public needed to be overhauled.
Conservative lawmaker and former minister Andrew Mitchell said the timing of the report was “no accident.”
“There is a big debate going on,” he told BBC radio. “We are going to have legislation bought back to parliament (...) about the way in which individual liberty and privacy is invaded in the interest of collective national security.”
Cameron has promised a swathe of new security measures, including more powers to monitor Briton’s communications and online activity in what critics have dubbed a “snoopers’ charter.”
Britain’s terrorism laws reviewer David Anderson said on Thursday the current system was “undemocratic, unnecessary and - in the long run - intolerable.”
