Hague Defends GCHQ Over Prism Spying Claims

Foreign Secretary William Hague has defended the integrity of GCHQ and dismissed as "fanciful" claims that the eavesdropping centre has stepped outside the law.

The Tory Cabinet minister refused to confirm or deny allegations that it has been accessing data through a secret US Internet surveillance programme .

But he confirmed he would be making a statement to the Commons on the issue today.

"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 the BBC's Andrew Marr Show.

Mr Hague said it was necessary for a lot of GCHQ's work to be covert and that law-biding members of the public had "nothing to fear".

"Why do we not tell people how we go about in detail gathering intelligence? It's because some thought goes in on the part of terrorist networks, criminal networks, intelligence agencies of other countries as to how they can communicate without GCHQ or the Secret Intelligence Service finding out about them," he said.

"If actually we could tell the whole world and the whole country how we do this business, I think people would be enormously reassured by it and they would see that the law-abiding citizen has nothing to worry about.

"If we did that, it would defeat the objective - this is secret work, it is secret intelligence, it is secret for a reason, and a reason that is to do with protecting all the people of this country."

Mr Hague declined to confirm that he had personally authorised engagement with the controversial US Prism programme, but he insisted checks in place in this country, including reviews of decisions by the Interception Commissioner, were strong.

"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 said.

"Indeed you will never be aware of all the things that these agencies are doing to stop your identity being stolen or to stop a terrorist blowing you up tomorrow," he added.

GCHQ is due to give a report to parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) within the next 24 hours over links with the Prism programme and claims it has been accessing information about British citizens through the body.

It follows reports by The Guardian and The Washington Post which disclosed the existence of the Prism system - set up by America's National Security Agency (NSA) to track customer data directly from ISP servers to fight the threat of terrorism.

Based on a leaked document, both papers also claimed nine internet service providers are partners in Prism.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the bosses of Google and Yahoo! have vigorously denied giving the US spy programme direct access to their customers' data.

Former MoD cyber security chief, Major-General Jonathan Shaw, said the internet was another area of criminal activity which needed to be used by the intelligence services to combat crime.

He told Sky News' Murnaghan programme on Sunday: "People are particularly concerned about cyberspace as if in cyberspace, the intelligence agencies should not be prying and that there should be a totally free cyberspace.

"But people need to recognise that cyberspace is just another area where people do their activity and criminal behaviour on cyberspace is just as criminal as if it takes place in the more public arena that we're used to."

Also appearing on Murnaghan, Lord Carlile, a former reviewer of terrorism legislation, added: "If the US with their much broader law enabling interception discover something which might tell us there could be, for example, another Woolwich style attack in the UK, then of course we'd expect them to supply that information to the UK even if the UK intelligence services would not have been able to obtain it themselves under UK law."