Twelve years ago, in an almost forgotten report, the European Parliament completed its investigations into a long-suspected Western intelligence partnership dedicated to global signals interception on a vast scale. Evidence had been taken from spies and politicians, telecommunications experts and journalists.
The report detailed a decades-old arrangement that had seen the United States and the United Kingdom at first — later joined by Canada, New Zealand and Australia to make up the so-called "Five Eyes" — collaborating to access satellites, transatlantic fiber-optic cables and radio signals on a vast scale.
This secretive cooperation was itself the product of a mutual agreement stretching back to World War I, expanded in the second, and finally ratified in 1948 in the so-called UKUSA agreement.