(Newswire.net — June 15, 2015) — China and Russia have encrypted the code from the secret NSA documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times reported. Reportedly the UK has moved its undercover agents from Russia and China. It is still unclear if US has done the same.
According to BBC, the government was informed by an unnamed source that Moscow and Beijing obtained information on the identities of undercover agents working for the British intelligence. It is not clear though if the NSA had a record of the British spies in China and Russia as a UK partner, or if the names were obtained through surveillance.
It is believed that Snowden had downloaded 1.7 million secret documents before he was granted asylum in Russia, where he works now for the Russian government.
The government source said the information obtained by Russia and China on “knowledge of how we operate” had stopped the UK from getting “vital information”.
According to BBC political correspondent Chris Mason, the problem for UK authorities was not only the direct consequence of exposing intelligence activities but dismantling the intelligence network and losing agents from the positions where they were doing useful work.
Moscow gained access to more than one million classified files held by Snowden, according to the Sunday Times. The newspaper also learned from senior government sources that China has also cracked the sensitive documents, which contain “details of secret intelligence techniques and information that could allow British and American spies to be identified.”
“Nobody bad has got hold of my information,” co-writer of the Sunday Times story Tim Shipman cited Edward Snowden, adding that now those words sound naïve.
“People in government are deeply frustrated that this guy has been able to put all this information out there,” Shipman wrote.
The Sunday Times quoted former director of UK intelligence agency GCHQ, Sir David Omand, saying that Snowden’s move is a “huge strategic setback” that was “harming” not only to Britain and the US, but all their Nato allies as well.
“Edward Snowden is not only a villain, he’s a villain of the first order,” Professor Anthony Glees of the University of Buckingham’s Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies wrote in a comment. However, there are others who pointed that spying is not really an honorable job and foreign agents were well aware of the risks of being caught.