UK Foreign Secretary defends intelligence sharing with U.S.

PanARMENIAN.Net - Britain should have "nothing but pride" in its "indispensable" intelligence-sharing relationship with the United States, William Hague has insisted amid continued controversy over secret surveillance programmes, Belfast Telegraph reported.

The Foreign Secretary, in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Library in California, said both nations operated "within a strong legal framework ... under the rule of law" and used the information to protect the freedom of their citizens.

Eavesdropping agency GCHQ has been accused of circumventing legal safeguards by accessing information about UK citizens gathered by the National Security Agency (NSA) in a secret programme known as Prism.

Evidence of the arrangement was among documents leaked by American whistleblower Edward Snowden which have sparked a fraught debate on both sides of the Atlantic about the acceptable limits of state snooping.

They also appear to show that GCHQ is able to tap into fibre-optic cables carrying huge amounts of internet and communications data and store it for up to 30 days under an operation codenamed Tempora. The agency insists it is ''scrupulous'' in complying with the law but civil rights group Liberty has requested a formal legal investigation into whether British intelligence services unlawfully accessed its communications.