US and UK ‘hacked into Israeli drones and planes’

Online publication The Intercept, which lists Snowden confidant Glenn Greenwald among its associates, ran a similar report, with what it said were hacked pictures of armed Israeli drones taken from cameras aboard the aircraft.

The leaked files pertain to a classified programme known as “Anarchist” that was conducted by GCHQ and the NSA, whereby operatives hacked into the live video feeds of Israeli drone fleet from a mountain top in Cyprus in order to get a bird’s eye view of what the drones were seeing, according to the Intercept.

The report, based on documents released by former NSA and Central Intelligence Agency agent Edward Snowden, includes images of video footage captured by Anarchist.

The spy operation, codenamed “Anarchist”, was run out of a Cyprus base and targeted other Middle East states too, Yedioth said.

The Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth said that the National Security Agency in the United States and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, which monitor electronic and other communications, had decrypted Israeli communications on air force missions over Gaza, Iran and Syria.

There was no official comment on the reports in Israel but Israeli cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz, who has held the post of minister of intelligence affairs, said: “We are not surprised; we know that the Americans spy on every country in the world and on us as well, on their friends”. “We will now have to look and consider changer the encryption, certainly”. “In times of crisis this access is critical and one of the only avenues to provide up to the minute information and support to U.S. and allied operations in the area”.

The revelation that GCHQ, and the U.S., have been monitoring Israeli drones and their abilities is more dramatic than the content of what they appear to have pinched from the unmanned aircraft’s transmissions. In 2008, satellite surveillance operators at Menwith Hill, an important NSA site in England reported it “collected video for the first time from the cockpit of an Israeli Air Force F-16 fighter jet”, which “showed a target on the ground being tracked”.

A new portion of Edward Snowden’s data reportedly obtained by the Intercept sheds light on Israeli drone operations over Gaza strip. “Nevertheless, [this report is] disappointing, in part due to the fact that we haven’t been spying, collecting intelligence or decoding American code for decades”.

A British embassy spokeswoman said it did not comment on intelligence matters, and there was no immediate response from the Foreign Office in London.