Britain's secret eavesdropping agency has been spying on UK citizens after cutting a backroom deal with US spies to share personal data plundered from some of the world's biggest internet companies, according to leaked documents. GCHQ has had direct access to the personal information of any Briton with a profile on almost all the mainstream social media sites since 2010 - all courtesy of America's National Security Agency.

The sensational disclosure came after it emerged the NSA has been pulling individual data from the mainframes of nine top US tech giants, including Facebook, Google and Apple, as part of a top-secret initiative codenamed PRISM.
But news that the scandal has spread across the Atlantic not only exposes the sinister lengths to which the British Government is prepared to go to spy on its own people but also raises serious questions over which politicians knew of the programme.

[link to www.dailymail.co.uk]