Electronic surveillance

HOW LONDON’S 7/7 BOMBINGS LED TO “UNPRECEDENTED” SURVEILLANCE TACTICS

IT WAS EARLY-MORNING rush hour in London on Thursday, July 7, 2005, when a series of explosions shut down the city’s transport network. At first, the authorities suspected an electricity fault was to blame. But it soon emerged that four Islamist suicide attackers had detonated bombs on three underground trains and a bus, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700.

The incident, one of the worst terrorist atrocities in British history, resulted in a major overhaul of policing across the United Kingdom. The government beefed up security, introduced new counterterrorism measures, and retrained first-responders to handle major crises. The attack also reshaped British spy agencies’ tactics and led to a more aggressive use of electronic surveillance – details of which are revealed for the first time in classified documents published today by The Intercept.

The documents – from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ – offer a unique insight into how U.K. and U.S. intelligence agencies responded in the aftermath of the London bombings. They reveal how the attackers may have been able to evade detection and disclose the existence of a secret intelligence-sharing agreement designed to enable “unfettered” sharing of phone and email records across the Five Eyes, an alliance of spy agencies from the U.K., the U.S., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.