Last year’s annual report of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee doesn’t mention Edward Snowden. It does, though, offer a few hints about the relationship between the NSA and its UK counterparts — a relationship which has always been extremely close, and which the leaks suggest may have involved GCHQ helping the NSA sidestep some of the legal restrictions it faced.
While the USA is not mentioned directly, it’s clear that Britain’s intelligence services are coming to accept the UK’s role as a secondary partner, specialising in particular roles, but unable to cover its entire function without American help. According to the head of SIS:
countries will play to their strengths and the joy of partnership, as we all know, is that two people or two organisations bring different strengths to a partnership and the total is more than the sum of its parts and that is what we are trying to create…
Intelligence priorites, also, are very much dictated by US priorities. Significant effort is being spent chasing Islamists without any real links to the UK. This, of course, fits snugly with American proccupations:
The trend that we noted last year for an increasing amount of counter-terrorism work to feature an ‘upstream’ element has continued (‘upstream’ refers to aspects of an investigation such as attack planning, preparation or direction occurring outside the UK, and terrorist groups with little or no presence in the UK). In the first three months of 2012/13, a significant proportion of the Security Service’s ICT investigations “ were focussed on upstream threats which did not have a substantial UK footprint”. This has driven closer working with SIS and GCHQ, who are able to collect intelligence and pursue disruptions overseas in support of these investigations.