LONDON, June 22: Britain’s intelligence services are tapping cables that carry the world’s phone calls and Internet traffic and are gathering vast amounts of data, according to leaked documents from former US National Security Agency official Edward Snowden.

The claims, published on Saturday by The Guardian newspaper, sparked a fresh outcry from privacy campaigners and surfaced as the United States filed criminal charges against Mr Snowden and asked Hong Kong — where he has fled to — to detain him.

In a sign of growing international tensions, Germany said on Saturday that Europe would need Britain to clarify the latest allegations.

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who made the comments, added that the accusations would be a “catastrophe” if they were true.

The newspaper reported that Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had started processing vast amounts of personal information — including Facebook posts, emails, Internet histories and phone calls — and was sharing it with its US partner the National Security Agency.

In reaction, however, GCHQ said it was “scrupulous” in its compliance with the law and declined to comment further.

The daily reported that GCHQ was able to tap into and store data from the cables for up to 30 days, under an operation codenamed Tempora.

“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” Mr Snowden told the newspaper. “They (GCHQ) are worse than the US.”

Mr Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong in May, has since proceeded to leak details of secret US intelligence programmes to international media outlets.

The Guardian claimed Tempora had been running for 18 months and GCHQ and the NSA were able to access vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people.

It also said that the intelligence-gathering directly led to the arrest and jailing of a British terror cell, the arrests of others planning acts of terror, and three London-based people planning attacks prior to the city’s 2012 Olympic Games.

The daily said the documents it had seen showed that by last year, GCHQ was handling 600 million “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.

The two main components of GCHQ’s surveillance programme are called “Mastering the Internet” and “Global Telecoms Exploitation”, the daily said, adding that the operations were all being carried out “without any form of public acknowledgement or debate”.

The newspaper added that it understood NSA staff and US private contractors had access to GCHQ databases.

Hong Kong officials remained tight-lipped on Saturday as to whether Mr Snowden had been approached by the law enforcement authorities or was still a free man.—AFP