A UK spy agency infiltrated international hotel booking systems for some three years, tracing high profile officials and wiretapping their suites, new leaks reveal. GCHQ’s top secret ‘Royal Concierge’ program tracked 350 hotels across the globe.
Germany’s Der Spiegel has published yet another episode of
scandalous revelations from the former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden, currently enjoying temporary asylum in Moscow.
Constantly on the move, top officials and diplomats prefer to
stay in high-end establishments and boutique hotels with premier
service standards. And since the number of high-class hotels in
the world is finite, British Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) came up with the idea of turning them into a
huge net to fish for secrets in high-tech style.
After the ‘Royal Concierge’ program underwent testing in 2010, it
was readied and put into action.
Documents unearthed by Snowden reveal that over a three-year
period GCHQ had an automatic system for singling out people of
interest, who made reservations in about 350 upscale hotels
worldwide.
Field operatives then allegedly wiretapped the phone and network
cables inside the targetted suite, and were potentially able to
check into the next door suite in order to eavesdrop the target
at the scene.
‘Royal Concierge’ in operation
According to documents seen by Der Spiegel, when a top official
or a diplomat makes a reservation using his working e-mail
address (or his secretary does) with a governmental domain like
.gov, GCHQ gets a notification and decides whether it needs to
take ‘action’ or not.
Once a foreign diplomat is booked into a hotel, putting him under
the microscope becomes a purely technical objective. Der Spiegel
lists an impressive array of spying techniques and capabilities
“that seem to exhaust the creative potential of modern spying”.
No details, however, are provided.
On occasions, when a guest of special interest checks in, a crack
intellgence unit can be deployed who have 'specialist
technologies' for spying at their disposal. GCHQ may also put
into action codename 'Humint' [Human Intelligence], for close
scrutiny of the target, an operation that could also include
field agents working in the vicinity.
Der Spiegel also highlights the speculation that ‘Royal
Concierge’ could possibly manipulate hotel choices through the
booking programs and also bug hired cars.
Der Spiegel has not provided information about whether ‘Royal
Concierge’ has been spying on Britain’s major allies, or if the
targets of the GCHQ hotel surveillance had any connections to
Al-Qaeda.
Remarkably, the report comes right after British intelligence
chiefs made assurances that their actions were conducted within
the framework of the war on terror. At a November-7th hearing by
parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee in London, GCHQ
head, Sir Ian Lobban, acknowledged that Edward Snowden’s leaks
would make GCHQ’s work “far harder” for years to come.