UK under pressure to respond to claims over Snowden files

The British government is being challenged to answer in public claims that Russia and China have broken into the secret cache of Edward Snowden files and that British agents have had to be withdrawn from live operations as a consequence.

The reports first appeared in the Sunday Times, which quoted anonymous senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services. The BBC also quoted an anonymous senior government source, who said agents had to be moved because Moscow gained access to classified information.

Privacy campaigners questioned the timing of the report, days after a 373-page report by QC David Anderson, commissioned by David Cameron. Anderson was highly critical of the system of oversight of the surveillance agencies and set out recommendations for reform.

Responding to the Sunday Times, David Davis, a Conservative MP who is one of the leading campaigners for privacy, said: "We have to treat all of these things with a pinch of salt."

He said the use of anonymous sources to create scare stories was a typical tactic and the timing was comfortable for the government. “You can see they have been made nervous by Anderson. We have not been given any facts: just assertions,” he said.

Anderson recommended that approval of surveillance warrants be shifted from the home and foreign secretaries to a new judicial body made up of serving and retired judges, which Davis supports but towards which the government seems to be lukewarm.

Snowden, a former NSA contractor, handed over tens of thousands of leaked documents to the Guardian newspaper in Hong Kong two years ago.

He left Hong Kong with flights booked to Latin America but was stopped in Russia when the US revoked his passport, and has been living in Moscow in exile since. – (Guardian service)