UK Spies Tap US Internet Cables, Collect Everything, Then Shares It With NSA

By 2010, two years after the project was first trialled, it was able to boast it had the "biggest internet access" of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. UK officials could also claim GCHQ "produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA". (Metadata describes basic information on who has been contacting whom, without detailing the content.)

And, GCHQ and the NSA are teaming up to go through it all:

By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data. But that's not all who have access to the data. The article claims 850,000 NSA employees and contractors with top secret clearance can access the GCHQ database. The report also notes that the UK spooks admit that they "have a light oversight regime compared with the US." Considering how light US oversight already is... In the US, there are those very weak minimization rules. In the UK, the analysts (including the American analysts working on the data) are told "it's your call."