The level of cooperation between American and European espionage agencies goes back a long way. This phony outrage, as if they're just some aggrieved and innocent bystanders, is comical.
These agencies and their counterparts have routinely been spying on each other's citizens, then sharing the data with that country's home agency. It's their little technocrat way of bypassing strong restrictions against domestic espionage. So hey, it's not domestic espionage if it's technically the British intelligence agencies doing the snooping, and gee whiz it sure was awful nice of them to share everything they collected with their American counterparts. So nice in fact that American agencies might just return the favor and spy on British citizens for the British government.
Thing is, none of this is really as revelatory as people might think. It's the sort of stuff hidden in plain sight for years, just buried in the mountains of dry technocratic white papers. The US and Britain jointly operate a data hoovering system in Cornwall, England -- the European entry point of transatlantic cables. They siphon off every bit of data coming over those cables.
