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interesting story with many juicy details on how they proceed ... (similarly interesting nickname for the "operation" chosen by our british friends) "The spies used the IP addresses they had associated with the engineers as search terms to sift through their surveillance troves, and were quickly able to find what they needed to confirm the employees' identities and target them individually with malware. The confirmation came in the form of Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn "cookies," tiny unique files that are automatically placed on computers to identify and sometimes track people browsing the Internet, often for advertising purposes. GCHQ maintains a huge repository named MUTANT BROTH that stores billions of these intercepted cookies, which it uses to correlate with IP addresses to determine the identity of a person. GCHQ refers to cookies internally as "target detection identifiers." Top-secret GCHQ documents name three male Belgacom engineers who were identified as targets to attack. The Intercept has confirmed the identities of the men, and contacted each of them prior to the publication of this story; all three declined comment and requested that their identities not be disclosed. GCHQ monitored the browsing habits of the engineers, and geared up to enter the most important and sensitive phase of the secret operation. The agency planned to perform a so-called "Quantum Insert" attack, which involves redirecting people targeted for surveillance to a malicious website that infects their computers with malware at a lightning pace. In this case, the documents indicate that GCHQ set up a malicious page that looked like LinkedIn to trick the Belgacom engineers. (The NSA also uses Quantum Inserts to target people, as The Intercept has previously reported.) A GCHQ document reviewing operations conducted between January and March 2011 noted that the hack on Belgacom was successful, and stated that the agency had obtained access to the company's

I knew I wasn't using TOR often enough...

Cool! It seems that after all it is best to restrict employees' internet access only to work-critical areas... @Paul TOR works on network level, so it would not help here much as cookies (application level) were exploited.

"Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies" - I thought we were the good guys... ;-D

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks - the thumb drive and the first amendment - had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred - with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's work.

The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood

Sarah Harrison is a lawyer that has been staying with Snowden in Hong Kong and Moscow. She is a UK citizen and her family is there. After the miranda case where the boyfriend of the reporter was detained at the airport, can Sarah return safely home? Will her family be pressured by the secret service? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-23759834