I can accept that he might have exaggerated from plain old coppers to MI5 in order to sound scary or something but that doesn't change the fact that it happened.

@colin actually that was a typo. I meant "known or suspected". Satisfied?

Of course, in focusing on this one rather insignificant part of my post your'e all rather missing the point I tried to make and if I'd know that would happen I simply wouldn't have mentioned it. We,in the UK, live in a country that routinely monitors domestic communications with almost unlimited scope, without any sort of oversight and without any way to prevent it, in other words wiretapping. The operation in the US does not have any contact with domestic or even interstate communications. It is focused on a limited subset of international communications, where it creates a database of telephone numbers without actually monitoring what conversations go between them. It is not wiretapping. It is data farming and it can certainly be argued that this is not exactly a healthy policy, and I have never said otherwise, but wiretapping it is not. My point was that this limited scope compares very favourably with our own situation, meaning that it's a little hypocritical of us to criticise them without first criticising our own government for carrying on much wider reaching operations for a hell of a lot longer.