US paid 100m pounds to UK spy agency for intelligence

The US government has reportedly paid close to 100 million pounds to the UK spy agency GCHQ over the last three years to gain access over Britain's intelligence gathering programs.

According to the Guardian, the documents revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden have exposed the top secret payments which indicates that GCHQ has to work hard to meet NSA's demands in return of their investment.

The classified documents have revealed that GCHQ has put in its money for collection of personal information from mobile phone and apps and wants to be able to 'exploit any phone, anywhere, anytime'.

The report said that the ministers have denied GCHQ's participation in NSA's 'dirty work' but the documents reveal that the amount of personal data available to GCHQ from internet and mobile traffic has increased by 7,000 percent in the past five years.

The revealed documents state that NSA payments to GCHQ to support its work including those for the Nato forces in Afghanistan and its Mastering the Internet project which gathers and stores vast amounts of 'raw' information ready for analysis.

According to the report, the documents suggest that GCHQ might have been spying on American living in the US as the NSA is prohibited to do so by the law.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said that in a 60-year alliance it is entirely unsurprising that there are joint projects in which resources and expertise are pooled, but the benefits flow in both directions.

A senior security source at Whitehall said that there is a close intelligence relationship between the UK and US and a number of other countries including Australia and Canada and there is no automaticity, not everything is shared and a sentient human being takes decisions.

GCHQ said that by 2013 it hoped to have 'exploited to the full its unique selling points of geography, partnerships and the UK's legal regime', the report added.