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The links between Britain and America\u2019s intelligence networks go so deep that it may be impossible to untangle them. | Dan Kitwood\/Getty Images<\/p>\nThere has been a relative decline over the last few decades in the gathering of human intelligence \u2014 often referred to as HUMINT, which broadly covers agents and assets run by the FBI and CIA in the U.S. and MI5 and MI6 in the U.K. But that drop has been matched by a meteoric rise in its digital cousin, signals intelligence \u2014 named SIGINT, covered by the work of Britain\u2019s GCHQ and America\u2019s NSA.<\/p>\n
The automated bulk sharing of this digital intelligence has become more important given that human intelligence \u201cdoesn\u2019t scale in the same way,\u201d the same former intelligence source said. \u201cThat is deeply, deeply integrated, and it\u2019s deeply disruptive to disentangle that,\u201d they added.<\/p>\n
Ears<\/p>\n
Britain still has important assets that are of use to America \u2014 chief among them its listening posts. These are military and intelligence facilities, often overseas, used to monitor communications. The details of listening posts are sometimes classified, with their locations, capabilities or which nations they monitor kept secret for national security reasons.<\/p>\n
The links between Britain and America\u2019s intelligence networks go so deep that it may be impossible to untangle them. | Dan Kitwood\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
But the crucial data they collect makes it unlikely the U.S. would ever leave Five Eyes, according to Neil Melvin\u200b\u200b\u200b\u200b, director of international security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a defense and security think tank. \u201cFor example, the one in Cyprus [Ayios Nikolaos] \u2014 the U.S. relies on that for the East Mediterranean, which is very important because of Israel,\u201d he pointed out.<\/p>\n