The NSA and GCHQ were about to make the humiliating announcement that they had been snooping on G20 friends and partners, according to the British Daily the Guardian, which also revealed that they had been surreptitiously gathering large amounts of phone and internet communications.
But despite the possible harm and probable danger to life, Lobban refused to yield to US demands to use his organisation to suppress the news.
These are the assertions made by filmmaker and investigative journalist Richard Kerbaj in his upcoming book, The Secret History of Five Eyes, which will be released on Thursday.
The episode was one of several conflicts that tore apart the Five Eyes partners as they disagreed over ideals, tactics, and national security.
According to the book, while being aware of the significance of the “special relationship” between the UK and US intelligence services, Lobban believed that asking a newspaper to suppress an item for the benefit of the NSA was going too far.
It wasn’t his agency’s or his personal goal to handle the NSA’s public relations, according to Kerbaj.
However, it is clear that pressure was applied at other levels of government, as evidenced by the fact that in October 2013, when Snowden’s leaks about the activities of the NSA and GCHQ were still being published, then-Prime Minister David Cameron threatened to stifle the story through injunctions or other “tougher measures” to stop further publication.
Claims that US and British intelligence services had effectively broken most of the internet encryption that millions of people depended on to secure their personal data and conversations were among Snowden’s most significant revelations.
Other tense times between the allies are revealed in the book, including when Gen Keith Alexander, Lobban’s equivalent as director of the NSA, failed to even tell the British that Snowden was the author of the Guardian’s reports.
It was only until Snowden, a government contractor with a base in Hawaii, willingly went public that Lobban, who had started a mole search inside his own company, GCHQ, learned of it.
A senior British intelligence source is mentioned in the book as stating, “It was a terrifying reminder of how important you are, or how important you’re not.”
The disclosures also revealed and implicated the other Five Eyes members, the signal intelligence services of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, in the snooping on allies including the former German chancellor Angela Merkel.
The fact that a contractor like Snowden, a computer systems administrator, might have access to their humiliating secrets infuriated the Five Eyes.
Additionally, it was discovered that 1.5 million Americans have the same level of security clearance as Snowden as a result of outsourcing by the US government.
In a rare interview after his retirement in 2014, Lobban said that since GCHQ handles contractors “as though they are humans,” there would never be a British Edward Snowden.
Only the British delegate ventured to raise concerns about US procedures that led to the Snowden revelations when Five Eyes officials gathered in Australia in the summer of 2013.
However, the power relations among the five nations were obvious since they were all concerned about losing access to the crucial flow of NSA cash and information.
The former national security advisor for the UK, Sir Kim Darroch, is reported in the book as saying: “The US gives us more than we offer them so we just essentially have to get on with it.”