Reports from the UK say that the most damaging material pointing to Trump-Russia collusion efforts were originated with the secretive Five Eyes surveillance program. This is a spying program set up during the Cold War to allow chummy English colonials to share data in an exclusive club.
This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information under the "Five Eyes“ agreement, which calls for open sharing of certain types of information among member nations the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Snowden warned that Five Eyes had morphed into an extra-judicial monster with routine surveillance of citizens that is shared between countries in the pact. A questionable legal loophole allows one country to surveil another country’s citizens and report “anything suspicious” to that partner — as described in Wikipedia:
The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn't answer to the known laws of its own countries".[6] Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY have been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.[7][8][9][10]
The Atlantic Magazine caught this back in 2013:
Did you know that the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand participate together in an electronic eavesdropping cooperative called "The Five Eyes Alliance"? Or that Britain "has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency"? That's big news, right!
One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months. GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.
So it appears that Robert Mueller is now swamped with hundreds of damaging wiretaps on the Trump-Russia collusion story but has to be careful what he says about his connection to Five Eyes and why they were listening to Citizen Trump during the election. Just saying that the “Brits did it” won’t satisfy nervous politicians who know that Five Eyes has data on everything they ever said on the phone or typed on the internet. Maybe some good can come of this if they can reel in the Five Eyed monster that is running amuck with our personal information. Don’t expect Muller to use any Five Eyes material to impeach Trump though. He has sworn to hunt down Snowden for discussing their spy club and will avoid public discussion of Five Eyes even if Trump’s smoking gun is sitting on his desk.