The Intercept’s new BOMBSHELL article on the NSA reveals that British intelligence service GCHQ once requested greater access to the NSA’s databases.

I can almost hear you yawning out there.

But in true Greenwaldian fashion (although it’s written by Ryan Gallagher while Greenwald is busy not being arrested in the United States), the title is absurdly overheated: British Spy Chiefs Secretly Begged to Play in NSA’s Data Pools - the Intercept.

Britain’s electronic surveillance agency, Government Communications Headquarters, has long presented its collaboration with the National Security Agency’s massive electronic spying efforts as proportionate, carefully monitored, and well within the bounds of privacy laws. But according to a top-secret document in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year - essentially begging to feast at the NSA’s table while insisting that it only nibbles on the occasional crumb.

Wow! Secretly begging to swim in the pool and feast on the vast troves, while pretending they’re only nibbling on crumbs! That’s some two-fisted journalism there.

But as usual, read on, grasshopper, and you will find that the brave journalists of The Intercept have no evidence at all that this secret swimming/feasting request was granted. I have to give them credit for not burying this information in paragraph 23 this time; it’s in paragraph 4:

The Snowden files do not indicate whether NSA granted GCHQ’s request…

That’s right — again, they’ve come up with an article that makes an extravagant claim, with no actual evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. This is getting kind of ridiculous.

…but they do show that the NSA was “supportive” of the idea, and that GCHQ was permitted extensive access to PRISM during the London Olympics in 2012.

So the only real information they have here is that GCHQ was permitted access to the PRISM databases during the Olympics, when the threat of a terrorist attack was at the very highest level. Shocking.

Seems like the vast trove of documents stolen by Edward Snowden may be running out of bombshells.