LONDON: Britain’s electronic spy agency GCHQ tapped e-mails of journalists at some of the world’s biggest media organizations, The Guardian reported on Monday.

The report said GCHQ gathered e-mails from journalists at the BBC, The Guardian, Le Monde, NBC, The New York Times, Reuters, The Sun and The Washington Post.

The e-mails were among 70,000 gathered in less than 10 minutes in 2008 by the spy agency, Britain’s equivalent of the US National Security Agency, according to The Guardian’s analysis of documents leaked by former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The e-mails were gathered in one of many taps of the fiber-optic cables that form the Internet’s backbone, and were available for viewing by any cleared staff on GCHQ’s intranet, according to the report.

The Snowden documents appeared to show the messages were collected while testing a new tool designed to sift through tapped data to identify relevant chunks.

It is not revealed in the leaked documents if journalists were deliberately targeted, the report said.

A spokesman for GCHQ told the paper: “All of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state.”

The spy agency considers journalists as “a potential threat to security” according to internal security advice cited by The Guardian, with investigative journalists listed as a threat alongside terrorists and hackers.

The report was published amid pressure to limit the British government’s ability to spy on journalists’ communications, after revelations police accessed phone records to identify journalists’ sources within the police.

Over 100 editors of British newspapers published a joint letter to Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday calling on the government to stop law enforcement officials viewing journalists’ phone records without a warrant from a judge.

“It is in everyone’s interests that the state recognizes the over-arching importance of protecting the confidentiality of journalists’ sources,” said the letter.