United Kingdom
Related: About this forumMI5 feared GCHQ went 'too far' over phone and internet monitoring
Senior figures inside British intelligence have been alarmed by GCHQ's secret decision to tap into transatlantic cables in order to engage in the bulk interception of phone calls and internet traffic.
According to one source who has been directly involved in GCHQ operations, concerns were expressed when the project was being discussed internally in 2008: "We felt we were starting to overstep the mark with some of it. People from MI5 were complaining that they were going too far from a civil liberties perspective
We all had reservations about it, because we all thought: 'If this was used against us, we wouldn't stand a chance'."
The Guardian revealed on Friday that GCHQ has placed more than 200 probes on transatlantic cables and is processing 600m "telephone events" a day as well as up to 39m gigabytes of internet traffic. Using a programme codenamed Tempora, it can store and analyse voice recordings, the content of emails, entries on Facebook, the use of websites as well as the "metadata" which records who has contacted who. The programme is shared with GCHQ's American partner, the National Security Agency.
Interviews with the UK source and the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden raise questions about whether the programme:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/23/mi5-feared-gchq-went-too-far
Wilms
(26,795 posts)Obviously.
idwiyo
(5,113 posts)idwiyo
(5,113 posts)Jeneral2885
(1,354 posts)Either you disband GCHQ or you let it work. It's a communications snooping agency and has been stealing your data even before the internet was invented.
So what do you want it to do?