The Guardian has revealed that the EU data retention as the UK practises it - even shocks the NSA.
"It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."
And they are willingly giving away the data to the NSA.
By May last year 300 analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.
The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US".
When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was "your call".
The GCHQ seem to prefer to tap the data from the cables. And they are collecting huge mountains of data.
The operation is called Tempora.
And it goes way beyond the traditional data retention:
GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.
This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user's access to websites – all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.
Amazingly this is considered all legal in the UK. But the parties interested in using this are exploiting a 13 year old law that has been outdone by the technical development.
Parliament passed the Ripa law to allow GCHQ to trawl for information, but it did so 13 years ago with no inkling of the scale on which GCHQ would attempt to exploit the certificates, enabling it to gather and process data regardless of whether it belongs to identified targets.
Fighting crime sure has a steep price these days.
And where are my manners:
Hello David Cammeron
