Concern About UK's Tempora Spy Programme

[Monster]

GCHQ surveillance: Germany blasts UK over mass monitoring

Minister questions legality of mass tapping of calls and internet and demands to know extent to which Germans were targeted

The German government has expressed the growing public anger of its citizens over Britain's mass programme of monitoring global phone and internet traffic and directly challenged UK ministers over the whole basis of GCHQ's Project Tempora surveillance operation.

The German justice minister, who has described the secret operation by Britain's eavesdropping agency as a catastrophe that sounded "like a Hollywood nightmare", warned UK ministers that free and democratic societies could not flourish when states shielded their actions in "a veil of secrecy".

(...)

The German justice minister, in her letters to Grayling and May, asks for clarification of the legal basis for Project Tempora and demands to know whether "concrete suspicions" trigger the data collection or whether the vast quantities of global email, Facebook postings, internet histories and phone calls are being held for up to 30 days as part of a general trawl.

She also demands to know whether the programme has been authorised by any judicial authority, how it works in practice and the precise nature of the stored data. The level of concern was reinforced by a phone call from the justice ministry to Ursula Brennan, permanent secretary at the Department of Justice in London.

"I feel that these issues must be raised in a European Union context at minister's level and should be discussed in the context of ongoing discussions on the EU data protection regulation," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger writes, adding she wants it discussed at the next meeting of justice and home affairs ministers in July.

(...)

( source: Guardian UK )

 

[Monster]

The UK government has reacted to Mrs Leutheusser-Schnarrenbergers request with a three-line canned response stating that matters of UK intelligence services would not be discussed.

In other news, Mrs Reding of the EU Commission has issued another request about information to the UK government.

Link to Guardian's article about the Tempora programme: Guardian UK article about Tempora

Guardian's news items about NSA's PRISM programme: Guardian UK articles about PRISM

 

[Monster]

Members of Germany's Bundestag have called for clarity on foreign wiretapping and surveillance programs. Meanwhile, the EU's justice chief has demanded answers on the Britain's online eavesdropping.

The debate in Germany's lower house of parliament Wednesday focused on how citizens' privacy can be guaranteed under controversial surveillance programs from the US and Britain. Both government and opposition politicians said it was important to avoid intrusion into data privacy.

German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger had already written to her British counterpart on Monday after the Guardian newspaper revealed a large-scale data trawling program called "Tempora" set up by Britain's Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ) that tapped international telephone and Internet traffic.

( Deutsche Welle article )

 

[Monster]

US Army blocks access to Guardian UK website to "prevent accidental access of potentially classified information". I wonder, what about all the people that already read the Guardian's articles??

 

[Monster]

This morning in the news: Many important EU institutions turn out to have been bugged by the NSA. Also: In Germany alone, the NSA is monitoring 500 million phone calls, e-mails, SMS, etc. per month. :ROFL: (this is of course technically not much of the problem, also there's been a law since the late 90ies that explictly grants intelligence agencies access to ISPs etc., called "telecommunication law" which requires that ISPs provide an interface to the intelligence community -- it's a good question whether the NSA is using those dedicated interfaces in cooperation with the German BND, or whether they're using external means of tapping like UK's Tempora system which taps into sea cables etc.)

I'll post more English language articles as soon as the news have been picked up by other news agencies. Here's the ones I found so far:

BBC article about EU finding
Guardian article about EU finding
English-language article from Der Spiegel
Earlier English-language article from Der Spiegel about UK/USA surveillance

 

[Monster]

Another interesting article: "Unleashed: How PRISM Began" (ZDF article, Google-translated)

(NOTE however, that the ECHELON project is much older than PRISM, and it has been known throughout Europe since at least the 1980ies that UK and USA were spying on mainland Europe by electronic means. -- It was considered important during the Cold War .)