GCHQ – praag.org

Pressure builds on UK’s surveillance

A group of leading human rights NGOs in Britain are taking the UK government to the European Court of Human Rights over invasive mass surveillance practices they warn violate Britons’ right to privacy and freedom of expression.

The court appeal, filed by Privacy International, Bytes for All, Amnesty International, Liberty and other civil liberties groups, is a direct response to a ruling last December by Britain’s surveillance court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT).

The case, brought before the IPT, examined whether Britain and America’s industrial surveillance programs uncovered by ex-NSA analyst Edward Snowden breach citizens’ right to privacy.

The IPT ruling found that Tempora, a program set up to monitor web traffic flowing in and out of Britain via fiber optic cables, is entirely lawful. It also said Britain and America’s intelligence sharing system known as Prism is legal.

During the court proceedings, fragments of previously clandestine government surveillance policies were made known to the public, which influenced the tribunal’s final decision. Because these policies had been made transparent, the IPT resolved industrial spying was compliant with international human rights law.

The appeal filed at the ECHR challenges the IPT’s December ruling that industrial spying under Britain’s controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) complies with the UK’s duty to protect its citizens’ human rights. RIPA regulates public bodies’ deployment of and access to surveillance.

The European Court of Human Rights will also consider whether certain provisions inherent to RIPA violate Article 14 of the Convention, which bans illegal discrimination.

On shaky legal ground

The court appeal comes at a time when legal arguments justifying the government’s surveillance policies are beginning to unravel. On February 6, Britain’s surveillance court ruled that British intelligence services breached the law by accessing millions of individuals’ personal data.

This landmark ruling signaled the first occasion that the IPT found UK security and intelligence services had acted unlawfully.

Several weeks later, during a separate IPT case involving Reprieve and Amnesty International, the UK government admitted that its program governing the interception, collection and use of material privileged under law breaches the Human Rights Act.

The most recent appeal filed at the ECHR follows 18 months of litigation between human rights NGOs and the British government. It uncovered multiple legal issues with the UK government’s mass surveillance techniques.

Throughout the course of this legal wrangling, it emerged the UK government deems it justifiable to engage in mass surveillance of every Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google user in Britain, even if there is no suspicion that the user has broken the law.

In a bid to legitimize this, the government has secretly redefined Britons’ use of these messaging platforms as “external communications,” according to Privacy International.

Carly Nyst, legal director of Privacy International, said mass surveillance tramples upon citizens’ basic rights.

“Intercepting millions of communications every day, and secretly receiving millions more from the NSA by the back door is neither necessary nor proportionate,” she said.

Nyst argued that the IPT revealed a pro-government stance by siding with UK spy base GCHQ. However, she noted the ECHR has a “strong history of ensuring intelligence agencies are compliant with human rights law.”

“We hope that the court continues this tradition and GCHQ is finally held accountable for its unfettered spying on the world’s communications,” she said.

James Welch, Legal Director for Liberty, said the IPT maintains there are reasonable safeguards to protect Britons from industrial-scale privacy rights violations.

“We disagree, and hope the European Court will finally make clear to our security services that they cannot operate in near complete secrecy,” he said.

“It is thanks only to Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the scant disclosures we and the other claimants have been able to prise from the government, that we know anything whatsoever about what the intelligence services are up to.”

Amnesty International lawyer Nick Williams said no individual is “above the law” and the European Court of Human Rights now has an opportunity to “make this clear.”

“The UK government’s surveillance practices have been allowed to continue unabated and on an unprecedented scale, with major consequences for people’s privacy and freedom of expression,” he said.

“It is critical that we are able to seek and receive information of public interest from our confidential sources, free from government intrusion.”

British politicians for sale

Two former ministers were caught on tape saying they would use their political influence in exchange for payouts

Another reminder this week that schadenfreude is a pleasure best avoided by the political class:

Two of Britain’s most senior politicians, one Labour, one Conservative, both former foreign secretaries, have been caught in an embarrassing media sting. When the same fate befell three of Jack Straw’s colleagues before the last election, he chided them for their “stupidity in allowing themselves to be suckered in a sting like this.”

Guess what, Mr. Straw? You got suckered by the same old trick. Undercover reporters, posing as intermediaries for a phony Chinese business, tempted Straw, who was foreign secretary during the Iraq War, and Sir Malcolm Rifkind into claiming they would make extensive use their political influence in exchange for great wads of cash.

Nothing either man did was illegal, and their willingness to accept well-paid advisory roles may not even have breached House of Commons guidelines. Nonetheless, hidden camera footage of the former ministers grasping for money reinforces the view that politicians are more interested in looking out for themselves than the voters they are supposed to represent.

“I am kicking myself,” admitted Straw, after news of the footage to be shown on Channel 4’s Dispatches emerged on Sunday night.

Rifkind, who was foreign secretary in the dying days of the last Conservative government in the 1990s, tried to brazen it out, insisting that there was no reason for him to resign as chairman of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee. On Tuesday morning he strode defiantly to work in Westminster, telling the TV cameras to “mind your own business” before mocking a cameraman for the way he was walking and for forgetting the correct name of Rifkind’s committee.

Not long after Rifkind had marched into the office, he was skulking back out again to announce that, yes, he was going to resign after all. In the intervening minutes, Downing Street had let him know that the Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, was displeased. With an election less than three months away, this sort of slipup was not to be tolerated.

In one of the videos, Rifkind was seen boasting that he could call a meeting with any ambassador in London. “They’ll all see me personally,” he said. “That provides access in a way that is, is useful.”

He also told the undercover reporters from Channel 4 and The Telegraph that he would be willing to write to ministers on behalf of the fictitious Hong Kong-based communications agency without mentioning the name of the business. He said his fee would be between £5,000 and £8,000 for half a day’s work. “You’d be surprised how much free time I have,” he said, despite leading the committee entrusted with scrutinizing MI5, MI6, and GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, which has been caught up in many of the Snowden revelations.

Perhaps most embarrassingly, Rifkind claimed that he was “self-employed” because “nobody pays me a salary,” even though he is receives more than $125,000 a year as an MP who chairs a committee.

After the tape had emerged, he made matters worse by claiming he was entitled to a far larger income. “The reality is that anyone from a professional or business background earns considerably more,” he told the BBC. “I want to have the standard of living my professional background would normally entitle me to have.”

MPs are allowed to undertake paid work in the private sector as long as they declare it on a parliamentary register of outside interests. One hundred eighty MPs make money on the side, and a dozen of those earn more from their sideline than their parliamentary work. Last year, Rifkind declared more than $100,000 in additional earnings.

He announced on Tuesday that he would not stand for re-election in May.

Straw was already planning to retire from frontline politics this year, and he told the undercover reporters that he would only be able to help them once he had left Parliament. He did, however, claim that he had successfully lobbied on behalf of private clients in the past. He said he had been able to change European Union sugar regulations in order to help ED&F Man Holdings, a commodities company that pays him more than $90,000 a year. “I got in to see the relevant director general and his officials in Brussels,” Straw said. “It’s public that the regulations have been changed, but the best way of dealing with these things is under the radar.”

Straw, who became a confidant of Colin Powell during the buildup to the Iraq War, asked to be suspended from the Labour Party, but his retirement is likely to begin before any inquiry into his conduct can be held.

Source: The Daily Beast

British threaten to halt intel to Germany

British intelligence chiefs have threatened to halt their sharing of information with their German counterparts if Germany goes ahead with a parliamentary inquiry into British and US spying, according German media reports.

The British are worried that German politicians could expose classified information including details of code breaking and other technology, including a European surveillance program, which was launched last year, said a report in German weekly magazine, Focus.

Head of Germany’s federal intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) Gerhard Schindler, is reportedly taking the British threat seriously.

Schindler told the parliamentary inquiry on the issue on Wednesday evening that he was experiencing “unusually tense relations with British partner agencies.”

The UK provides crucial eavesdropping powers, which is shared with the German agencies.

“Without the information from British signals intelligence we would be blind,” an unnamed senior German intelligence official told Focus.

UN to investigate GCHQ, MI5 spying at climate talks

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has announced he will launch an inquiry into allegations that British secret service agents spied on foreign governments at two consecutive international climate summits in 2009 and 2010.

Speaking to Danish television, Ban Ki-moon said the allegations were a UN issue, because the climate summits are UN conferences.

“All diplomatic information is inviolable. If there has been any breach … they should be investigated. UN information should be protected in its entire confidentiality,” he said.

The presentation, disclosed by former NSA senior analyst and whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealed it became a “serious intelligence priority” for Britain’s clandestine intelligence services to spy on negotiations brokered an international UN summits from 2007.

The 23-page PowerPoint presentation was first published by Swedish site Dagbladet Information.

The file entitled, “Supporting HMG’s (Her Majesty’s Government) Climate Change Ambitions,” states a GCHQ secret service official frequented the high profile UN gatherings, also attended by an array of international leaders.

The document indicates the spy reported to Downing Street, the foreign secretary, diplomats, the Department for International Development (DfID), the business department, the Treasury and MI5.

According to the file, the GCHQ official was planted in the UK delegation because such a cover would facilitate direct access to other state’s delegates along with useful documentation they were in possession of.

The spy’s remit, as outlined in the document, was to discern states’ climate policy leanings, report on how far they were prepared to broker on issues, uncover if foreign delegates poised at the UN negotiation table were receiving orders from their respective governments, and relay this information back to British officials to bolster Britain’s leverage at the climate talks.

While the talks failed spectacularly in 2009, the UK secret service operation was reportedly a success. States were expected to wrap up years of tenuous negotiations with a landmark cross-border agreement to curb carbon emissions.

Such actions could amount to a violation of international law, because UN climate conferences are officially declared to be UN territory throughout the negotiations.

Snowden’s disclosure could cause embarrassment to current leftist Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, who held the position of energy and climate change secretary in 2009. Miliband also led the British delegation at the UN Climate Summit in 2009.

British spies allowed warrantless access to US data

Newly released documents from the British government reveal a lack of judicial oversight for how it sifts through communications data collected by the NSA and other foreign governments

British authorities are capable of tapping into bulk communications data collected by other countries’ intelligence services—including the National Security Agency—without a warrant, according to secret government documents released Tuesday.

The agreement between the NSA and Britain’s spy agency, known as Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ, potentially puts the Internet and phone data of Americans in the hands of another country without legal oversight when obtaining a warrant is “not technically feasible.”

The data, once obtained, can be kept for up to two years, according to internal policies disclosed by the British government. GCHQ was forced to reveal that it can request and receive vast quantities of raw, unanalyzed data collected from foreign governments it partners with during legal proceedings in a closed court hearing in a case brought by various international human-rights organizations, including Privacy International, Liberty U.K., and Amnesty International. The suit challenges certain aspects of GCHQ’s surveillance practices.

It is well known that the NSA and GCHQ closely share intelligence data with one another, as part of a long-standing surveillance partnership. Some details of the agencies’ spy pact were exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden last year, including the existence of GCHQ’s Tempora program, which taps into fiber-optic cables to scoop up online and telephone traffic across the Web for up to 30 days.

But this is the first time the British government has disclosed that it does not require a warrant to access data collected and maintained by its American counterparts. The revelation appears to counter statements made by an oversight committee of the British Parliament in July of last year that “in each case where GCHQ sought information from the U.S., a warrant for interception, signed by a minister, was already in place.”

Source: National Journal

Seeding the net with false info

The British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.” The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call.

The tools were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive. Previously disclosed documents have detailed JTRIG’s use of “fake victim blog posts,” “false flag operations,” “honey traps” and psychological manipulation to target online activists, monitor visitors to WikiLeaks, and spy on YouTube and Facebook users.

But as the U.K. Parliament today debates a fast-tracked bill to provide the government with greater surveillance powers, one which Prime Minister David Cameron has justified as an “emergency” to “help keep us safe,” a newly released top-secret GCHQ document called “JTRIG Tools and Techniques” provides a comprehensive, birds-eye view of just how underhanded and invasive this unit’s operations are. The document—available in full here—is designed to notify other GCHQ units of JTRIG’s “weaponised capability” when it comes to the dark internet arts, and serves as a sort of hacker’s buffet for wreaking online havoc.

Source: First Look

Britain’s secret listening post in Berlin uncovered

Concerns were raised tonight that Britain operates a top-secret listening post from its Berlin embassy to eavesdrop on the seat of German power.

Documents leaked by the US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden show that GCHQ is, together with the US and other key partners, operating a network of electronic spy posts from diplomatic buildings around the world, which intercept data in host nations.

An American intercept “nest” on top of its embassy in Berlin – less than 150 metres from Britain’s own diplomatic mission – is believed to have been shut down last week as the US scrambled to limit the damage from revelations that it listened to mobile phone calls made by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But the NSA documents, in conjunction with aerial photographs and information about past spying activities in Germany, suggest that Britain is operating its own covert listening station within a stone’s throw of the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, and Ms Merkel’s offices in the Chancellery, using hi-tech equipment housed on the embassy roof.

The potentially toxic allegation that Britain has a listening station in the capital of a close European Union ally will test relations between London and Berlin only days after the row between Germany and the US about its own clandestine activities. Jan Albrecht, an MEP for Germany’s Green Party and a leading campaigner on privacy and data protection, told The Independent: “If GCHQ runs a listening post on the top of the UK’s Berlin embassy, it is clearly targeting politicians and journalists. Do these people pose a threat?

“The EU has asked David Cameron’s Government to explain the activities of GCHQ in Europe but it has declined to do so, saying it does not comment on activities in the interest of national security. This is hardly in the spirit of European co-operation. We are not enemies.”

Asked to respond to the concerns last night, Mr Cameron’s official spokesman said: “We don’t comment on intelligence questions.”

Infrared images taken by a German television station, ARD, appear to show that the US embassy spying facility, housed in an anonymous rooftop building, has now been shut down after an incendiary clash in which Mrs Merkel told President Barack Obama it was “just not done” for friendly nations to spy on each other.

The heat signature from the structure dropped dramatically last week in the immediate aftermath of the conversation, and equipment inside has not been detected as having been turned on since.

The eavesdropping base, concealed in a box-like structure with special windows made of fibreglass which are opaque to light but allow radio signals to pass unhindered, was run jointly by CIA and NSA agents in a top-secret unit called the Special Collection Service (SCS). Despite the row the German authorities appear not to have noticed – or protested about – a potential parallel and linked surveillance unit on top of the British embassy.

According to one NSA document, Washington recently closed some of the 100 SCS locations it operates in embassies around the world and transferred some of the work to GCHQ, which is based in Cheltenham. In 2010, the SCS was known to operate 19 facilities in Europe, including stations in both Berlin and Frankfurt.

Documents shown to The Independent state that the operation uses equipment hidden within the fabric of diplomatic buildings and only a small number of personnel operating under diplomatic cover whose “true mission” is unknown even to the majority of their colleagues.

Aerial photographs of the British embassy in Berlin show a potential eavesdropping base enclosed inside a white, cylindrical tent-like structure which cannot be easily seen from the streets. The structure has been in place since the embassy, which was built following the reunification of Germany, opened in 2000.

The structure bears a striking resemblance to spying equipment used in GCHQ’s Cold War listening post in West Berlin at the now-abandoned Teufelsberg or “Devil’s Mountain” site, which was used to intercept East German and Soviet communications.

Equipment within the embassy unit would be capable of intercepting mobile phone calls, wi-fi data and long-distance communications across the German capital, including the adjacent government buildings such as the Reichstag and the Chancellery clustered around the Brandenburg Gate.

Last night GCHQ officials refused to discuss ongoing security matters.

Such is the critical importance of the network of embassy spying bases – the US version of which the NSA has codenamed “Stateroom” – that the NSA and the CIA have built a mock embassy-style site in woodland outside Washington DC to test their technology and train operatives.

Satellite images of the site in Maryland also show a white cylindrical structure in the grounds of the facility similar to the one on the roof of Britain’s Berlin embassy.

The NSA documents provided by Mr Snowden state that Stateroom-type operations are run by the US, Britain, Canada and Australia. Together with New Zealand, the countries form the “Five Eyes” at the core of an international eavesdropping coalition.The NSA document outlining Stateroom describes it as “covert SIGINT [signals intelligence] collection sites located in diplomatic facilities abroad… [including] SCS (at US diplomatic facilities) and government communications headquarters (at British diplomatic facilities)”.

The briefing underlines the clandestine nature of the operation, adding: “These sites are small in size and in the number of personnel staffing them. They are covert, and their true mission is not known by the majority of the diplomatic staff at the facility where they are assigned.”

The “concealed collection system” within the embassies utilises “sheds” or structures with fake windows. The document said: “Collection equipment on a building is concealed so as not to reveal SIGINT activity… antennas are sometimes hidden in false architectural features or roof maintenance sheds.”

German and US diplomatic relations have fallen to an unprecedented low since evidence emerged that the personal mobile of Mrs Merkel, who is known to conduct sensitive government business by phone and text message, was targeted by SCS. Intelligence officials from Germany are now in Washington negotiating an end to mass surveillance on German territory as well as a formal pact not to conduct spying operations on friendly nations. But any suggestion that Britain could also have intercepted the calls of German politicians or officials – even if only as part of a much wider sweep of the German capital – would prove damaging.

A separate leaked SCS document states that Stateroom and other facilities target mobile phones or wi-fi networks. The location of any equipment within the British embassy would make it unlikely that data from Mrs Merkel’s residence and offices would not have been collected.

Secret bugging operations similar to the British and American Berlin embassy operations have been making the news for more than 40 years.

In 1971, American news columnist Jack Anderson reported that NSA and GCHQ were successfully monitoring Soviet leaders’ radio links from Russian-made Zil limousines, producing streams of information about foreign policy and military intentions – but also revealing that the Soviet leaders “banter and bicker … and gossip”. “The leaders … complain about their ailments like old maids,” he wrote.

As with the Snowden leaks, at the time the NSA claimed that the Anderson leak caused the Russians to shut down their use of limo phones.

This was not true – the Soviets just went on chattering. On 26 May 1972, according to released US documents, the embassy suites produced information that was vital to securing the East-West agreement not to use anti-missile missiles.

The Russians’ real response to the revelation was to blast both embassies with high intensity radio signals, in a failed attempt to jam the receiving equipment. The radio onslaught provoked concerns for the health and safety of both diplomats and spies. – The Independent

Global surveillance: Where is the outrage?

The British-American surveillance program Tempora marks a historic turning point. Unnoticed by the public, intelligence agencies have pursued total surveillance. Governments have deliberately concealed from the public the extent to which we are being watched.

The term, “information superhighway” has always been insufficient to describe the Internet. In reality, the Web is a global communication space containing the private information of a large part of the population of every developed country. If someone were able to train an all-seeing eye onto the Internet, the blackmail potential would be almost limitless.

It is precisely this all-seeing eye that the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the American National Security Agency (NSA) have developed under the name Tempora. An appropriate real-world metaphor for the program might be something like this: In every room of every house and every apartment, cameras and microphones are installed, every letter is opened and copied, every telephone tapped. Everything that happens is recorded and can be accessed as needed.

It sounds preposterous, but it is frighteningly close to the reality that was unveiled by the Guardian on Friday. Together, the GCHQ and NSA monitor Internet traffic by tapping directly into the data stream sent through fiber-optic cables. They are able to copy and cache this data, to be sifted through later as needed.

Those behind this disgraceful program have not even bothered to deny what they are up to. The British spy agency has said it will not be commenting on the program — but said that whatever they do is in the service of the fight against terrorism and subject to strict legal controls. The NSA has been making this same argument since the Prism program was unveiled earlier this month. What we’re doing, they say, is for a good cause. It’s all regulated, and we’re only looking at the information collected when we deem it necessary.

But that’s all just pretence.

Would the public agree to the total video surveillance of their private living space because it could possibly also help in the pursuit of terrorists? Would we be satisfied with the fact that we would only be observed if some unnamed intelligence analyst considered it necessary? Of course not. A government proposing such a program would be forced out of office — and rightly so.

Where is the Outrage?

It therefore seems odd that the reactions in the Anglo-Saxon world have been so restrained. Sure, the Guardian, as well as the Washington Post, have reported in detail about the programs. Yet in the political sphere, it was mainly a few German politicians voicing their outrage.

And for good reason. The fact that the Americans and the British — it is yet to be revealed who else participated — have granted themselves this enormous power, without ever informing their own people, is a scandal of historic proportions. To the initiated, all the recent public debate about data retention, Internet privacy and the practices of Facebook and Google must have been downright amusing. The state, as it turns out, knew everything all along.

That was precisely the goal, according to the head of the NSA, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander. “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” he asked in an internal document acquired by the Guardian. “Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith,” he continued, referring to a GCHQ/NSA facility at Menwith Hill in northern England.

Voters Must Defend Themselves

A different quote shows that intelligence personnel lied to the public following the first revelations of the existence of the program. European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said that, in meetings with US officials, she had been assured that data from Europeans had not been collected “in bulk.” The surveillance of Europeans, they insisted to Reding, had been targeted and only undertaken in exceptional cases. That now appears to be untrue — it’s just that the mass acquisition of data in Europe is taken care of by GCHQ, rather than by the NSA.

The public revelation of these activities in the Guardian, thanks to the risky actions of former NSA worker Edward Snowden, marks a turning point. The next weeks and months will show whether democratic societies across the world are strong enough to take a stand against the unlimited, totalitarian ambitions of Western secret services — or not.

The governments of the countries in question apparently did not have the necessary backbone. They knew full well that the kind of surveillance being undertaken lacked all democratic legitimacy. But they pursued the programs anyway, behind the backs of their electorates.

It is now up to voters to defend themselves. It is up to us, whose data has landed as by-catch in the nets of Tempora. We must force our own representatives to defend our freedoms. – Der Spiegel

‘Criminals are being exposed by Snowden’

Information that NSA leaker Edward Snowden is exposing can lead to trials against those involved in war crimes in Afghanistan or Iraq or in money laundering and that is why “the West is so afraid,” investigative journalist Tony Gosling told RT.

The 29-year-old whistleblower – who was charged with espionage in the US for revealing secret surveillance programs – arrived in Moscow from Hong Kong on Sunday. Snowden is on his way to a third country via Russia.

Gosling says Snowden’s got his options rather limited. “The real impact of what he’s done here is only now starting to be realized. Not only is he exposing the criminality of the GCHQ – the signals intelligence part of the British intelligence services – and the NSA, but he is also showing that much of that intelligence contains information which may bring criminal prosecutions. For example, of war crimes, or criminal prosecutions against bankers, people who’ve been doing money laundering, such as Lord Green who was in charge of HSBC. There’s a vast amount of information there.

“There’s one thing I can tell you though, is that he won’t be coming to London. He doesn’t want to end up in the Tower of London like Julian Assange, fugitive, is at the moment.

“Here in Britain, we have a very poor record. Although the government and many of our media talk about protecting whistleblowers, the fact of the matter is if you blow the whistle on anything really big and important, or, in fact, even some trivial things, you’ll be bullied and you’ll be taken out of your job. And there’s total hypocrisy. One of the reasons for this is the way our entire network of government is paid –tax-payers money that is paying for all this intelligence service stuff.

“Sir Malcolm Rifkind, for example, who chairs the Intelligence and Security Committee, is supposed to oversee all this secret stuff. He is actually also employed by financial services firm that works for defense contractors. We are losing any kind of proper democratic oversight of these intelligence services. And that’s one of the things that Snowden has started to expose.

“If I were him, I’d actually be thinking about maybe not going to South America but looking at Iceland. It has got a couple of very useful institutions. IMMI, the Iceland’s Modern Media Institute, which has been set up by the parliament to protect whistleblowers and to make sure that Iceland is seen is a safe heaven. There’s also the AWP, the Associated Whistleblowing Press in Iceland. These are really great institutions which have started to emerge now in Europe as a resistance to the intelligence, really, I suppose the military-industrial complex and the financial cults in the European world, taking over so much of our public life, essentially – leaving our democracies in tatters.”

Gosling thinks Moscow will probably be a transit point, because maybe it would be a little too explosive for him to stay in Moscow for too long.

“I think what’s happening now is that there’s a lack of faith in much of what our intelligence services are up to. When we’ve got no proper democratic oversight of them they are running of on their own.

“The money system as well is involved in it. This is why I point out that much of this intelligence will be to do with economic warfare. We’ve got many new types of warfare in the world – economic is just one of them. Another one is psychological warfare which is using media wars, attacking the reputations of individuals and countries around the world. So, those are the sorts of information that contained in these PRISM leaks that we are now starting to see.

“There have been serious crimes over the last ten years – particularly since 9/11 when the war on terror started – in Afghanistan, Iraq, in places like Yemen, Pakistan where many people were murdered through the use of drones and hellfire missiles completely illegally by mainly three countries – Israel, the US and the UK. But this is what people don’t necessarily understand: there will be information that Edward Snowden has that can actually bring some of these people to trial. That’s why the West is so afraid. If Britain was serious about any kind of real justice, we would be able invite him to London and say, ‘Yes, you can tell all your secrets or stories to people here in Britain, you’ll be safe here.’”

Gosling says Snowden is actually exposing criminals “and the criminals are going for him now”. – RT

Snowden: British are worse than US in spying

The British spy agency GCHQ has access to the global network of communications, storing calls, Facebook posts and internet histories – and shares this data with the NSA, Edward Snowden has revealed to the Guardian in a new leak.

GCHQ’s network of cables is able to process massive quantities of information from both specific targets and completely innocent people, including recording phone calls and reading email messages, it was revealed on Friday.

“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.”

The Government Communications Headquarters agency has two different programs, aimed at carrying out this online and telephone monitoring – categorized under ‘Mastering the Internet’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation.’ Both have been conducted in the absence of any public knowledge, reports the Guardian.

“If you remember, even the NSA said that they did not record phone calls, but according to these latest revelations by Edward Snowden, that up to ‘600 million’ telephone events last year were recorded a day by the GCHQ,” said RT’s Tesa Arcilla from London.

“There’s no doubt as to what the objectives of these programs were, having put them in place,” she said, emphasizing the titles.

The agency is able to store the volumes of data it amasses from fiber-optic cables for up to 30 days in an operation codenamed Tempora. The practice has been going on for around 18 months.

GCHQ which was handling 600m telephone ‘events’ a day, according to the documents, had tapped into over 200 fiber-optic cables and had the capacity to analyze data from over 46 of them at a time.

The cables used by GCHQ can carry data at 10 gigabits per second, which in theory, means they could deliver up to 21petabytes of information per day. The program is continuing to develop on a daily basis with the agency aiming to expand to the point it is able to process terabits (thousands of gigabits) of data at once.

“This appears to be dangerously close to, if not exactly, the centralised database of all our internet communications, including some content, that successive Governments have ruled out and Parliament has never legislated for,” said Nick Pickles of UK privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch.

“If GCHQ have been intercepting huge numbers of innocent people’s communications as part of a massive sweeping exercise then I struggle to see how that squares with a process that requires a warrant for each individual intercept. This question must be urgently be addressed in Parliament,” he stated.

By May last year, some 300 GCHQ-assigned analysts and 250 from the NSA had been specially allocated large quantities of data to trawl through as a result of the operations.

The Guardian reports that 850,000 NSA and outside contractors had potential access to the databases. However, the paper does not explain how it came to such an enormous figure

“These revelations reveal the scale of and the scope of cooperation between UK and US intelligence services,” said RT’s Gayane Chichakyan from Washington. “From these revelations we learned how dramatically it has expanded over the years.”

“The document shows the FISA court lets the NSA use data snagged ‘inadvertently.’ They basically give a warrant to target suspects,” she said, recalling Lieutenant General Keith Alexander’s quote after a 2008 visit to the Menwith RAF base in England: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith,” he had said.

The GCHQ project was first trialed in 2008. The intelligence organization has been labeled an ‘intelligence superpower’ on account of its technical capabilities, which by 2010 gave it the strongest access to internet communications out of the ‘Five Eyes’ – an international intelligence sharing alliance, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US, brought into existence in 1946.

The mass-surveillance has seen the interception of data from transatlantic cables that also carry data to western Europe through ‘intercept partners’ commercial companies that had entered into private agreements with GCHQ. Many have been paid off for their cooperation.

GCHQ feared that exposure of the names of the companies involved could lead to “high-level political fallout,” and took measures to ensure names were kept secret. Warrants had reportedly been issued to compel the companies to cooperate so that GCHQ could engage in spying through them.

“They have no choice,” said a Guardian intelligence source.

Human rights groups have spoken out against the mass data collection: “They are exploiting the fact that the internet is so international in nature,” Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, told BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ program. “I’m pretty sad in a democracy when all that appears to be holding back the secret state is its physical and technological capability and not its ethics or a tight interpretation and application of the law,” she added.

Snowden previously warned that he would be releasing further information pertaining to mass security operations carried out on the unwary public, stating in a previous Q & A with the Guardian that the “truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.” – RT