British spies mislead MPs over Tempora b4in.org/bVD GCHQ has been running Tempora to harvest, store and analyse millions of phone calls, emails and search engine queries. Britains spying agencies have been accused of seriously misleading the countrys parliament over how far they were able to intrude publics privacy without their consent. This came after a former Labour cabinet minister warned that the spying agencies including the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), MI5, the countrys domestic spying apparatus and its foreign spying counterpart MI6, have been carrying out mass surveillance without parliaments consent. The warning was made by Nick Brown, a former chief whip who was a member of the parliamentary committee tasked with reviewing the governments draft communications data bill or the so-called snoopers’ charter.” Earlier in the spring, the coalition government failed to get enough endorsement for its snoopers’ charter” bill to become law amid Liberal Democrats concerns that it would breach people™s privacy. The snoopers’ charter” was drafted in a bid to give GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 more powers to collect and save information about people™s internet activities. According to Nick Brown, a Labour MP, there was an “uncanny” similarity between the GCHQs secret surveillance programmes, entitled Tempora, which was disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden and proposals in the first part of the snoopers’ charter” bill. “The similarity between part 1 of the proposed data communications bill and the events Mr Snowden is describing as already taking place is uncanny,” Brown said. “It covers the same set of circumstances. The bill was trying to be permissive in that all material could be saved for a year. It now looks very much like this is what is happening anyway, with or without parliament’s consent under GCHQ’s secret Tempora programme,” he added. Tempora allows GCHQ to harvest, store and analyse millions of phone calls, emails and search engine queries by tapping the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic. More b4in.org/bVD
Posted on: Wed, 16 Oct 2013 10:38:14 +0000
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