The NSA itself has been under fire after the PRISM program – and the related Boundless Informant software – was revealed by leaker Edward Snowden, who also leaked the document revealing the GCHQ program to the Guardian.
The revelations have been so damaging that Obama was forced to attempt to defend the program in Germany despite strong opposition. We also have seen the Director of National Intelligence lie under oath while Attorney General Eric Holder claimed the leaks were “extremely damaging” to national security. All of the government’s language used when talking about the program has been deceptive at best.
While some in Washington D.C. have been working to get more information about this program and the legal authorization behind it, the majority of the Senate skipped out on a major hearing.
Now it seems that whereas previously it looked like it was the NSA collecting most of the data and sharing it with GCHQ, the British intelligence agency is running a massive collection program of their own.
“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden said to the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”
GCHQ’s two programs, called Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, are focused on gathering up as much information as possible without any public debate or even acknowledgment.
As part of an operation codenamed Tempora, the agency has for around 18 months been able to “tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fiber-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analyzed,” according to the Guardian.
This results in communications between completely innocent people being accessed and processed, along with those of targeted suspects.
The variety of information is staggering: phone call recordings, email message content, Facebook entries and the history of anyone’s access to websites.
Somehow, all of this is deemed legal, according to the Guardian, despite the fact that the warrant system was supposed to restrict interception to a specified range of targets.
An unnamed source “with knowledge of intelligence” claimed that the data was actually collected legally under a system of safeguards – much like the claims made by individuals in the U.S. government – and “had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.”
Yet when Americans were given guidelines for the use of the data collected through this system, they were told in a legal briefing by GCHQ lawyers, “We have a light oversight regime compared with the U.S.”
Given what we now know about the U.S. oversight system, that should be troubling. Even more so when we realize that Americans were told it was “your call” to judge the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for.
According to the Guardian, “a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases.”
These databases must be massive considering the fact that the documents reveal that GCHQ was handling some 600 million “telephone events” every single day.
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