MI5 feared GCHQ went 'too far' with NSA. Retroactive warrants. Targets outside of the UK (us lol)

[Catherina]

MI5 feared GCHQ went 'too far' over phone and internet monitoring

Amid leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, senior intelligence source reveals worries were voiced in 2008

Nick Davies
The Observer, Saturday 22 June 2013 20.18 BST


GCHQ taps can intercept UK and US phone and internet traffic. Photograph: EPA

Senior figures inside British intelligence have been alarmed by GCHQ's secret decision to tap into transatlantic cables in order to engage in the bulk interception of phone calls and internet traffic.

According to one source who has been directly involved in GCHQ operations, concerns were expressed when the project was being discussed internally in 2008: "We felt we were starting to overstep the mark with some of it. People from MI5 were complaining that they were going too far from a civil liberties perspective … We all had reservations about it, because we all thought: 'If this was used against us, we wouldn't stand a chance'."

The Guardian revealed on Friday that GCHQ has placed more than 200 probes on transatlantic cables and is processing 600m "telephone events" a day as well as up to 39m gigabytes of internet traffic. Using a programme codenamed Tempora, it can store and analyse voice recordings, the content of emails, entries on Facebook, the use of websites as well as the "metadata" which records who has contacted who. The programme is shared with GCHQ's American partner, the National Security Agency.

Interviews with the UK source and the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden raise questions about whether the programme:

■ Exploits existing law which was passed by parliament without any anticipation that it would be used for this purpose.

■ For the first time allows GCHQ to process bulk internal UK traffic which is routed overseas via these cables.

■ Allows the NSA to engage in bulk intercepts of internal US traffic which would be forbidden in its own territory.

■ Functions with no effective oversight.

The key law is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Ripa, which requires the home secretary or foreign secretary to sign warrants for the interception of the communications of defined targets. But the law also allows the foreign secretary to sign certificates that authorise GCHQ to trawl for broad categories of information on condition that one end of the communication is outside the UK.

...

The source claimed that even the conventional warrant system has been distorted – whereas police used to ask for a warrant before intercepting a target's communications, they will now ask GCHQ to intercept the target's communications and then use that information to seek a warrant.

...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/23/mi5-feared-gchq-went-too-far


"on condition that one end of the communication is outside the UK" Why I believe that be us lol!

[malaise]

1. 2008??

OK then

[Catherina]

2. I know n/t

[wandy]

3. Geee. Do ya think countries other than the U.S - U.K may have been doing this too.

For a long, long, long time.
Who would ever have imagined?

[Catherina]

6. On this scale? Investing multiTrillians to spy on the entire world

and fuck over their own citizens? Name one. Please include more than a gut-feeling.

[wandy]

9. Each country to their own technical abilites...............

Did I ever say this was a good thing?
Did I ever say that I think this just started two weeks ago.
Oh. On other than gut feel? Funny thing about that, most countries don't just come right out and brag about their spying abilities.
The usually try to keep that a secret.
Otherwise it wouldn't be spying.
So, back to the beginning.
Did I ever say this was a good thing?

[Octafish]

4. What's a little eavesdropping among fiends? Eh-r, friends.

EXPOSING THE GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM

by Nicky Hager

This article is reprinted with the permission of CAQ (to Ham Radio Online) (CovertAction Quarterly). CAQ subscription information follows the article.

This article appears in CAQ with the following sidebar articles:

NSA'S BUSINESS PLAN: GLOBAL ACCESS by Duncan Campbell
GREENPEACE WARRIOR: WHY NO WARNING? by Nicky Hager
NZ's PM Kept in the Dark by Nicky Hager
Nicky Hager's book Secret Power is available from CAQ for $33.

IN THE LATE 1980'S, IN A DECISION IT PROBABLY REGRETS, THE U.S. PROMPTED NEW ZEALAND TO JOIN A NEW AND HIGHLY SECRET GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE SYSTEM. HAGER'S INVESTIGATION INTO IT AND HIS DISCOVERY OF THE ECHELON DICTIONARY HAS REVEALED ONE OF THE WORLD'S BIGGEST, MOST CLOSELY HELD INTELLIGENCE PROJECTS. THE SYSTEM ALLOWS SPY AGENCIES TO MONITOR MOST OF THE WORLD'S TELEPHONE, E-MAIL, AND TELEX COMMUNICATIONS.

For 40 years, New Zealand's largest intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) the nation's equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been helping its Western allies to spy on countries throughout the Pacific region, without the knowledge of the New Zealand public or many of its highest elected officials. What the NSA did not know is that by the late 1980s, various intelligence staff had decided these activities had been too secret for too long, and were providing me with interviews and documents exposing New Zealand's intelligence activities. Eventually, more than 50 people who work or have worked in intelligence and related fields agreed to be interviewed.

The activities they described made it possible to document, from the South Pacific, some alliance-wide systems and projects which have been kept secret elsewhere. Of these, by far the most important is ECHELON.

Designed and coordinated by NSA, the ECHELON system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world's telecommunications networks. Unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere in the world.

SNIP...

The thousands of simultaneous messages are read in "real time" as they pour into the station, hour after hour, day after day, as the computer finds intelligence needles in telecommunications haystacks.

SOMEONE IS LISTENING: The computers in stations around the globe are known, within the network, as the ECHELON Dictionaries. Computers that can automatically search through traffic for keywords have existed since at least the 1970s, but the ECHELON system was designed by NSA to interconnect all these computers and allow the stations to function as components of an integrated whole. The NSA and GCSB are bound together under the five-nation UKUSA signals intelligence agreement. The other three partners all with equally obscure names are the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia.

CONTINUED...

http://cryptome.org/jya/echelon.htm

[Catherina]

7. New Zealand, Australia both being busted and eviscerated for this as I type.

I haven't heard much about Canada, the other partner in the "Five Eyes", have you?

Thank you for that post!

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. and by the same rules, USA can tap all of UK phones/mail, etc.

because one end is outside of USA.
See how that partnership thingy works?
Betcha we do same to Canada, too.

[Catherina]

8. US/UK, joined at the hip in war crimes.

I'm so happy this is coming to a light. And I want to see the files concerning the grand Bush/Blair cook-up for the Iraq war.

We do not spy on our own citizens! Right.