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{Update1} BREAKING NEWS: Snowden leaves Hong Kong on a commercial flight to Russia (see my comment below)

NSA leaks: US and Britain team up on mass surveillance

(The Guardian) – Twelve years ago, in an almost forgotten report, the European parliament completed its investigations into a long-suspected western intelligence partnership dedicated to global signals interception on a vast scale. EP Report on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system)

Evidence had been taken from spies and politicians, telecommunications experts and journalists. In stark terms the report detailed a decades-old arrangement which had seen the US and the UK at first – later joined by Canada, New Zealand and Australia to make up the the so-called “Five Eyes” – collaborating to access satellites, transatlantic fibre-optic cables and radio signals on a vast scale.

This secretive (and consistently denied) co-operation was itself the product of a mutual agreement stretching back to the first world war, expanded in the second, and finally ratified in 1948 in the so-called UKUSA agreement.

GCHQ successful in greater metadata haul competing with NSA Data Center

That GCHQ was at the very heart of secret efforts to tap into the internet and cable-carried telephony was finally confirmed in the most dramatic terms on Friday by the latest batch of documents to be leaked by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who is now being sought by the US government for alleged theft and breaches of the Espionage Act.

Those documents, published by the Guardian, not only describe the UK’s lead role in tapping the cables carrying global internet traffic – enjoying the “biggest internet access” of the Five Eyes – but its efforts to suck up ever-larger amounts of global data to share with its partners, and principally with the US.

From a handful of cables at the beginning, the UK is now able, according to the documents, to access some 200 on a daily basis and store the information contained within for up to 30 days for analysis, including up to 600m “telephone events” each day.

Economic Espionage prevalent by global NSA snooping

The direct descendent of earlier UKUSA treaty programmes, Project Tempora‘s purpose remains the hoovering up of the largest amount of signals intelligence, principally in the form of metadata. Then, as now, it appears the priorities are not only related to national security but also economic advantage – interventions which can be justified under UK law by reference to the ill-defined notion of “economic wellbeing”.

Wired: U.K. Spy Agency Secretly Taps Over 200 Fiber-Optic Cables, Shares Data With the NSA

The Government’s Word Games When Talking About NSA Domestic Spying

(EFF) – Government officials have made many statements about the warrantless surveillance since it became public in 2005. They’ve done so in court, in Congress, and in the media. Unfortunately, their words have too often served to evade or obscure, rather than clarify, their actions.

A close reading of the government’s statements, along with other publicly available materials, sheds some light on at least some of their word games. Here are some words or phrases to watch closely:

  • Terrorist Surveillance Program or TSP
  • Surveillance
  • Collection or Collect
  • Content
  • Conversations and Communications

This list likely isn’t complete, but with the specific definitional games in mind, the government’s public statements about the warrantless surveillance become both much less clear and much more troubling.

GCHQ monitoring described as a ‘catastrophe’ by German politicians

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the German justice minister said the report in the Guardian read like the plot of a film.

    “If these accusations are correct, this would be a catastrophe. The accusations against Great Britain sound like a Hollywood nightmare. The European institutions should seek straight away to clarify the situation.”

With a few months to go before federal elections, the minister’s comments are likely to please Germans who are highly sensitive to government monitoring, having lived through the Stasi secret police in communist East Germany and with lingering memories of the Gestapo under the Nazis.

“The accusations make it sound as if George Orwell’s surveillance society has become reality in Great Britain,” said Thomas Oppermann, floor leader of the opposition Social Democrats.

“This is unbearable,” Oppermann told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. “The government must clarify these accusations and act against a total surveillance of German citizens.”

Der Spiegel: Netz-Spähsystem Tempora: Der ganz große britische Bruder