The Guardian says it has obtained documents showing that Britain’s secret listening post had access to the Prism system, set up by America’s National Security Agency (NSA), since at least June 2010.
Controlling the Herd
GCHQ Prism spying claims: Agency to report ‘shortly’
Britain’s GCHQ has an incredibly close relationship with its US counterpart – and that is now drawing it into controversy.
At issue is whether America’s Prism program has been used to cast a significantly wider surveillance net over communications.
Is Prism simply a means of accessing forms of communication information in a more streamlined way (by directly accessing servers) or does it involve collecting whole new categories of information? And about whom?
Critics will ask whether GCHQ could have used this to get round existing restrictions on whom it collects on.
That’s something the spy agency seems to be pushing back against by saying that everything it does is within a legal and policy framework to make sure it is authorised, necessary and proportionate.
It should come as no surprise that spy agencies spy – and that they don’t like talking about how they spy or on whom.
But this revelation will lead to questions from the public about whether those agencies might be spying on them.
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Contributed by Gordon Corera of BBC Politics.
