Internet Surveillance in the US and UK

[Loki]

It's a problem with trust I think.William Hague is adamant that any intercept information grab has to be approved by him personally, so there is oversight and an evidence chain, as it were, and that he does them pretty much every day. The question is, whether you believe GCHQ sticks to that, or does its own monitoring on the sly. If they did, then it could never be used in court for the prosecution of terrorists as it would have been illegally obtained.Do we believe Hague, and even if we do, do we believe GCHQ? I find it hard to believe that the CIA and SIS don't still hand each other brown envelopes under the table, with illegally obtained but pertinent information.One interesting thing about the scandal in the US, is that the government spend on this programme is tiny - nowhere near enough money to be doing anything approaching a broad data capture and analysis along the lines of Echelon. That lends credibility to the claim (similar to here) that it's very specifically targeted and with a high level of oversight.Of course, none of this changes anything if you believe that it's fundamentally wrong to spy on people. I'm undecided. You can't have 100% freedom and 100% security, that much is obvious, so it's all about where you draw the line. How much of your freedom are you willing to sacrifice to not get blown up in the street or your hometown?There's always mission creep as well - the police started using their new arrest powers under the Terrorism Act 2005 to arrest all sorts of people who were clearly outside the bounds of the act, and it eventually got curtailed somewhat.

[David]

It's a problem with trust I think.William Hague is adamant that any intercept information grab has to be approved by him personally, so there is oversight and an evidence chain, as it were, and that he does them pretty much every day. The question is, whether you believe GCHQ sticks to that, or does its own monitoring on the sly. If they did, then it could never be used in court for the prosecution of terrorists as it would have been illegally obtained.Do we believe Hague, and even if we do, do we believe GCHQ? I find it hard to believe that the CIA and SIS don't still hand each other brown envelopes under the table, with illegally obtained but pertinent information.

I'd tend to believe that if the US Government officials involved in this project had no qualms about lying to both the US public and Congress about the level of their operation, then why would GCHQ have an issue doing the same here? Is there a good chance that if US Congress was being misled perhaps Hague and his people are as well?Documents have shown that during the month of March of this year the NSA collected nearly 3 billion pieces of intelligence from within the US. In the same month at a Senate hearing, Ron Wyden, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee asked James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"Clapper replied: "No, sir." He continued: "Not wittingly. There are cases where they could, inadvertently perhaps, collect