More details emerge of the UK’s illegal mass spying
Robert Stevens: More details emerge of the UK’s illegal mass spying - UK charity Privacy International has begun a legal case calling for the British government to end the use of data collected by the US National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) mass surveillance system, Prism. The papers also call for an injunction on the “Tempora” system, used by the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) programme to systematically spy on the entire British population. GCHQ monitors all outgoing and incoming communications via its access to the fibre-optic cables through which all UK Internet traffic passes. Some 600 million “telephone events” are monitored each day by tapping more than 200 fibre-optic cables, including those that connect the UK to the US. According to the Guardian, the legal claim was submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT). The IPT is a tribunal, supposedly tasked with investigating claims regarding the UK’s spy agencies. It was created under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000, meets in secret and is not required to make a determination on a complaint. On this basis, it is not possible to have a complaint heard before an open public court.
Peter Symonds: Snowden confirms Australian agencies involved in NSA global spying - A classified National Security Agency (NSA) map leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden confirms that four Australian intelligence facilities are directly involved in the NSA’s electronic spying operations in the United States and around the world. The map published by American journalist Glenn Greenwald in collaboration with the Brazilian newspaper, O Globo, has revealed the locations of dozens of facilities in the US and its close allies that are involved in systematically intercepting and storing huge amounts of telecommunications and Internet data. The four Australian sites are the US Australian Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, and three Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) facilities—the Shoal Bay Receiving Station near Darwin, the Australian Defence Satellite Communications Station at Geraldton in Western Australia, and the naval communications station HMAS Harman outside Canberra.