The British government has yet to confirm or deny reports that it had been given information from an American surveillance program called Prism, which is said to have collected Internet data on foreigners abroad from companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/world/europe/britain-gchq-surveillance.html?ref=world “Because circumstances vary and because procedures vary according to the situation, I don’t want to give a categoric answer,” says UK.
The Guardian newspaper reported that G.C.H.Q. generated 197 intelligence reports through the Prism system in the year to May 2012. G.C.H.Q. has refused to comment on the details of the claims but said in a statement that its work “is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorized, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight.”
the legal situation remains opaque. “We are told this is lawful but the precise nature of these legal judgments are hidden from us,”
He argued that intelligence agencies now had access to enormous stores of information that could be crosschecked with other data to build up a profile of individuals’ lives
“The last 10 years has been about working out how to warehouse unbelievable amounts of boring data and how to analyze that data — and they have cracked it,” said Richard J. Aldrich, a professor of international security at the University of Warwick.
Through such a process it would be possible for the authorities “to have a better memory of what I was doing 10 months ago than I have,”
“All our e-mails and other electronic communication, including social media, even if sent only between European Union citizens, can be intercepted and read by U.S. security services,” said Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who leads the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in the European Parliament. “This has obvious and very serious privacy consequences for E.U. citizens.
