The British intelligence service GCHQ taps for 18 months, huge amounts of internet and telephone traffic through glasvezelbackbones. The service maintains metadata for 30 days and shares it with the NSA, it appears from information of Prism whistleblower Snowden, who has been accused in the USA.
The purpose of the Government Communications Headquarters would be to, as much as possible, internet and telephony traffic to be intercepted. To do so would be in operation Tempora, which is already about 18 months, the glasvezelbackbones be drained which the global traffic. In addition to phone calls, would e-mails, messages on social-networking sites and other internet traffic is collected. According to The Guardian, that the information from Prism whistleblower Edward Snowden was, theoretically, to more than 21 petabytes per day.
Already in 2011, would the GCHQ have access to 200 internetkabels with a bandwidth of 10Gbit/s, and then Tempora set in motion. Content is three days for analysis, metadata – such as who with whom communicates – remains thirty days.
In the GCHQ would since may last year 300 analysts to the data to start digging, but also the Us intelligence agency NSA would be the data passed to get and there would be 250 analysts to sit for the project. In total, however, would 850.000 Americans involved in the NSA have access to the databases of the GCHQ.
The intelligence agencies would use the data to search for “pins in the haystack’, claims a source from The Guardian that the information confirms it. “The criteria are security, terrorism, organised crime and the economy”, says the anonymous source. “Through an audit process to the logs, looked at whether the right pieces of information are extracted. For the most part, never looked, we didn’t have the resources for.” Access would be enforced by an appeal on a clause of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which allows the GCHQ within the law would operate. The information gathered by Tempora would have been several times to the arrests have led, among other things of three Londoners for the Olympics.
Meanwhile, the US lodged a complaint against whistleblower Edward Snowden, writes The Washington Post. He is accused of “unauthorized communication of national defensieinformatie’ and ‘knowingly and wilfully leaking of secret information to an unauthorized person.”
