Alan Travis writes in The Guardian:

The chances of Theresa May reintroducing her “snooper’s charter” communications data bill are practically zero in the wake of the Guardian’s disclosures on the scale of internet surveillance, leading Tory and Labour civil liberties campaigners have said.

David Davis, a former contender for Conservative leadership, and Tom Watson, the Labour deputy chair, both said on Thursday they felt there had been a change in the atmosphere at Westminster compared with the “great rush” to legislate in the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich murder of Drummer Lee Rigby.

Both MPs said the disclosure of the mass harvesting of personal communications, including internet data, by the American National Security Agency and Britain’s eavesdropping agency, GCHQ, had shown that the existing UK regulatory framework was completely ineffective.

Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, writing in the Daily Telegraph, reflects on the revelations that the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad was asked to discover “any intelligence that could have smeared the campaign” for justice for Stephen Lawrence. He concludes:

It is against this background that the Government has on its books a Communications Bill that will enhance the snooping power of the state. To his great credit the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has continued to oppose this even after the brutal murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich. He is right to do this because the more unbridled access the state is given to private information, the higher the risk that it will be abused. Under existing powers in 2011, 494,078 requests were made for communications data under Part 1, Chapter II of the Regulation of Investigatory Power Act, 2000. This enormous amount of information no doubt includes some that will stop crime or solve it but it will inevitably include superfluous data that are no business of the authorities. This needs to be kept under strict control of senior and accountable figures to minimise the chances of abuse. And these need to be outside the organisation requesting the information, otherwise the potential for corruption is too great.

It is in the nature of a government and its agencies to think that they are on the side of good and those who are against them are not. Sometimes this allows the end to justify the means. The Metropolitan Police is an essential and mainly benign institution. Individual police officers, such as those who guard the Houses of Parliament, are of the highest calibre, professional, friendly and courageous. Yet it is not an organisation that likes to admit to mistakes, hence the alleged disgraceful treatment of the Lawrence family. This has shown that even those who have nothing to hide have something to fear from state intrusion. The only way to control this is to limit the powers that are available and make intrusion subject to external warrants. These ought to come from Justices of the Peace, the lay-magistry taken from our fellow citizens or in the most serious cases from senior politicians who are accountable to Parliament for their actions. Who guards the guards themselves? It can only be the people.

Nick Davies, writing in The Observer, quotes concerns from “senior figures inside British intelligence” about GCHQ’s Tempora programme:

Last year, the government was mired in difficulty when it tried to pass a communications bill that became known as the “snoopers’ charter”, and would have allowed the bulk interception and storage of UK voice calls and internet traffic. The source says this debate was treated with some scepticism inside the intelligence community – “We’re sitting there, watching them debate the snoopers’ charter, thinking: ‘Well, GCHQ have been doing this for years’.”

There are similar concerns about the role of the NSA. It could have chosen to attach probes to the North American end of the cables and documents shown to the Guardian by Edward Snowden suggest that key elements of the Tempora filtering process were designed by the NSA. Instead, the NSA agency has exported its computer programs and 250 of its analysts to operate the system from the UK.

Initial inquiries by the Guardian have failed to explain why this has happened, but US legislators are likely to want to check whether the NSA has sought to bypass legal or policy requirements which restrict its activity in the US. This will be particularly sensitive if it is confirmed that Tempora is also analysing internal US traffic.

The UK source challenges the official justification for the programme; that it is necessary for the fight against terrorism and serious crime: “This is not scoring very high against those targets, because they are wise to the monitoring of their communications. If the terrorists are wise to it, why are we increasing the capability?

“The answer is that you can’t stop it. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we develop communications technology, the more they develop technology to intercept it. There was MS Chat – easy. Then Yahoo chat – did that, too. Then Facebook. Then Skype. Then Twitter. They keep catching up. It is good for us, but it is bad for us.”

Jack Clark writes in The Register:

The spooks at Brit intelligence agency GCHQ have been secretly tapping hundreds of fibre-optic cables to slurp data, according to leaked documents seen by The Guardian.

This massive interception effort operates under two programs titled, rather modestly, Mastering the Internet (as reported on by El Reg four years ago – Ed) and Global Telecoms Exploitation, The Guardian reported on Friday, based on documents shown to it by Edward Snowden, the deep throat behind multiple reports of mass data slurping by governments both in the US and abroad.

“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight. They [GCHQ] are worse than the US,” Snowden is reported to have said.

GCHQ is tapping 200 internet links, each with a data rate of 10Gbps, and the agency has the technical capacity to concurrently analyze 46 of these 200 streams of data at a time. It can store all the data generated by the 200 taps for three days, and then the metadata of this for 30 days via a system of what The Guardian terms “internet buffers”, which sounds like Tivo, but for all net-traffic, we reckon.

John Naughton writes in The Observer:

Watching William Hague doing his avuncular routine in the Commons on Monday, I was reminded of the way establishment figures in the 1950s used to reassure hoi polloi that they had nothing to worry about. Everything was in order. The Right Chaps were in charge. Citizens who had done nothing wrong, declared Uncle Hague, had nothing to fear from comprehensive surveillance.

Oh yeah? As Stephen Fry observed in an exasperated tweet: “William Hague’s view seems to be ‘we can hide a camera & bug in your room & if you’ve got nothing to hide, what’s the worry?’ Hell’s teeth!”

Hell’s teeth indeed. I can think of thousands of people who have nothing to hide, but who would have good reasons to worry about intrusive surveillance. Journalists seeking to protect their sources, for example; NHS whistleblowers; people seeking online help for personal psychological torments; frightened teenagers seeking advice on contraception or abortion; estranged wives of abusive husbands; asylum seekers and dissident refugees; and so on.