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Blunkett calls for urgent review of spying safeguards
Last updated eight minutes agoFormer home secretary urges update of laws and says 'we have to protect ourselves from ourselves'
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Latest“Garton Ash says Dianne Feinstein, the US Senate intelligence committee chair, was completely asleep on the job - she didn't know what was going…” NSA files – live debate
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Live• 6.45pm: live coverage of debate on spying in London
• White House: Snowden should face justice in US
• New readers start here
• What do the NSA Files mean for youA man, thought to be Edward Snowden, is seen in front of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in central Moscow in this still image taken from video footage shown on Russian television channel Rossiya 24 on 31 October. Photograph: Reuters LiveSort by:
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There is a discussion about whether an early-day motion against surveillance would be effective.
David Davis says the dangerous thing to do is count your troops before you get them all organised because almost every MP accepts the establishment view initially and each argument (on 90-day detention for example) takes as much as a year to win. So an early-day motion now would only attract a few names and would be counter-productive, he says.
Garton Ash says Dianne Feinstein, the US Senate intelligence committee chair, was completely asleep on the job - she didn't know what was going on.
Rory Stewart suggests any oversight committee needs to chaired by an opposition MP.
He points out how much stronger US select committees are than UK ones.
Guardian columnist Timothy Garton Ash says the US is a model on free speech, but not privacy.
The system built up in the US since 9/11 involves secret courts, he points out. "This can be a model for us in Britain? Heaven help us. The model in this respect is Germany," he says.
Nick Pickles of campaign group Big Brother Watch is up next.
He says the budget of the ISC is still a secret; the number of warrants read by the interception of communication commissioners or requested by MI5 are secrets too.
We cannot allow this secrecy to continue, he says.
He looks ahead to Thursday's ISC hearing featuring the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. This comes decades after the US first did something similar.
He predicts the three will attack Snowden and the Guardian rather than defending their own actions.
Transparency is a very important step we need to take, he says.
Can the government tell us on what scale it has been collecting data on people in the UK and abroad and what the justification is for this, Mepham asks.
How is this consistent with the UK's agreement to uphold the right to privacy?
It is unclear how much parliament, the cabinet, the national security council and the ISC knew about these programmes.
What are the foreign policy implications of these revelations?
He says last week's Westminster Hall debate indicated declining support for the government's hard line that no change to oversight is needed.
The ISC is taking forward its on enquiry - we have reasons perhaps to be sceptical, Mepham says. But perhaps it will surprise us.
The existing legislative framework surrounding the security services needs to be revised, he says.
David Mepham of Human Rights Watch speaks next.
He says HRW exposes abuses of state power around the world.
The foreign secretary has said the agencies uphold UK law - but how would we know if they weren't, Mepham asks.
He points out that the ISC in the last parliament wrongly found no UK involvement in rendition.
Lib Dem MP Julian Huppert takes the mic. He says he would be delighted to join with foreign MPs over this.
He says this is one of the key issues of the century.
Huppert points out that the communications data bill has been stalled by his party. But it now turns out the information and powers the government said it needed it actually already had (or GCHQ did).
He says last week's parliamentary debate was fantastic.
He says the intelligence and security committee members reassured other MPs about how well its own oversight works.
Huppert says it's sad the debate has become about the Guardian instead of mass surveillance.
No one would say there is no role for the security services - but he doesn't think anyone wants to give them carte blanche.
But very few MPs understand, say, the difference between data and metadata. breaking encryption is terribly dangerous for our financial system, he points out.
Snowden wants and deserves a safe place to live in a western democracy, von Notz says.
The transatlantic relationship must be a two-way street, he says.
He wants to start an international movement called Parliamentarians against Mass Surveillance. Parliamentarians worldwide have been kept out of the loop, von Notz says.
The rule of law needs to be re-established in Germany, he says, with complete parliamentary oversight of the agencies.
He says his colleague Hans-Christian Stroebele met Edward Snowden the other day.
He notes that Snowden's letter contained the line: "Speaking the truth is not a crime."
German MP Konstantin von Notz speaks next.
He says he is an admirer of the UK's democracy and parliament.
He says some may be irritated by the participation of a Germany MP, but the freedom of the press lies at the very heart of both countries' democracies.
The scale of the mass surveillance revealed by Snowden is unprecedented, he says. Everyone is affected.
Germans must assume that GCHQ screens the communications of German citizens and institutions, he says.
Who could exclude that British citizens are not being targeted by other countries, he asks.
We urgently need this public debate everywhere, he says.
There is a short break - during that can I draw your attention to this story in about Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, blasting apparent US government spying on the company's data centre as "outrageous" and possibly illegal.
Rusbridger asks Google's Peter Barron if he is confident that the NSA is now behaving as it should regarding the interception of tech companies' fibre-optic cables.
The only legitimate process is court orders coming to us, Barron says.
Rusbridger says the metadata on emails or calls can be as revealing as the content of the emails or the calls: who you're calling, for example. That can be devastating for investigative journalists; it's the end of calling confidential sources, for example.
Tory MP Rory Stewart suggests oversight should meet US standards at a minimum.
Rusbridger says Obama was quick to announce a review, and the review has interesting figures on it, such as privacy advocate Peter Swire. And now Feinstein has announced a much broader review. If the UK could match US standards of seriousness on this we would be doing much better than we are, Rusbridger says.
Rusbridger points out that Snowden did not go to the New York Times because the NYT sat on a story for a year. So he went to the Guardian. But what if the UK government succeeds in shutting down the Guardian's reporting? Where would the whistleblower go then?
David Davis MP asks Buechner about asylum for Snowden. He says the only thing that makes these organisations work properly is whistleblowers. And if the whistleblowers could look forward to a life in Germany rather than a life in Moscow, that might encourage more to come forward.
Peter Barron from Google speaks briefly to say Google was not acting in cooperation with the NSA. There was never a backdoor, he says, and he has been outraged at the latest revelations of the NSA tapping into their cables.
Has Der Speigel been under the same kind of pressure the Guardian has been under? No, says Buechner, and the threats from Andrew Parker of MI5 and from David Cameron against the Guardian really shocked him. He says he is puzzled that such a thing could happen in the UK. He says he is certainly not here to tell British people about democracy - the UK, US and France have given many democratic values to Germany. But Cameron's behaviour is "unbelievable".
Any chance of German asylum for Snowden? The German government wants to discuss the issue with Snowden personally, he says. He says he hopes there will be a public debate in Germany that results in asylum for Snowden.
Obama had said if he wanted to know something from Merkel he would personally call her. "Well, now we know better," Buechner says.
The fact the leader of a friendly nation is under surveillance by the US "really shocked" German public opinion, he says.
Will that result in a new oversight regime? He is not sure. Public interest can wane quickly.
Does the Stasi history make Germans more sensitive to this? Buechner says he agrees with Jenkins that we are not in a Stasi-type situation today. But Germans do have the experience of totalitarian regimes that tried to establish total surveillance. They couldn't, but imagine if they had had today's technologies. Luckily they did not, he says.
Wolfgang Buechner of Der Spiegel is asked about the impact of the Merkel bugging story in Germany.
He says that before that story people felt they already suspected what had been revealed. But the Merkel story completely changed the situation - people understood there were literally no limits to what the spy agencies were doing, he says.
Rusbridger suggests Barack Obama did not know about the bugging of Angela Merkel's phone.
The MPs being asked to approve the communications data bill when GCHQ secretly had far stronger powers already are furious, he says.
The cabinet and national security council were kept in the dark, as former minister Chris Huhne has written.
Spooks do not talk to journalists - but do they talk to Whitehall, he asks.
Would he have done anything differently?
We didn't go to the D-Notice committee about the G20 surveillance story, Rusbridger says. But that seems to him an entirely legitimate story. The Guardian did not go to the D-Notice committee because it feared being injuncted. That was a rational fear. But it allows the Julian Smiths of this world a way to criticise the Guardian as being irresponsible. So perhaps the paper should have gone to the committee, Rusbridger says.
What kind of oversight regime should we have?
Rusbridger says the nature of intelligence has changed since 2000.
The laws governing intelligence may not be appropriate any more.
In the US the author of the Patriot Act has said it was never intended to be used like this.
Have people such as Dianne Feinstein in the US got the technological expertise to question the agencies, he asks.
Is Malcolm Rifkind's committee in the UK the right place to balance privacy and security?
So you have to imagine a different type of oversight in which these conflicting interests are represented, he says.
He does not know if the ISC for example has the resources the Guardian has deployed to examine these documents.
Rifkind would not say in the parliamentary debate last week whether his committee had known about Tempora and Prism before the Guardian had revealed their existence - why?
Why has the debate been muted in the UK?
Rusbridger points out that novelist John Lanchester has made the point about the difference between a society based on rights (America, some EU countries) and a country based on wrongs (the UK) - somewhere that forms its law through reaction.
We haven't had Nixon, McCarthy, the Stasi, he says - we might believe it couldn't happen here.
We've had Enigma - we feel we're very good at intelligence and surveillance.
Why has the rest of the media attacked the Guardian over this?
Rusbridger refers to "the Blackhurst document" in reference to former Independent editor Chris Blackhurst's "who am I to argue?" piece about the security services. "If a journalist can't answer that question, we're all in trouble," he says.
The Mail and the Times have made the same point about not questioning what spies tell them.
He says all these papers are saying "please don't send us any secrets - because we can't be trusted to have them".
He says the Guardian is robust enough to withstand this kind of pressure - but whether it is proper and wise of the government to use this kind of pressure is for others to answer.
On David Miranda's detention, Rusbridger says Louise Mensch and Julian Smith MP are using loaded words such as "muling" - "as though the sharing of information between journalists was itself criminal".
Using terrorism legislation against Miranda was inappropriate, he says.
It was used to avoid the checks and balances that would have happened if he was outside Heathrow on UK territory.
We have released a tiny amount, Rusbridger says - 17 documents, not thousands.
In New York Janine Gibson has put all the stories to the White House, and in the UK every story but one (the first) has gone to the government and intelligence agencies before publication.
Rusbridger mentions the police inquiry - "we assume into the Guardian, although they haven't been specific about that" (it may be into David Miranda rather than the paper).
The government forced the Guardian to destroy hard disks, despite that information being held by the Guardian in the US too.
William Sieghart interviews the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and Der Spiegel's Wolfgang Buechner.
He asks Rusbridger: "How did this all happen?"
Rusbridger says what has happened was a disaster for the security services - the biggest disaster that has hit western intelligence in 100 years.
But it was not a catastrophe - because Edward Snowden did not act as a spy or put it all on the internet unredacted.
But how was it that GCHQ agreed to 850,000 people being able to look at GCHQ's private wiki-site, Rusbridger asks. No one is asking that.
Glanville says effective intelligence services and privacy rights are not mutually exclusive.
She says she is part of a Strasbourg challenge to the surveillance techniques revealed. They have gone to Strasbourg because there is no UK route to challenge this.
Jo Glanville of English PEN quotes Cameron's recent "lah di dah, airy fairy" remark dismissing the debate over privacy.
"You don't have to have secrets to worry about this," she says. The freedom to privately express views and exchange information should be something everyone is entitled to.
Open justice is also at threat - it is impossible to challenge the intelligence services' conduct in open court, she points out.
"David Cameron is attacking the very foundations of democracy," she says.
Jenkins says he feels the story is a story about failure of oversight.
America takes freedom of speech rights very carefully, he points out.
In this country we don't, he says.
"GCHQ is an offshoot of the NSA," he says. It did not keep its material secure, and it had the "cheek" to say to the Guardian it cannot keep its material safe.
This is "the one thing that makes me mildly ashamed of my country", he says.
Simon Jenkins of the Guardian speaks next. He says we are not threatened with a Stasi state or a new Gestapo. He says both sides should be careful not to slide into extremes.
Jenkins says this is a bigger story than those revealed by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
No newspaper presented with the material the Guardian was presented with was ever likely to hand it over to the authorities, he says. Any responsible paper would do what the Guardian and its partners have done - reported on frameworks and concepts, not individuals.
He says he cannot understand David Cameron's comment that this material endangered life. Jenkins says all material published by the Guardian has been perfectly fit for print.
That said, defence is a sensitive subject, he allows. But it also lends itself to an attack from governments over national security.
He says he has just been in the US, where the debate is consuming the political classes.
Erica Buist reads a message from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. He points out that Alan Rusbridger is subject to government threat in a way impossible in the US. He suggests a first amendment on freedom of the press for the UK. He says he dares politicians to support him. "It's time for a first amendment in the UK."
Henry Porter speaks first.
He says this event is both to allow people to speak up to say they oppose mass surveillance and to support the Guardian. "A prime minister muttering threats" against a paper is a first in my lifetime, he says.
Surveillance debate
I'm here in the wood-panelled surroundings of the Royal Institute of British Architects waiting for the start of tonight's debate on mass surveillance.
The chair will be Rosie Boycott, and the speakers will be:
• Observer columnist Henry Porter
• Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, who will provide a "message of support"
• Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins
• Jo Glanville of English PEN
• William Sieghart in conversation with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and Spiegel editor Wolfgang Buechner
• Konstantin von Notz, the German Green MP
• Tom Watson, the Labour MP
• Julian Huppert, the Lib Dem MP
• David Mepham of Human Rights Watch
• Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch
• David Davis, the Tory MP
The US and the EU are to resume their free trade negotiations next week despite the tensions caused by Snowden's revelations.
"It's out of question to mix the two things - the negotiations on an investment and trade agreement with the United States and the measures the [EU] member states would like to adopt to fight against spying," European commission spokesman Olivier Bailly said.
Meanwhile Angela Merkel's spokesman, Steffen Seibert, has made comments interpreted as pouring cold water on the idea Germany might offer Snowden asylum. Seibert said:
The chancellor believes she has an obligation to protect the data and privacy of German citizens from illegal monitoring and she is working to re-establish trust with the United States, and put in place clear rules for future cooperation.
That said, however, this is also about our security and our interests as partners. For us Germans, the transatlantic alliance remains of paramount importance. There is hardly a country that has profited as much from this partnership and friendship as Germany ... and this will guide the chancellor in all future decisions.
German chancellor Angela Merkel. Photograph: Sean Gallup/Getty Images Here is the full text of Snowden’s “manifesto for truth” (see earlier):
In a very short time, the world has learned a lot about irresponsibly-operating intelligence services and about sometimes criminal surveillance programmes.
Sometimes the services are even trying to deliberately avoid allowing high officials or the public to control them.
While the NSA and GCHQ seem to be the worst offenders – or so the documents now made public suggest – we must not forget that mass surveillance is a global problem that requires global solutions.
Such programmes are not only a threat to privacy, they also threaten freedom of opinion and an open society.
The existence of spy technologies should not determine policy. We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit surveillance programmes and protect human rights.
Society can only understand and control these problems through an open and informed debate.
At the beginning, some of the governments who were exposed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented smear campaign. They intimidated journalists and criminalised the publication of the truth. At that time, the public was not yet able to calculate the benefits of these revelations. They relied on their governments to judge.
Today we know that this was a mistake, and that such behaviour is not in the public interest. The debate they tried to stop is now taking place all over the world.
And instead of causing harm, the usefulness of the new public knowledge for society is now clear because reforms to politics, supervision and laws are being suggested. Citizens have to fight against the suppression of information about matters of essential importance for the public.
Those who speak the truth are not committing a crime.
Edward Snowden's 'manifesto for truth' published in Der Spiegel On Saturday the New York Times published a long piece on the NSA based on the information from Snowden the Guardian had shared with the American paper. (The Guardian/Observer piece based on this material is here.)
This was an extract I found interesting:
In one 2010 hacking operation code-named Ironavenger, for instance, the NSA spied simultaneously on an ally and an adversary. Analysts spotted suspicious emails being sent to a government office of great intelligence interest in a hostile country and realized that an American ally was “spear-phishing” — sending official-looking emails that, when opened, planted malware that let hackers inside.
This was also an interesting fact:
The Americans silently followed the foreign hackers, collecting documents and passwords from computers in the hostile country, an elusive target. They got a look inside that government and simultaneously got a close-up look at the ally’s cyberskills, the kind of intelligence twofer that is the unit’s specialty.
A single daily report from June 2011 from the NSA’s station in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban country, illustrates the intensity of eavesdropping coverage, requiring 15 pages to describe a day’s work.
The NYT piece also points to one potential downside of being able to collect so much information - the volume can be overwhelming.
In 2008, the NSA’s Middle East and North Africa group set about updating its Sigint collection capabilities. The “ambitious scrub” of selectors — essentially search terms — cut the number of terms automatically searched from 21,177 to 7,795 and the number of messages added to the agency’s Pinwale database from 850,000 a day to 450,000 a day.
The reduction in volume was treated as a major achievement, opening the way for new collection on Iranian leadership and Saudi and Syrian diplomats, the report said.
The New York Times building in New York. Photograph: Paul Owen Labour’s Diana Johnson, the shadow crime and security minister, has written to Home Office minister James Brokenshire to ask him to explain the “explicit legal basis” under which GCHQ’s Tempora programme – which intercepts internet fibre-optic undersea cables – operates.
She specifically wants to know if the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 authorises the scheme – and whether any information is collected without an individual warrant.
The interceptions of communications commissioner – currently Sir Anthony May – is one of the figures providing oversight of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
Johnson also asks whether May covers Tempora.
Here is her letter in full:
I am writing to follow up on last week's debate on oversight of the intelligence agencies. l appreciate that time was limited in the debate but there were two points that l was disappointed that you did not address directly and l hope that you will be able to confirm in writing.
l was pleased to hear you confirm, on the record, that the actions of the government's Tempora programme complied with British law at all times. However, I was surprised that you did not go into the explicit legal basis under which Tempora operates. l think it would be helpful if you confirm whether RIPA provides the legal basis for the programme. In particular if the authorisation for the collection of metadata comes from Part 1, Chapter Z, it would be helpful it you could clarity the full remit of powers this gives to the intelligence agencies. It would also be helpful it you could confirm that the Tempora programme does not include the collection of data which would fall under the remit of Part l, Chapter l and that no such data is collected without an individual warrant.
I would also like confirmation that the Tempora programme falls within the remit of the interceptions of communications commissioner and that the commissioner has been given access to all aspects of the programme as it has been developed. As l said in the debate, l am disappointed that the government has not given a higher profile to the role of the commissioner. In particular, the failure to make it clear whether an investigation into Tempora is ongoing, whether this is separate from the commissioner's annual report and when we can expect to see this report published.
I look forward to your response on these points.
UpdatedIn the Financial Times, Edward Luce recalls a speech Barack Obama made in June which he says contained “a thinly coded cry for help to rein in the growing US shadow state”. Edward Snowden’s revelations have allowed him to do this, Luce says.
Why, then, does Mr Obama want to put Mr Snowden behind bars?
The question of Mr Snowden’s motives is secondary. He may be a criminal, or a saint. I suspect he had good reasons. At minimum he will pay for his sins with a lifetime of looking over his shoulder. In the meantime, the rest of us are far more educated than before about how much privacy we have lost and how rapidly. We are all Angela Merkel now.
Mr Obama is enraged and embarrassed by the hammer blows of one giant disclosure after another. But the fallout has given him the possibility of answering his own plea for greater accountability. Back in May, he issued a thinly coded cry for help to rein in the growing US shadow state. We should be grateful that Mr Snowden came forward.
Der Spiegel yesterday published a “manifesto for truth” by Edward Snowden, in which the whistleblower warned of the dangers of the security services setting the political agenda, saying: "We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit surveillance programmes and protect human rights". He wrote:
At the beginning, some of the governments who were exposed by the revelations of mass surveillance initiated an unprecedented smear campaign. They intimidated journalists and criminalised the publication of the truth. Today we know that this was a mistake, and that such behaviour is not in the public interest. The debate they tried to stop is now taking place all over the world.
He also said his revelations were helping to bring about practical change:
Instead of causing damage, the usefulness of the new public knowledge for society is now clear because reforms to politics, supervision and laws are being suggested ... Citizens have to fight against the suppression of information about affairs of essential importance for the public. Those who speak the truth are not committing a crime.
In Germany, as my colleague Philip Oltermann reports, an increasing number of public figures are calling on the government to offer Snowden asylum.
In August he was granted a year’s asylum in Russia.
Welcome to our hub for all Edward Snowden, NSA and GCHQ-related developments around the world, as controversy over revelations leaked by the whistleblower continue to make headlines. As arguments rage over how much of our day to day life should be monitored in the name of security, we'll be tracking the growing global debate about privacy in the digital age. We'd like to know what you think about the whole NSA story, what you're worried about – and any new areas you'd like to read more about.
Good morning.
The White House has rejected a call from Edward Snowden for the US to abandon its “harmful” attempt to prosecute him under the Espionage Act.
White House adviser Dan Pfieffer said yesterday of the NSA whistleblower, currently in exile in Russia: “Mr Snowden violated US law. He should return to the US and face justice.” He said that no offers of clemency were being discussed.
Meanwhile the head of the US Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, said that if Snowden had truly been a whistleblower he would have reported his concerns about mass US surveillance to her committee privately. "That didn't happen, and now he's done this enormous disservice to our country. I think the answer is no clemency," she said. Feinstein last week stunned Washington when she came out against the NSA’s spying on allies, having previously staunchly supported the agency throughout the current controversy.
Mike Rogers, the chair of the House intelligence committee, called clemency for Snowden a “terrible idea”. He said:
He needs to come back and own up. If he believes there's vulnerabilities in the systems he'd like to disclose, you don't do it by committing a crime that actually puts soldiers' lives at risk in places like Afghanistan.
Rogers also said he was sceptical about White House and European claims to have been shocked by what Snowden revealed:
I think there's going to be some best actor awards coming out of the White House this year and best supporting actor awards coming out of the European Union. Some notion that ... some people just didn't have an understanding about how we collect information to protect the United States to me is wrong.
Former NSA and CIA director Mike Hayden said it was possible Barack Obama did not know about the tapping of Angela Merkel’s phone, but he said it was "impossible" that Obama's top staff members were unaware. "The fact that they didn't rush in to tell the president this was going on points out what I think is a fundamental fact: This wasn't exceptional. This is what we were expected to do."
Also today:
• Seventy of the world's leading human rights organisations have written to David Cameron to warn that the government's reaction to the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden is leading to an erosion of fundamental rights and freedoms in the UK, report Matthew Taylor and Nick Hopkins.
• Read their open letter here.
• And yesterday, Ewen MacAskill and James Ball published this useful primer on what the NSA does and who it works with. Here’s an extract:
The NSA operates in close co-operation with four other English-speaking countries - the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - sharing raw intelligence, funding, technical systems and personnel. Their top level collective is known as the '5-Eyes'.
Tonight at 6.45pm Tory MP David Davis, the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger and Simon Jenkins, plus Wolfgang Büchner of Der Spiegel and Jo Glanville of writers’ group English PEN will be debating mass surveillance and the meaning of Snowden’s revelations for Britain at RIBA, 66 Portland Place, W1. I’ll be live-blogging it here, but if you want to attend email: surveillanceevent@gmail.com
Beyond that, the NSA has other coalitions, although intelligence-sharing is more restricted for the additional partners: the 9-Eyes, which adds Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway; the 14-Eyes, including Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden; and 41-Eyes, adding in others in the allied coalition in Afghanistan.
The exclusivity of the various coalitions grates with some, such as Germany, which is using the present controversy to seek an upgrade. Germany has long protested at its exclusion, not just from the elite 5-Eyes but even from 9-Eyes. Minutes from the UK intelligence agency GCHQ note: "The NSA's relationship with the French was not as advanced as GCHQ's … the Germans were a little grumpy at not being invited to join the 9-Eyes group".
Significantly, amid the German protestations of outrage over US eavesdropping on Merkel and other Germans, Berlin is using the controversy as leverage for an upgrade to 5-Eyes.
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http://www.theguardian.com/uk
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