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THE UNITED KINGDOM’S national surveillance agency has had ‘back door’ access to data harvested by the United States’ intelligence agency, according to a new report.
The Guardian says that GCHQ, Britain’s national electronic surveillance and security body, has access to the US’s PRISM network which was yesterday exposed as having access to data collected by companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Google and Apple.
PRISM, run by the US’s National Security Agency, has the legal right under US law to scrape data relating to any US user of any of the online services mentioned, and any communication they may have with other US users.
However, it was not known before now that its British counterpart had direct access to the information accrued by the US – allowing it to bypass the British legal constraints requiring court approval for records to be collected.
Ordinarily GCHQ can ask the US Department of Defence to apply, on its behalf, for court orders to ask technology companies like Google or Facebook for access to their data about named individuals.
Though this process is still regularly observed, it can be ably circumvented if GCHQ already has access to the PRISM system, which can accrue the data on an enormous basis without any need for judicial oversight.
Documentation obtained by the Guardian further suggests that the data is also available to similar agencies in other countries.
GCHQ accrued 197 intelligence reports from the PRISM data between June 2011 and May 2012, an increase of 83 on the previous year.
PRISM was set up by the George W Bush administration in 2007 to survey online and electronic communications for anti-terrorism purposes, with its mandate updated by Barack Obama last December, a month after his re-election as president.
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Nice to see jobs being created outside Dublin.
@Niamh Brady: Those 6,000 folk working for Apple in Cork must have escaped your notice.
@Eoin Roche: What has that got to do with anything, most of the time you hear jobs being from created in Dublin but I personally think they need to start creating more jobs outside the capital, whats the point of loads of jobs in Dublin if there is nowhere for people to live.
The benefit of being competitive in the modern world. Well done.
These are the people that make the cool robots, I think.
@Keth Warsaw: That’s Boston Dynamics you’re thinking off.
@Keth Warsaw: Medical devices
@Darren Sheridan: and really cool robots.. but evil!
Well done Boston Scientific, Galway and all your talented people.
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