Big Brother Britain under attack for surveillance

The irony of the situation is hard to miss. Big Brother Britain, the birthplace of George Orwell, is blasted  by the Germans for a worse than Orwellian. mass monitoring of the world's people.  

GCHQ surveillance: Germany blasts UK over mass monitoring

Minister questions legality of mass tapping of calls and internet and demands to know extent to which Germans were targeted

Alan Travis, Kate Connolly in Berlin and Nicholas Watt

The German government has expressed the growing public anger of its citizens over Britain's mass programme of monitoring global phone andinternet traffic and directly challenged UK ministers over the whole basis of GCHQ's Project Tempora surveillance operation.

The German justice minister, who has described the secret operation by Britain's eavesdropping agency as a catastrophe that sounded "like a Hollywood nightmare", warned UK ministers that free and democratic societies could not flourish when states shielded their actions in "a veil of secrecy".

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But writing in the Guardian, the former Conservative leadership contender David Davis disputes that view, saying Britain's intelligence agencies are only subject to law in theory.

He accuses GCHQ of circumventing "inconvenient laws" by handing over personal data to the US and raises the prospect of "extremely serious violation" of the rights of British citizens over the use of their personal data. The German justice minister, in her letters to Grayling and May, asks for clarification of the legal basis for Project Tempora and demands to know whether "concrete suspicions" trigger the data collection or whether the vast quantities of global email, Facebook postings, internet histories and phone calls are being held for up to 30 days as part of a general trawl.

She also demands to know whether the programme has been authorised by any judicial authority, how it works in practice and the precise nature of the stored data. The level of concern was reinforced by a phone call from the justice ministry to Ursula Brennan, permanent secretary at the Department of Justice in London.

"I feel that these issues must be raised in a European Union context at minister's level and should be discussed in the context of ongoing discussions on the EU data protection regulation," Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger writes, adding she wants it discussed at the next meeting of justice and home affairs ministers in July.

Britain is almost single-handedly blocking Europe's attempts to increase privacy protection for personal data in a new regime. The Home Office said it would not comment on "private correspondence", while the Ministry of Justice said only that it would respond to the letter in due course.

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The leading German social democrat, Thomas Oppermann, has said the details of Project Tempora make it sound as if George Orwell'ssurveillance society has become a reality in Britain.

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger's letters – sent to Grayling and May on the 110th anniversary of Orwell's birth on 25 June 1903 – are the most forceful expression yet of the German government's frustration and anger over the surveillance scandal. The German media has been filled in recent days with pundits and readers asking to what extent they have been spied upon and whether their government knew about the surveillance.

The Snowden revelations have drawn wide-scale comparisons in the last fortnight with Gestapo and Stasi techniques. "I thought this era had ended when the German Democratic Republic fell," Markus Ferber, a member of the European parliament, said in a Reuters interview.

On Tuesday night the British inventor of the internet accused the west of hypocrisy over online snooping.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee told the Times: "In the Middle East, people have been given access to the internet but they have been snooped on and then they have been jailed.

"Obviously, it can be easy for people in the west to say, 'oh, those nasty governments should not be allowed access to spy'. But it's clear that developed nations are seriously spying on the internet."

Konstantin von Notz, the interior affairs spokesman of the opposition Green party, told Deutsche Welle radio: "What's been going on here is against international law and must be stopped immediately." His party has scheduled a Bundestag debate on the topic. On Tuesday,Snowden's location was clarified by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who disclosed that the whistleblower was at a Moscow airport. The admission reversed days of Russian obfuscation and came hours after Putin's foreign minister said Russia had nothing to do with Snowden's travel plans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/25/germany-uk-gchq-internet-surveillance