GCHQ Surveillance: The Power of Britain's Data Vacuum

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/snowden-reveals-how-gchq-in-britain-soaks-up-mass-internet-data-a-909852.html


A British military base near Harrogate provides signals intelligence for Britain and the United States: "It snarfs everything."

In an interview published in the latest edition of SPIEGEL, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden reports on how America's NSA intelligence service works together with Germany's federal intelligence agency, the BND, more intensively than previously known.

He also provides an in-depth account of the surveillance operations of the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Britain's Tempora system is the signal intelligence community's first "full-take Internet buffer," Snowden said in an interview.

The scope of this "full take" system is vast. According to the whistleblower and Britain's Guardian newspaper, Tempora stores communications data for up to 30 days and saves the content of those messages for up to three days, in a so-called Internet buffer. "It snarfs everything, in a rolling buffer to allow retroactive investigation without missing a single bit," Snowden said. If you send a single data packet, he further explains, "and it routes through the UK, we get it."

Asked if it is possible to get around this total surveillance of all Internet communication, he said: "As a general rule, so long as you have any choice at all, you should never route through or peer with the UK under any circumstances."