Britain's NSA Is Listening to Your Phone Calls

Yesterday, the Guardian revealed that GCHQ, Britain's version of the NSA, has been running a program called Tempora that taps fiber optic cables coming into the country. GCHQ claims that Tempora gathers more metadata than any NSA program, and provides access to 600 million "telephone events" each day: The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: "We have a light oversight regime compared with the US". When it came to judging the necessity and...