[jumblesale]

It's staggering that there's no discussion on this. I remember seeing the newspapers on the day Snowden broke the stuff about GCHQ. The Grauniad was indignant; nobody else even touched the story. Why aren't the government being hauled over the coals for this thing? Cameron's promising an enquiry over the Lawson investigation but his government is still pushing ever broader collection of digital communications.

It makes me feel angry and powerless.

[DanBC]

> nobody else even touched the story.

This is EDIT not correct.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02xxvbr)

0833 Sir Malcom Rifkind, a former foreign secretary and the current chairman of the commons intelligence and security committee, and Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, analyse allegations that GCHQ has snooped on web information.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23059065)(http://www.b...

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23004080)

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23048259)

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23017108)

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23051248)

etc etc etc.

> Why aren't the government being hauled over the coals for this thing?

There's no evidence that GCHQ are doing anything illegal, nor anything new. They've been doing this for many years. It's what they say they do. It's what they're set up to do.

GCHQ having a 3 day cache of communication-content data is little different to telecoms companies keeping a similar cache[1] except the laws are clearer about what GCHQ can and can't do with the data.

In terms of privacy violation there are much worse examples than GCHQ slurping everything. Corrupt public officials (eg: police officers) selling off information to newspapers; workers for telecoms companies having unauthorised access; people with access to medical records gossiping.

Note that the broader collection you mention is, at the moment, just "meta data" (routing information), and not content data. I guess while not be acceptable it is less unacceptable than collecting content data. (If that makes sense.)

[jumblesale]

I don't remember but did the BBC run the story on TV? I don't remember it being discussed but I might not have seen the news that day. My point was that none of the other papers picked this up. There's been a lot of talk online but I don't think that's where the majority of people get their news from.

[ollysb]

My parents watch the BBC news religiously, I asked them if they'd heard anything about the NSA story a couple of days after the story broke and they were completely unaware. When I brought their attention to some of the articles online their reaction was outrage. I wonder what the national reaction would have been had the coverage been more thorough. I find it difficult to believe there aren't plenty of journalists out there wishing they could get their teeth into a meaty story like this one, what's holding them back?

[colin_jack]

They hardly covered it on the news/radio broadcasts I saw, also worth noting that although the BBC Website did have some articles about it they weren't prominent on the main news page at all.

[timthorn]

Yup, big feature on Newsnight.

[illumen]

The government already locked up one editor, and a bunch of journalists, and also closed a newspaper down. They are scared.

[cones688]

To reply to your tweet about this.....

"UK government puts editor in jail for one of employees spying on a few dozen people. What punishment do they get for spying on a billion?"

The Government are working within the law... the press was not. Also all to combined government computing power in the UK couldn't analyse the amount of data the government would have to work through if it "spied" and analysed everything that went across any network. Classic case of "big data" analysis - parse all the data in motion, pull off the things of interest, discard the rest.