It's ok because it's legal. It's legal because we've made laws allowing it. I hope they find time soon to get round to addressing if it's ethical, or if the people want it.
That gets to the root of it all I think. There's no way of telling whether its ethical or if the people want it if no one except the Intelligence and Security Committee knows what is going on.
Given they need warrants* for each interception it's pretty clear they aren't blanket bringing back all UK records, just the ones they ask for based on specific criteria.
So yes, I don't mind that at all. That seems like exactly how the system should work.
* Though intelligence warrants work a little differently in the UK
Given they need warrants for each interception it's pretty clear they aren't blanket bringing back all UK records,
They shouldn't be intercepting data without a warrant. They are intercepting everything and then deciding what they think is important or justified. That's illegal and needs to stop.
Tempora is described as storing absolutely all packets traversing given points for fixed number of days.
This claim "we have individual orders" is just based on the interpretation that "before you start the court procedure against somebody it's not intercepting" so of course under that premise, they have warrants. So they collect everything, store everything and they simply don't name that "intercepting and collecting."
The simple question for them is "is there a Tempora project, is it active and how many individual records are in the databases in that project and how many internet packets are on the storage at once?" -- Just an order of magnitude (the exponent of 10) of the packets is enough. If you have a millions of billions packets stored, it's certainly not from any small number of "targets."
But consider how you tap a cable though: you need to be able to analyse it offline to work out what the hell is going on, sift the data you need a warrant for (UK stuff) and whether a warrant applies.
Even if that could be done in real time it would still be "storing" all the data.
Even Snowden's allegations put the maximum length at 30 days which makes it sound much less like a database of everyone's activity online.
Everybody is spied on, all the data are stored. According to Guardian it's 3 days absolutely everything from everybody is stored and 30 days the metadata from everybody. US, UK and foreigners. Everybody. And it's only the Tempora project. More (perpetually) is stored at least for those with warrants under different project names, but we don't know anything about these projects. The numbers 3 and 30 are just constants that can be changed at any moment as soon as there's more storage capacity. Because "they don't need warrants for that."
That they don't use the collected data against everybody at once is clear. But they certainly spy everybody, everything else is a spin. They just later decide on whom to use the data they already intercepted, collected and processed. That interception, collection and processing they call "nothing" and later usage they call "interception" with a warrant. It's a spin.
We also saw that a single warrant can order "everything." There are no limitations.