the UK, law enforcement and intelligence agencies must have a warrant
That's surprising. The GCHQ was the agency that tapped Google's datacenter fiber. They actually had more-direct access to Google data than the NSA.
The firm said it could not specify the countries that have a direct line into its networks, because those countries have laws prohibiting disclosure of surveillance methods.
Couldn't someone compile a list of countries with such laws?
Weird that they are not on the BBC site. I assume it's these countries:
> In Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turkey, it is unlawful to disclose any information related to wiretapping or interception of the content of phone calls and messages including whether such capabilities exist.
D-notices are not legally binding. They advice about what government would prefer not to have published, some of which may result in legal proceedings. It may scare people off reporting it, though.
Tempora also records without a warrant, unless the warrant is so broad as to be meaningless. So this statement is provably false, unless you deny the existence of Tempora, or interpret listen to or look at to mean a human operator scanning the full text of a message (not necessary for most analysis), or perhaps they have a secret warrant which covers all information all the time. We don't know because the 'oversight' of this activity is done in secret and GCHQ is not accountable in any meaningful sense.
It's a deliberately duplicitous and misleading statement, probably directly from the spy agencies, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if this story was fed to the BBC in this form in an attempt to spike other stories based on the Vodafone declaration of direct access.
It just shows I suppose, that despite the complexity or independence of oversight, it's hard to come up with a construct that incentivizes dissent in the national security context.
That's surprising. The GCHQ was the agency that tapped Google's datacenter fiber. They actually had more-direct access to Google data than the NSA.
The firm said it could not specify the countries that have a direct line into its networks, because those countries have laws prohibiting disclosure of surveillance methods.
Couldn't someone compile a list of countries with such laws?