‘Germany blasts Britain over GCHQ’s secret cable trawl’

Published on 26 June 2013 at 08:31

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German justice minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has demanded that British authorities detail the extent to which German citizens have been targeted by secret data collection programs of the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intelligence agency, reports The Guardian.

The daily, which helped break the story of US and UK mass surveillance programs, explains that the minister -

demands to know whether ‘concrete suspicions’ trigger the data collection or whether the vast quantities of global email, Facebook postings, internet histories and phone calls are being held for up to 30 days as part of a general trawl. [...] She also demands to know whether the programme has been authorised by any judicial authority, how it works in practice and the precise nature of the stored data.”

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