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Commentary and analysis of recent UK (and Australian) UK politics news.

Image of GCHQ donught buildingEdward Snowden has released a document showing that Australia offered to share evidence about ordinary citizens with its ‘5-eyes’ surveillance partners. The document is a record of a 2008 meeting at GCHQ discussing what information can be shared. Different partners offered different categories of surveillance to be shared with their spy partners.

Revealed: Australian spy agency offered to share data about ordinary citizens

Australia’s surveillance agency offered to share information collected about ordinary Australian citizens with its major intelligence partners, according to a secret 2008 document leaked by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document shows the partners discussing whether or not to share “medical, legal or religious information”, and increases concern that the agency could be operating outside its legal mandate, according to the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC.

The Australian intelligence agency, then known as the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), indicated it could share bulk material without some of the privacy restraints imposed by other countries, such as Canada.

“DSD can share bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata as long as there is no intent to target an Australian national,” notes from an intelligence conference say. “Unintentional collection is not viewed as a significant issue.”

The agency acknowledged that more substantial interrogation of the material would, however, require a warrant.

The editor of the Guardian Alan Rusbridger was called before the home affairs committee to defend the Guardian publishing material leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

David Cameron and British intelligence chiefs have accused The Guardian of damaging national security with its reporting. In November the head of MI6 told MPs Al Qaida and other terrorist groups have been “rubbing their hands with glee” over the information revealed by Snowden.

But Rusbridger insisted The Guardian had behaved responsibly and had acted carefully to protect the identities of intelligence agents. “This is not a rogue newspaper, this is a serious newspaper with long experience,” he said.

Guardian will not be intimidated over NSA leaks, Alan Rusbridger tells MPs

Rusbridger said the Guardian had been put under the kind of pressure to stop publishing stories that would have been inconceivable in other countries.

“They include prior restraint, they include a senior Whitehall official coming to see me to say: ‘There has been enough debate now’. They include asking for the destruction of our disks. They include MPs calling for the police to prosecute the editor. So there are things that are inconceivable in the US.

“I feel that some of this activity has been designed to intimidate the Guardian.”

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Guardian editor Rusbridger defends leaked files stories

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24464286

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has insisted it was right to publish secret files leaked by US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden.

Image of GCHQ donught building

His comments come after the new director general of MI5, Andrew Parker, said such revelations risked causing enormous harm.

Making public the “reach and limits” of intelligence-gathering techniques gave terrorists the advantage, he added.

The paper said the leaks had prompted a debate which was necessary and overdue.

Mr Snowden, a former CIA contractor, fled to Russia with a wealth of secret data including some 58,000 files from GCHQ, Britain’s electronic eavesdropping agency.

The stories that followed in the Guardian newspaper, based on material provided by Mr Snowden, revealed the huge capacity of British and US intelligence agencies – GCHQ and NSA – to monitor communications.

In his first public speech since his appointment in April, Mr Parker said intelligence gathered by GCHQ had played a vital role in stopping many UK terrorist plots over the past decade.

He warned that terrorists now had tens of thousands of means of communication “through e-mail, IP telephony, in-game communication, social networking, chat rooms, anonymising services and a myriad of mobile apps”.

Mr Parker said it was vital for MI5 – and by inference its partner GCHQ – to retain the capability to access such information if it was to protect the country.

Mr Rusbridger said those on the security side of the argument wanted to keep everything secret and did not want a debate.

“You don’t want the press or anyone else writing about it. But MI5 cannot be the only voice in the debate,” he told BBC Radio 4’s World at One.

He added that his newspaper had revealed the “extent to which entire populations are now being potentially put under surveillance”.

“I just spent a week in America where everybody is talking about this, from the president down.”

He added: “It’s quite surprising to me that the number of MPs in this country who have said anything at all in the last four months can be counted on one hand – Malcolm Rifkind, Tom Watson, David Davis.

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