British Spies Authorized To Intercept Google, Facebook

Nobody likes to be spied upon, especially when you’re the French soccer team, but with some might say that this is a necessary evil in this day and age, where you give up a little bit of your personal freedoms and privacy to make sure that the whole world is a safer place. In fact, it has been discovered that the U.K. has allowed British spies to check out Google and Facebook traffic, where Privacy International claims this is part of the government’s ‘vague surveillance legal framework’.

Basically, British spies have the authority to check out British citizens’ Internet communications that make their way through servers which reside outside of the U.K.. Privacy International, a civil rights group, stumbled upon such information to be part of a lawsuit that it filed against the U.K. government, accusing the government to be involved in mass surveillance programs among ordinary citizens.

In fact, a slew of messages “such as a Google search, a search of YouTube for a video, a ‘tweet’ on Twitter, or the posting of a message on Facebook,” could fall under the category of being external by intelligence services, making it possible to intercept such data and information.

Charles Farr, one of the U.K.’s most senior security officials, shared, “A Google search by an individual located in the U.K. may well involve a communication from the searcher’s computer to a Google web server, which is received outside the British Islands; and a communication from Google to the searcher’s computer, which is sent outside the British Islands. In such a case, the search would correspondingly involve two ‘external communications’.”

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: spy