Brit spy agency's access to world's phone calls and Internet traffic revealed

Latest set of revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicate that UK's Government Communication Headquarters (CGHQ) reportedly has access to world's phone calls and Internet traffic and shares it with US National Security Agency (NSA).

It has been revealed that GCHQ has the ability to tap fibre optic cables and store data upto 30 days. The operation of tapping and storing huge amount of Internet and phone data has been codenamed 'Tempora', the Guardian reports.

According to the report, GCHQ in collaboration with NSA are capable of sifting and analyzing the huge amount of data related to targeted suspects or even innocent people which include recordings of phone calls, email content related to location and sender/receiver information as well as Facebook activities.

Snowden said that it is not just the US problem and UK is equally involved in the 'snooping programme' adding that it is worse than the US.

The NSA, which has been defending its 'snooping programme', had claimed that it is essential for the national security and had helped the agency foil a number of terrorist attacks on the state.

GCHQ has claimed that it does not go through the emails or phone calls of each individual and instead is merely looking at the 'needles in the haystack' adding that the criteria for selecting the suspected user is 'security, terror and organised crime' and rest of the 'metadata' is discarded.

The processing centre for the data collection use the process called as 'massive volume reduction, through which the data is sorted into 'metadata' and 'tempora'.

Recently, the GCHQ had reportedly snooped on the emails and telephone records of the foreign politicians and officials during the G20 summit in 2009.

It is also believed that the UK spy agency used the same method as the US run 'Prism' programme of tapping user data from major Internet and social media websites.