GCHQ Prism Spying Claims 'Quite A Scandal'

David Davis has told Sky News that allegations Britain's eavesdropping centre secretly gathered intelligence through a controversial US spying agency are "quite extraordinary".

GCHQ is to give a report to parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) "very soon" over links with the US Prism surveillance system and claims it has been accessing information about British citizens through the body.

The big question is whether this was authorised by the Government.

Mr Davis, a former shadow home secretary, said he suspected Home Secretary Theresa May and Foreign Secretary William Hague previously knew about the Prism.

"Presumably they at least would have had to sign an authorisation for this to take place.

"(There were) nearly 200 British citizens under surveillance of one sort or other in one year so they must have known something about it."

The Tory MP told Sky News the monitoring programme appeared to allow the state to "spy on who they like" and if reports were accurate then "it is actually quite a scandal".

"The sort of surveillance the Americans are applying against British citizens is illegal for them to apply against their own citizens; their own constitution stops that happening," he said.

"In the absence of parliamentary knowledge approval by a secretary of state is a process of authorisation, not a process of holding to account. Since nobody knew it was happening at all there is no possibility of complaint," he added.

The Guardian said it had obtained documents showing that GCHQ had access to the Prism system since at least June 2010.

The Prism programme was set up by America's National Security Agency (NSA) as part of its anti-terror measures. Its existence was revealed this week.

According to the newspaper, the documents show that the British agency, based at Cheltenham, had generated 197 intelligence reports through the system in the 12 months to May 2012.

It said the Prism programme appeared to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to obtain personal material, such as emails, photographs and videos, from internet companies based outside the UK.

GCHQ said in a statement that it operated within a "strict legal and policy framework".

"GCHQ takes its obligations under the law very seriously," it added.

"Our work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the Secretary of State, the Interception and Intelligence Services Commissioners and the Intelligence and Security Committee."

The existence of the Prism system was disclosed by The Guardian and The Washington Post.

Under the programme, the US government is secretly tapping into the servers of nine internet giants, the reports said. The companies include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

President Barack Obama has defended the programme, saying: "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls."

With the new revelations about GCHQ, the row is growing.

"The ISC will be receiving a full report from GCHQ very shortly and will decide what further action needs to be taken as soon as it receives that information," said the committee's chairman Sir Malcolm Rifkind.

International Development Secretary Justine Greening told Sky News: "We have a security service that plays a lead role in keeping our country and people in our country safe.

"Clearly some questions have been raised about how those operations take place. We have a process for looking at that. The intelligence and Security Committee will be getting its report so that it can start to form its own views on this, on behalf of parliament."

Liberal Democrat Julian Huppert, a member of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, said he hoped to force the Government to respond to an urgent question on the issue in Parliament on Monday.

"We have to understand exactly what information they have had and what the safeguards are. It's deeply, deeply alarming," he said.

Nick Pickles of the civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch said questions needed to be asked at the "highest levels" to establish whether British citizens had had their privacy breached "without adherence to the proper legal process or any suspicion of wrongdoing".

"There are legal processes to request information about British citizens using American services and if they are being circumvented by using these NSA spying arrangements then that would be a very serious issue," he said.