Tempora


 * When imported from Wikipedia this article cited only The Guardian disclosure as a source

Tempora is, according to The Guardian newspaper, a clandestine national security electronic surveillance program operated by the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Tempora was described by American whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his revelations of government sponsored mass surveillance programs. Snowden said that data collected by the Tempora programme is shared with the National Security Agency of the United States.

According to Snowden the two principal components of Tempora are called Mastering the Internet and "Global Telecoms Exploitation", the aim of each to collate as much online and telephone traffic as possible. The vast volumes of data utilised by GCHQ in Tempora are extracted from fibre-optic cables, and stored for up to 30 days for analysis. British officials have claimed that GCHQ produces larger amounts of metadata than the NSA. By May 2012 300 GCHQ analysts and 250 NSA analysts had been assigned to sift through the flood of data.

The Guardian reports that no distinction is made in the gathering of the data between innocent people or targeted suspects. The scope of Tempora includes recordings of telephone calls, the content of email messages, Facebook entries and the personal internet history of users. Snowden said of Tempora that "It's not just a U.S. problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight...They [GCHQ] are worse than the U.S."

Tempora was possible only with secret agreements with commercial companies, that were described in GCHQ documents as "intercept partners". Some companies have been paid for the cost of their co-operation. GCHQ staff were urged to disguise the origin of material in their reports for fear that the role of the companies as intercept partners would cause "high-level political fallout". The companies are forbidden from revealing the existence of warrants compelling them to allow GCHQ access to the cables. If the companies fail to decline they can be compelled to do so.

Lawyers for GCHQ said it would be impossible to list the total number of people targeted by Tempora because "this would be an infinite list which we couldn't manage".

GCHQ set up a three year trial at the GCHQ Bude in Cornwall. GCHQ had probes attached to more than 200 internet links by Summer 2011, each probe carried 10 gigabits of data a second. NSA analysts were bought into the trials, and Tempora was launched in Autumn 2011, with data shared with the NSA. Content collected by Tempora was stored for three days, and metadata stored for 30. Ongoing technical work is expanding GCHQ's capacity to collect data from new super cables that carry data at 100 gigabits a second.