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UK monitoring agency spies 'only when necessary'

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, May 5, IRNA – GCHQ, the British government’s electronic eavesdropping centre has denied it was planning to target everyone in the UK, insisting that it only spies on people when “necessary.”

In a rare statement, the intelligence monitoring station based in Cheltenham, western England, denied weekend reports that its £1 billion plan for Mastering the Internet (MIT) was a "snooping project" and said the technology being developed was solely to keep pace with developments in internet technology.

"GCHQ is not developing technology to enable the monitoring of all internet use and phone calls in Britain, or to target everyone in the UK,” it said.

“Similarly, GCHQ has no ambitions, expectations or plans for a database or databases to store centrally all communications data in Britain," it said. It insisted that it “only acts when it is necessary and proportionate to do so; GCHQ does not spy at will."

Last week, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith ruled out plans for a single "big brother" database that would centrally store all communications data in Britain and instead announced up to £2bn of public money would instead be spent helping private internet and telephone companies to keep information for up to 12 months in separate databases.