John Naughton writes in The Observer:

Watching William Hague doing his avuncular routine in the Commons on Monday, I was reminded of the way establishment figures in the 1950s used to reassure hoi polloi that they had nothing to worry about. Everything was in order. The Right Chaps were in charge. Citizens who had done nothing wrong, declared Uncle Hague, had nothing to fear from comprehensive surveillance.

Oh yeah? As Stephen Fry observed in an exasperated tweet: “William Hague’s view seems to be ‘we can hide a camera & bug in your room & if you’ve got nothing to hide, what’s the worry?’ Hell’s teeth!”

Hell’s teeth indeed. I can think of thousands of people who have nothing to hide, but who would have good reasons to worry about intrusive surveillance. Journalists seeking to protect their sources, for example; NHS whistleblowers; people seeking online help for personal psychological torments; frightened teenagers seeking advice on contraception or abortion; estranged wives of abusive husbands; asylum seekers and dissident refugees; and so on.

Geoff Dyer writes in the Financial Times:

The accusation that US authorities routinely snoop on the online activity of non-Americans has drawn strong condemnation from Microsoft’s former chief privacy adviser. Caspar Bowden, who advised the software company on privacy until 2011 and is now a privacy campaigner, warned that the US’s access to global personal data consigned the rest of the world’s cloud data to a “privacy Guantánamo Bay”.

Mr Bowden said US legislation provided a “carte blanche” for the US to collect business and technical data, and that political information was also expressly covered.

He said the definition of “foreign intelligence information” covered by the US law included anything “with respect to a foreign territory that relates to the conduct of the foreign affairs of the US”.

Mr Bowden added: “We’ve reached a decision point about European sovereignty. Either we rely on the US for our data capacity forever or we bite the bullet and say we need our own cloud software industry.”

Mr Bowden’s recent detailed slide presentation on this topic, presented at ORGcon 2013 on Saturday, is available here.

Brian Brady writes in the Independent:

Police and intelligence services have been sending terror suspects’ DNA to counterparts around the world with no official scrutiny over their actions, a government watchdog has warned.

The National DNA Database Ethics Group has demanded an explanation as fears emerged that a little-known archive of thousands of samples, often taken without permission from innocent people during counter-terrorism operations, had been operating with “no statutory basis”.

The group has also asked ministers to detail exactly what information from the Counter Terrorism DNA database – operated by the Metropolitan Police as an “adjunct” to the national database – has been handed to foreign governments and intelligence services, and what safeguards govern how the information is used.

Civil rights campaigners warned that it appeared the police were “simply ignoring the will of Parliament”. “Why do we need this second database when we already have a framework for holding the DNA of so many people in this country in one place?” Nick Pickles, director of the campaign group Big Brother Watch, said.

Nick Hopkins writes in The Guardian:

The UK’s electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world’s biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America’s top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The documents show that GCHQ, based in Cheltenham, has had access to the system since at least June 2010, and generated 197 intelligence reports from it last year.

The US-run programme, called Prism, would appear to allow GCHQ to circumvent the formal legal process required to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos from an internet company based outside the UK.

The use of Prism raises ethical and legal issues about such direct access to potentially millions of internet users, as well as questions about which British ministers knew of the programme.

Alan Travis writes in The Guardian:

The five biggest internet companies in the world, including Google and Facebook, have privately delivered a thinly veiled warning to the home secretary, Theresa May, that they will not voluntarily co-operate with the “snooper’s charter”.

In a leaked letter to the home secretary that is also signed by Twitter, Microsoft and Yahoo!, the web’s “big five” say that May’s rewritten proposals to track everybody’s email, internet and social media use remain “expensive to implement and highly contentious”.

The private letter, which has been passed to the Guardian, is part of a series of continuing confidential discussions between the industry and the Home Office. It says that May’s “core premise” to create a new retention order requiring overseas internet companies to store the personal data of all their British-based users for up to 12 months has “potentially seriously harmful consequences”.

The leading US-based internet players have also told the home secretary that her proposed £1.8bn communications data plan puts at risk Britain’s position as a leading digital nation and jeopardises the UK’s leading role in promoting freedom of expression on the internet around the world.

The collaboration of the internet giants is vital for the success of May’s communications data project but they warn that it opens the door to a “chaotic world” in which every country seeks to impose conflicting demands on companies in sensitive areas such as the collection and storage of personal data.