Anyone surprised by No Such Agency involved in this kind of indiscriminate wire tapping needs to wake up and smell the coffee. It happens and it happens quite often and to a degree that never makes the news.

All the objections are to them listening to the personal conversations of 'Americans' with no reason. If they listen to perfectly innocent foreigners there's no objection whatever.

Europe has human rights. So does the US - it's just that only US citizens count as human.

@Christoph NSA was set up for domestic spying. Since the creation of the NSA they spied on Americans and activates that happen in America . Its the CIA that will be spying you Euros. So please continue on about how only Americans have humans rights and not the rest of the world does, when this agency was created to spy on Americans and not the rest of the world.

We used to accept that Government and it's agencies were equal under the law to an individual. such that a transgression by a Governement or an agency could be adequately prosecuted under criminal law or judged in civil suit. Why is that no longer so?

Given the powers the Government has given itself (AFAIK using the same excuse) I wouldn't be surprised if it happened in the UK as well.

Plenty of excuses: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/10/09/policing_internet_one/

Most of the protection is supposed to relate to *domestic* calls - spying on phone calls in a foreign country is a very different matter. Did anyone expect them to go and try to get a warrant from an Iraqi court first? Come on, the NSA monitoring what's going on in Baghdad should hardly come as a surprise to anyone!

Look, Bush/Cheney created a warrantless surveillance program, he also stuffed the NSA with his cronies. So naturally those cronies had a look at what politicians are up to. They're only human! I Betcha.

The fix is to have: reasonable suspicion, a judicial process and THEN surveillance with warrant.

So if UK goes ahead and creates a warrantless surveillance program, naturally it will be abused. Just like RIPA is abused, just like anti-terror laws are abused, THEY'RE ONLY HUMAN!

With out own govt: going to start keeping all email/text/...; keeping records of car journeys; DNA; ... how many of these are going to be used for: entertainment; personal profit; snooping on neighbour/lover/ex-lover/partners business rival/... ?

This is ''what we have got to hide'' and why we must stop govt snooping.

So what is the reason for these people coming forward now? Maybe it's just me being cynical but I can't help thinking there must be some motive here - I mean come on, they clearly had no problem with it at the time. Have they recently left or something like that?

I'm no fan of the way the world is going down the tube, but I'm pretty sceptical when people make revelations about things they were involved in (especially when they're clearly admitting their guilt) for the good of the people... That's just not how most people work!

Perhaps it should have been called Project Palantir?

...that all of the equipment at GCHQ is being used to watch The Two Ronnies on UK Gold?

Point I was making is the NSA is a secret police design to spy on Americans. Hell for the longest time the gov denied they even existed.