Privacy campaigners launch legal action against hacking by UK, US

Privacy campaigners have brought legal claims against UK and US spy programmes that allowed intelligence agencies to access, store and share data on millions of people.

Papers filed yesterday called for an immediate suspension of the UK's use of material from the Prism programme, run by the US' National Security Agency.

They have also called for a temporary injunction against the Tempora programme, which allows harvesting of millions of emails, phone calls and Skype conversations from the undersea cables carrying internet traffic in and out of the country by the UK's spy centre GCHQ.

According to lawyers acting for the UK charity Privacy International, the programme was neither necessary nor proportionate. They said the laws being used to justify mass data trawling were being abused by intelligence officials and ministers, and needed to be urgently reviewed.

In a claim submitted to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), Privacy International has called for a review of all complaints about the conduct of UK spy agencies. The organisation is pushing for a public hearing and early rulings given the gravity of the situation.

The group sought legal recourse after revelations by US whistleblower Edward Snowden and the leak of top-secret papers he gave to The Guardian newspaper.

Meanwhile according to Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, Snowden, currently hiding in a Moscow airport, had said the US secret service was "in bed with the Germans."

Confirmation of his assertion came from Merkel who said of the spying programme, "We as Germans got a lot of information." Addressing a Christian Democratic Union party conference on Saturday she said thanks to the timely information from the US, terrorist attacks against Germany had been foiled.

"But this does not justify bugging each other's embassies. And that is why I say bugging really doesn't work between friends," she added.

Referring to Monday's talks between the EU and the US about free trade agreements, opposition Social Democratic Party's parliamentary party leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he expected "clear and dependable guarantees that there will be no further spying operations - before the assumption of negotiations."

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel reported that Snowden told US cipher expert Jacob Appelbaum and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras that security chiefs on both sides of the Atlantic had organised their cooperation so that they could protect their "political leadership from any backlash".

The duo had quizzed Snowden shortly before he revealed the Prism operation in early June, but his answers had only now been published.