Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.
The journalists’ communications were among 70,000 emails harvested in the space of less than 10 minutes on one day in November 2008 by one of GCHQ’s numerous taps on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet.
New evidence from other UK intelligence documents revealed by Snowden also shows that a GCHQ information security assessment listed “investigative journalists” as a threat in a hierarchy alongside terrorists or hackers.
– From the Guardian article: GCHQ Captured Emails of Journalists from Top International Media
Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, is the United Kingdom’s equivalent to the NSA. As you might expect, it is no less immoral or shady than its domestic counterpart. While most of the surveillance related posts here at Liberty Blitzkrieg have focused on the NSA, GCHQ has been front and center from time to time. For example, see the following from 2014:
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“When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches.
Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.
I’m no nutritionist. In fact, as I write this I am probably about 50 pounds overweight, which I guess depending on how you look at it could indeed make me a food expert. But for the most part, I’ve learned as an adult that I have horrible eating habits. I was raised like many other millennials. McDonald’s was a greatly anticipated treat at least once a week, and at home my mother made us tacos, meatloaf, cheese burgers, spaghetti, fried chicken and pork chops. Lots of potatoes, corn and 2% milk in the mornings with my Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
It’s one thing for an 80 year old to nostalgically lament that things aren’t as they used to be. The problem is, I’m only 36 years old and this country already barely resembles the place I grew up in.
Oh the irony. You just have to laugh when you see this closed, autocratic regime scramble to build a neo-feudal wall in order to protect itself from radical terrorists of its own creation. In fact, it reminds me a lot of U.S. foreign policy. In case you aren’t up to speed on the Saudi relationship to ISIS, I suggest you read the following post: 
While I’m sure many of the millions of French citizens who marched in solidarity with the victims of the recent senseless violence and in the name of free speech came with genuine intentions, the corps of professional authoritarians, I mean politicians, who tagged along in order to pose for a staged photo op, clearly had less than noble intentions. Indeed, they likely spent the entire time scheming as to how the tragedy might be used to strip more rights away from their citizens.
The quaint notion that the U.S. political system remotely resembles either a Republic or a Democracy should have been abandoned long ago. Any lingering illusions were surely extinguished last year, when an academic study empirically proved that the USA is nothing more than a corrupt oligarchy. I highlighted this groundbreaking piece of research in the post: