UK spy laws need urgent revision, former Home Secy. says

Laws that govern UK intelligence agencies need to be urgently reviewed, former Home Secretary David Blunkett has said.

Blunkett said the country’s surveillance laws should be revised to stop spy agencies getting “carried away”, adding that the regulations need a review by specialists so that they could keep up with new technologies.

“In government you are pressed by the security agencies. They come to you with very good information and they say ‘you need to do something,” he said.

Earlier in September, head of the UK spy watchdog also admitted that the surveillance laws should be reviewed considering the recent revelations.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who chairs the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) said, “It must be right for that law to be reviewed from time to time to see whether the safeguards are adequate. Sometimes they are not”.

Classified documents leaked by American whistleblower Edward Snowden in revealed earlier in June that Britain’s eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was secretly accessing the network of cables, which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has been sharing the data with its American counterpart the NSA.

According to The Guardian, the GCHQ operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for the past 18 months