In Newcastle the 22-year-old computer science student Christopher Wilson was sentenced to 6 months coercive detention for not revealing the password that is required to decrypt the data on his computer.

He was urged to do this in “the interests of national security”. Wilson is accused of fooling police with cyber attack warnings as well as encouraging people to post deliberately inflammatory messages on a Facebook condolence page that was set up for two killed police officers. Wilson was already suspected to have sent rampage warning mails to the University of Newcastle. Two of these mails could be tracked back to Northumbria University where he was studying at that time. 

Communications between British on social networks are considered external and can be intercepted.

The British government has asserted the right to intercept communications that go through services like Facebook, Google and Twitter that are based in the United States or other foreign nations, even if they are between people in Britain. The report says that the findings are based on a government document that the groups obtained through a lawsuit. The government document says contact between British people through social networks based elsewhere, or use of search engines located outside Britain, constitutes “external communication,” and as such, is subject to interception, even when no wrongdoing is suspected.

According to the Canadian non-governmental organization Centre for Research on Globalization, MI6 agent tasked to locate a former CIA granted temporary asylum in Russia. Earlier lawyer Snowden said that American lives and works in Moscow, but specific addresses are kept secret for security purposes.

In a statement, the organization said that the British authorities are seeking Snowden and forward it to the UK or the U.S.. In this Centre for Research on Globalization does not the source of his information. On the organization's website states that MI-6 agents in Moscow engaged in intelligence analysis of social networks, which they were granted U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Center for Government Communications UK. This refers to the possible whereabouts Snowden.

The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on Tuesday vigorously defended his decision to publish a series of articles based on the secret files leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Telling a parliamentary committee that the right to continue pursuing the story goes to the heart of press freedoms and democracy in Britain.

Rusbridger also told lawmakers that the Guardian had published only 1 percent of the 58,000 files it had received from Snowden.

Officials demanded Monday that an advertising firm stop using a network of high-tech trash cans to track people walking through London’s financial district.

The Renew ad firm has been using technology embedded in the hulking receptacles to measure the Wi-Fi signals emitted by smartphones, and suggested that it would apply the concept of “cookies” — tracking files that follow Internet users across the Web — to the physical world. “We will cookie the street,” Renew Chief Executive Kaveh Memari said in June. But the City of London Corporation insisted that Renew pull the plug on the program, which captures smartphones’ serial numbers and analyzes signal strength to follow people up and down the street. 

Major telecom companies have been assisting the UK intelligence agency GCHQ by granting access to all the traffic passing through their fiber-optic cables – and by developing Trojan software, leaked papers obtained by German media reveal.

The classified slides obtained by German news agencies Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) and NDR list global telecommunication operators among the collaborators of the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters. The documents are said to have been leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The 2009-dated GCHQ slides reportedly provide the names of the following companies.