The UK Government can legally intercept UK citizens' Google searches, and YouTube, Faceboook and Twitter activity, a counter-terror boss has claimed.
According to a statement from Charles Farr, director general of the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, this surveillance is legal because such communications are classed as "external".
This is because a Google search, for example, is viewed as a message between the searcher's computer and a Google web server.
If the web server is abroad, this counts as an "external communication". Posting updates to Facebook, or tweets to Twitter, also count as external communications.
Some 88.6% of all web searches in the UK are made through Google. 24 million people in the UK use Facebook every day, according to the social network, and 15 million people use Twitter – around a quarter of the population.
Farr also said that "it will be apparent that the only practical way in which the Government can ensure that it is able to obtain at least a fraction of the type of communication in which it is interested is to provide for the interception of a large volume of communications".
However, emails sent between British nationals are deemed internal communications, even if the message is routed through web servers located abroad.
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