BIG BROTHER WATCH AND OTHERS v. THE UNITED KINGDOM JUDGMENT II. THE RELEVANT SCHEMES INTERNET SECRET SURVEILLANCE 14. Internet communications are primarily carried over international sub-marine fibre optic cables operated by CSPs. Each cable may carry several “bearers”, and there are approximately 100,000 of these bearers joining up the global Internet. A single communication over the Internet is divided into “packets” (units of data) which may be transmitted separately across multiple bearers. These packets will travel via a combination of the quickest and cheapest paths. Consequently, some or all of the packets of any particular communication sent from one person to another, whether within the United Kingdom or across borders, may be routed through one or more other countries if that is the optimum path for the CSPs involved. A. The United Kingdom 1. Bulk interception 15. The Edward Snowden revelations made in 2013 indicated that Government Communications Headquarters (“GCHQ”, being one of the United Kingdom intelligence services) was running an operation, codenamed “TEMPORA”, which allowed it to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from bearers. The United Kingdom authorities neither confirmed nor denied the existence of an operation codenamed TEMPORA. 16. However, according to the March 2015 Report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament (“the ISC report” – see paragraphs 142-149 below), GCHQ was operating two major processing systems for the bulk interception of communications. 17. The first of the two processing systems referred to in the ISC report was targeted at a very small percentage of bearers. As communications flowed across the targeted bearers, the system compared the traffic against a list of “simple selectors”. These were specific identifiers (for example, an email address) relating to a known target. Any communications which matched the simple selectors were collected; those that did not were automatically discarded. Analysts then carried out a “triage process” in relation to collected communications to determine which were of the highest intelligence value and should therefore be opened and read. In practice, only a very small proportion of the items collected under this process were opened and read by analysts. According to the ISC report, GCHQ did not have the capacity to read all communications. 18. The second processing system was targeted at an even smaller number of bearers (a subset of those accessed by the process described in the paragraph above) which were deliberately targeted as those most likely to carry communications of intelligence interest. This second system had 4