Britain's spy agency 'taps world communication'; Something worse than credit crunch for China?; How the digital age is changing us; I'm a one-man stand; 'A Brazilian spring'

1 Britain’s spy agency ‘taps world communication’ (Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Nick Hopkins, Nick Davies and James Ball in The Guardian) Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA).

The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form of public acknowledgement or debate.

One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months. GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

The existence of the programme has been disclosed in documents shown to the Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as part of his attempt to expose what he has called "the largest programme of suspicionless surveillance in human history. It's not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight," Snowden told the Guardian. "They [GCHQ] are worse than the US."

However, a source with knowledge of intelligence argued that the data was collected legally under a system of safeguards, and had provided material that had led to significant breakthroughs in detecting and preventing serious crime.

2 Something worse than credit crunch for China? (Robert Peston on BBC) What is the significance of the recent turmoil in China's money markets, the sharp reduction in the flow of credit between banks and the rising cost of loans between banks? Its trigger has been a tightening of credit provision to the financial system by the Chinese central bank, the People's Bank of China.

But its more fundamental cause is the perception that Chinese banks and so-called shadow banks have lent far too much, too recklessly over the past five years, and that a reckoning may loom. First that the Chinese authorities have lost one of their most important economic levers, which they have deployed with powerful effect since the 2008 global financial crisis - namely to create vast amounts of credit to fund investment, and stimulate economic growth to offset deflationary forces imported from the rest of the world.

Or to put it another way, the widespread recognition that excessive amounts of debt have been accumulated by speculators, property developers and local governments, inter alia, makes it much riskier for the central bank to continue the recent policy of stoking up an investment boom each time there is a blip in China's growth. To do so in future would risk China becoming dangerously like Japan in the late 1980s - an economy in which a massive investment bubble deflates to stymie growth for a generation.

So with China's credit-creation lever not what it was, the continued ability of the world's second biggest economy to be the engine of global growth - whatever is happening in the rest of the world - is also not what it was.
As quantum, domestic business and household debt at two times GDP is high - pretty similar, for example, to a debt burden on the UK private sector which has hobbled our economy. But it is the stunning and unsustainably rapid rate of growth in Chinese credit creation, and who has borrowed the money, that are the main sources of concern. Unless China is re-writing financial history, much of that money will have been lent without due care to businesses and individuals, and many of them will never be able to repay much of it. As and when that is too conspicuous to ignore, banks and financial institutions will go bust - unless bailed out by central bank and government.

3 How the digital age is changing us (Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian) The fundamental aspect of human life – memory – is being altered by the digital revolution, and it is far from the only one. I confess I long avoided bowing to such a conclusion. In the 1990s, I was among those who wanted to believe the internet represented a shift in scale or form, rather than in kind: emails would be the same as letters, only faster. But increasingly, it seems, that was to underestimate the nature of the change.

Take two areas of human activity, both highlighted this week. Initially it appeared as if "cyber-porn" would be no different from the old variety, the screen merely replacing the mag. Now most people accept that the ease and availability of a dizzying range of pornography, easily accessed by the very young, represents more than a change of platform.

Friday was Stop Cyberbullying Day. The old response, that bullying is timeless, misses two key differences: the pre-digital tormentor rarely followed his victim into the home, as he can now, and always had to witness the consequences of his actions in the flesh, which for some probably acted as a brake. In the virtual age, both those constraints have gone.

The effect of the great technological upheaval on politics, as social media mobilises protest in Brazil and Turkey and on privacy has been well-documented. But the change manifests itself in other, less obvious ways, too. The global response to the death of the actor James Gandolfini prompted the political scientist Ian Bremmer to remark that "Twitter reduces the famous-person-mourning cycle from days to hours," a comment he made via Twitter of course. The speed with which an event becomes old news has deprived us of the time to process experiences, both public and private.

Perhaps there was similar angst at the birth of the printing press. But this change is reaching into every corner of our humanness. Once it looked like hype, but now those pioneers seem right: the internet really has changed the world completely – and us along with it.

4 I’m a one man stand (Darrel Bristow-Bovey in Johannesburg Times) This week Erdem Gunduz proved that, like stand-up comedy, becoming a protest-celebrity is all about timing. Gunduz is better known in Turkey as duran adam, and outside it as The Standing Man. At 6pm on Monday night he stood in Istanbul's empty Taksim Square, hands in pockets, iPod in ears, staring at a large banner of Kemal Attaturk, the man who secularised and modernised Turkey at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Soon his photograph and hashtag spread across the social networks, and a small group of 300 people were standing with him.

Gunduz gave the media a name and face for the Turkish protests. Before becoming an internet sensation Gunduz was a dancer and a performance artist. If I were one of the protesters who spent days in Taksim being water-cannoned and pepper-sprayed, I might slightly resent Erdem Gunduz becoming the icon of my struggle. Without the tens of thousands who protested in ways the government didn't find pleasing to the eye, Gunduz would just be a weird bloke with good posture standing in a square. He didn't even stand very long: his long ordeal was from 6pm till around 2am. In Cape Town that's the queue at Burger King.

When the police arrived on Tuesday morning, 10 of the 300 citizens standing by their man refused to leave and were arrested. The Standing Man was not among them. He slipped away, not to go stand somewhere else like some sedentary pimpernel, but to go home and become the Sitting On The Sofa With A Beer Man. It's not exactly self-immolation.

The Standing Man is a perfect icon of resistance for the social media: he's photogenic and unthreatening and easy to understand. It feels vaguely poetic and inspiringly Gandhi-ish and makes you click "Like". Erdem Gunduz is a very comforting icon for a very middle-class protest. In places around the world where people are more desperate than in Turkey, and have more to be desperate about, the face of protest won't look like Erdem Gunduz, and it won't stand still for long.

5 ‘A Brazilian spring’ (Khaleej Times) Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, just like the rest of the leaders whose countries have experienced massive protests in the last two years, has been short-sighted. But at least Brazil’s first female leader, just like Turkey’s Recip Tayyip Erdogan, had a solid reason for believing that dissent against her regime would not spin out of control: She is a democratically elected leader.

But this fact has not stopped nearly a million Brazilians to join protests against Rousseff’s government. In over a 100 cities of the mammoth country, protesters have come out on the streets in fervour to express their dissent against the rising fares for public transport, corruption and the exorbitant funds used to prepare for next year’s football World Cup. The demonstrations, which started last week, have also grown more violent, with protesters retaliating forcefully against police action.

With the protests growing larger and more vociferous, the Brazilian government will have to soon negotiate with the protesters if it wants peace on the streets. A hardline posture like Erdogan’s will not help Rouseff accomplish much; public’s enthusiasm for chanting anti-government slogans is not going to exhaust anytime soon. The smart option would be to engage the protesters now, before the situation gets further out of control.