The intelligence service is also tasked with waging war on 'anti-vaccination' conspiracy theories.
GCHQ spooks are monitoring the movement of British people minute-by-minute to check if they are complying with government restrictions, according to insiders.
The Telegraph (Paywall) reports that spies from Britain’s most secretive intelligence and security organisation, Government Communications Headquarters, have embedded a ‘cell’ within Number 10 Downing Street in order to provide Prime Minister Boris Johnson with real time information pertaining to the public’s movements.
Whilst the The Daily Mail noted that GCHQ, normally tasked with spying on terrorists and foreign powers, has been turned on the British public to gauge whether people are following the COVID ‘rules’ or not, angering many civil liberty groups. The Mail notes that as well as tracking the movement of people, the intelligence agents are even collecting information on “internet searches for holidays and jobs.”
The Telegraph report also claims that the GCHQ has collected all the information from the maligned ‘Track and Trace’ app, something that Vision News reported on last month when Michael Gove admitted that the government were passing track and trace data to the police despite what they had previously said when it was launched.
The spy agency has also been tasted with 'waging war' on anti-vaccination lobby groups. Speaking anonymously to the London Times earlier this month, a source noted that “GCHQ has been told to take out anti-vaxxers online and on social media. There are ways they have used to monitor and disrupt terrorist propaganda.” With the whistleblower reporting that the agency was considering taking down websites and content that isn’t pro-vaccination, as well as ‘disrupting’ those creating the content by “using a toolkit developed to tackle disinformation and recruitment material peddled by Islamic State.”