Over the past three months the Guardian has made a series of disclosures about the activities of GCHQ and its much bigger American counterpart, the National Security Agency. Two of the most significant programmes uncovered in the Snowden files were Prism, run by the NSA, and Tempora, which was set up by GCHQ. Between them, they allow the agencies to harvest, store and analyse data about millions of phone calls, emails and search engine queries." Guardian 6 Oct 2013 Huhne said Prism and Tempora "put in the shade Tony Blair's proposed ID cards, 90-day detention without trial and the abolition of jury trials". He added: "Throughout my time in parliament, the Home Office was trying to persuade politicians to invest in 'upgrading' Britain's capability to recover data showing who is emailing and phoning whom. Yet this seems to be exactly what GCHQ was already doing. Was the Home Office trying to mislead?