Germany demands answers from Britain over GCHQ surveillance But condemnation of the practice continues, with a senior Conservative warning British intelligence agencies had "violated the rights" of the public if they have handed personal information to the US without proper legal checks. David Davis accused GCHQ of circumventing "inconvenient laws" by handing information to the US. Writing in The Guardian, he said: "As the Prism controversy has exposed, there is nothing to stop GCHQ from handing over our personal information to US security services so they can pick through it at will." He said such actions "would constitute an extremely serious violation of the rights and freedoms of British citizens." The British inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, also waded into the controversy yesterday, accusing the West of hypocrisy and questioning the ability of governments to keep the personal data they have collected safe. "In the Middle East people have been given access to the internet but they have been snooped on and then they have been jailed," he told The Times. Obviously it can be easy for people in the West to say 'Oh those nasty governments shouldn't be allowed access to spy', but it is clear that developed nations are seriously spying on the internet. GCHQ could be formally investigated by a watchdog to see if it unlawfully accessed communications. Liberty, the civil rights group, complained to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal over what it described as "out-of-control" spying and asked to examine whether human rights and official safeguards have been breached. Documents disclosed by the American whistle-blower Edward Snowden suggest that the intelligence agency accessed fibre-optic cables. GCHQ is also said to have accessed information about British citizens via the US National Security Agency's secret Prism monitoring programme.