9.49am BST

Good morning and welcome back to the Guardian’s live blog on all the latest developments resulting from Edward Snowden’s leaks to the Guardian on US and UK surveillance. Here are today’s headlines:

• Former Labour cabinet minister Nick Brown has warned that GCHQ and Britain's other intelligence agencies appear to be undertaking mass surveillance without parliament's consent because the coalition failed to get the communications data bill – the so-called "snoopers' charter" – passed into law after Liberal Democrat opposition, reports Rowena Mason.

The communications data bill – dubbed the "snoopers' charter" by critics – would have given GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 much greater powers to gather and save information about people's internet activities but it was shelved in the spring amid Lib Dem fears that it intruded too much into privacy. Brown, a Labour MP, said that it "looks very much like this is what is happening anyway, with or without parliament's consent" under GCHQ's secret Tempora programme, which was revealed by the Guardian in July in reports based on files leaked by Snowden. Tempora allows GCHQ to harvest, store and analyse millions of phone calls, emails and search engine queries by tapping the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic … On Tuesday night, two other Liberal Democrat members of the joint committee also questioned why the Home Office did not reveal the extent of GCHQ's spying capabilities during the committee's inquiry, which concluded the bill carried a risk of "trampling on the privacy of citizens". Lord Strasburger, a businessman, said nothing was mentioned about Tempora during two private "no holds barred sessions with the Home Office".

• Here Alan Travis looks back at the parliamentary scrutiny of the communications data bill. The bill is now stalled but, as Travis reports, reports of its death are likely to prove exaggerated. He quotes Strasburger as saying: "I sat on the committee and the Home Office misled parliament by concealing that they were already doing what the bill would have permitted."

• Theresa May, the home secretary, told the home affairs select committee there was nothing in the Snowden files that changed the case for new laws giving the security services more powers to monitor the internet. She also described the Guardian's publication of the material as "damaging to the public interest" and repeatedly rejected the need for a debate on oversight of the intelligence agencies. Afterwards, it emerged that Julian Smith, a Conservative MP, had written to the Metropolitan police asking the force to investigate whether the Guardian has broken the law by communicating intelligence information obtained from Snowden. The MP wrote to Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe to ask if offences had been committed under Section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000 or the Official Secrets Act.

A Guardian spokesman said:

The high public interest in the stories we have responsibly published is evidenced by the debates, presidential review and proposed legislative reforms in the US Congress, throughout Europe and in Westminster. We're surprised that, once again, it is being proposed that terror legislation should be used against journalists.

• Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times, mounted a defence of the ability of journalists at her own paper and at the Guardian to publish public interest stories based on the files leaked by Snowden. "I think … that those articles are very much in the public interest and inform the public," she said on BBC's Newsnight. On claims by MI5 director general Andrew Parker that newspaper reports were causing "enormous damage" to the fight against terrorism, Abramson said that there had been no proof of actual harm to security.

• In a leader column, the Guardian argues that comments by four public figures have illustrated the security services’ lack of accountability. Former cabinet minister Chris Huhne said the National Security Council was never briefed on the Prism or Tempora surveillance programmes. Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, said parliamentary oversight was “sickly” and intelligence and security committee chair Sir Malcolm Rifkind badly compromised. And former ministers Lord Blencathra and Nick Brown revealed that the committee scrutinising the government's abandoned data communications bill was never informed about GCHQ's existing and far more sweeping mass surveillance capabilities.

Here, therefore, is the pressing problem that faces Britain's political leaders. Our security services practice mass collection of communications metadata which, as an NSA official admits, "tells you everything about somebody's life", terrorist or not. Neither the cabinet nor the parliamentary oversight, nor the legislative committee looking into snooping laws, has provided real accountability over such sweeping activity. In this, as in other respects, the security services enjoy a degree of legal and operational autonomy that exceeds what many MPs and ministers, if they knew about it, would judge appropriate. The head of MI5 says such discussion helps the nation's enemies. That is untrue. It is the unregulated surveillance that poses a threat to the nation, along with the threat from our enemies. Parliament urgently needs to exert a proper grip and to find a better balance. Starting now.

• Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke a string of stories about widespread electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency based on files leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden, has announced that he is leaving the Guardian.

We’ll have all this and more throughout the day today.