Secretive UK Court That Approves Of GCHQ Surveillance Says That GCHQ Surveillance Doesn't Violate Human Rights
from the because-to-say-otherwise-would-implicate-itself dept
For a while now, we've been covering various legal challenges in Europe related to the GCHQ's surveillance activities. One of the main cases, brought by Amnesty International and Privacy International, argued that the surveillance violated the European Convention on Human Rights (specifically article 8, on right to privacy, and article 10, on freedom of expression). While it was always expected that the case would eventually go to the European Court of Human Rights, the first step was the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in the UK -- a secretive court that reviews complaints about surveillance, but (as with nearly all "secretive courts" charged with "oversight" on the intelligence community) almost always sides with the intelligence community. Between 2000 and 2012 the IPT only sided against the intelligence community 10 times out of 1468 cases brought (about half of one percent of all cases). In other words, this is a court that (in secret) regularly okays GCHQ's surveillance efforts on UK citizens.So take a wild guess what happened when it was asked to determine if such surveillance violated human rights? It said of course no human rights were violated when the GCHQ spied on people. This is not a surprise. Anything else would have been a surprise. To put it simply, if the IPT had ruled in favor of these groups, it would have been implicating itself, effectively admitting that its own approvals of GCHQ activity enabled the violation of human rights. And that wasn't going to happen. But that's not how surveillance state defenders are discussing this result:
A government security source told the BBC: "We are delighted that a third independent body has confirmed that GCHQ does not seek to carry out mass surveillance."Independent body? Right. It's the "independent" body that has a history of saying the very actions now being scrutinized are perfectly fine. It may be "independent" of the GCHQ itself, but it's not "independent" of the surveillance GCHQ carried out.
The groups who brought this case say that they'll appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which is what everyone expected to happen in the first place. This little rubber stamping by the IPT was just a procedural issue that had to be taken in the first place.
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Filed Under: gchq, human rights, investigatory powers tribunal, ipt, surveillance, uk
Companies: amnesty international, privacy international
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They are easily captured because the same people turn up on one side of the fence again and again.
Just let an ordinary, general purpose, court decide.
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Re: Re:
I think that phrase is far too charitable. With no-one challenging the gov't, and no-one speaking for the defence, and no-oversight on the court's decisions, this is not a court. It's a captured tribunal, merely a necessary bureaucratic hurdle.
The lawmakers failed us again.
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Is watching on Watch-Watcher-Watchering-Watch,
Watch-Watch-Watch-Watching the Watcher who's watching that bee..."
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OK, can and WILL do.
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Bye bye
So remove this cancer on the free world from the European Union and then reorganize the communication and the governing law to lock the bulldogs away safely in their own pen where they can sniff each other's butts all they like.
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Re: Bye bye
- Cameron is promising a vote on EU if he wins next election, taking EU as hostage in his bid for continuing as prime minister.
- ECHR is completely independent of EU and is their main fear in terms of losing the current surveillance, but in a twist EU is being taken hostage in his bid for stopping EUHCR.
- In EU many of the british conservatives are operating the conservative group EU-sceptics. They have been rained upon by gold from the other groups in EU to satisfy the scepticism across Europe. In a bizarre twist the group has now been taken hostage by Cameron.
...
Am I the only one seeing the downfall of Cameron in next UK election as the only way to keep them from completely selfdestructing?
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Re: Re: Bye bye
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http://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/foreign-law-enforcement-agencies-allowed-to-ta p-irish-calls-653609.html
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If you are already doing it, there is no seek.
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That we appointed, pay for, and seek the permission of to blatantly spy on our own citizens. They give it a rubber stamp so we can pretend due process & rights still exist as we curtail everything our citizens do in an effort to stop the "terrorists" & keep them safe. As they had far to many rights, we curtailed them to make the job easier. Pay no attention to the overreach or everything we share with our allies, it is all part of the global vision we have of knowing everything about everyone so no one feels they can stop us.
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Independent body?
I'm curious about what their definition of "independent" is here. It looks to me like they're using the bogus US definition whereby they try to convince us that the Senate Intelligence Committee and the FISC are "independent bodies". In other words, they're lying.
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"Interpretation"
I believe according to that the US doesn't torture, on the grounds that we've interpreted torture to not mean those things we do to people.
(Or we've outsourced our enhanced interrogation so as to allow for a creative use of the pronoun "we").
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There goes the free world into another tyranny
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