After Five-Year Legal Battle, Top Judges Rule That The UK's Spying Activities Can Be Challenged In Ordinary Courts

from the if-at-first-you-don't-succeed dept

The digital rights group Privacy International has won a major victory against UK government surveillance after a five-year legal battle. One of the many shocking revelations of Edward Snowden was that the UK security and intelligence services break into computers and mobile phones on a massive scale. Privacy International challenged this "bulk" surveillance at the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the "judicial body which operates independently of government to provide a right of redress for anyone who believes they have been a victim of unlawful action by a public authority using covert investigative techniques". In February 2016, the IPT dismissed Privacy International's challenge, ruling that:

the UK government may use sweeping 'general warrants' to engage in computer hacking of thousands or even millions of devices, without any approval from by a judge or reasonable grounds for suspicion. The Government argued that it would be lawful in principle to use a single warrant signed off by a Minister (not a judge) to hack every mobile phone in a UK city -- and the IPT agreed with the Government.

In May 2016, Privacy International challenged the IPT's decision in the UK High Court, which agreed with the UK government's position that Tribunal decisions were not subject to judicial review. So Privacy International turned to the Court of Appeal, in February 2017. In November 2017, the Court of Appeal dismissed the move, finding in favor of the UK government once more. Undeterred, the digital rights group applied for and was granted permission to appeal to the UK's Supreme Court, which has now ruled that IPT decisions can indeed be challenged in the courts (pdf). Caroline Wilson Palow, Privacy International's General Counsel, explains why that's important:

Today's judgment is a historic victory for the rule of law. It ensures that the UK intelligence agencies are subject to oversight by the ordinary UK courts. Countries around the world are currently grappling with serious questions regarding what power should reside in each branch of government. Today's ruling is a welcome precedent for all of those countries, striking a reasonable balance between executive, legislative and judicial power.

The hope is that other countries will take note of the UK Supreme Court ruling, and follow suit by allowing judicial oversight of national surveillance activities. Privacy International intends to take advantage of the new judgment immediately to tackle the UK's bulk surveillance revealed by Snowden:

Today's ruling paves the way for Privacy International's challenge to the UK Government's use of bulk computer hacking warrants. Our challenge has been delayed for years by the Government's persistent attempt to protect the IPT's decisions from scrutiny. We are heartened that our case will now go forward.

As well as a welcome result in itself, Privacy International's ultimate victory after a string of legal defeats is a useful reminder that persistence and patience are important virtues for activists.

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Filed Under: courts, ed snowden, privacy, spying, surveillance, uk
Companies: privacy international

Privacy Group Files Legal Complaint Over UK Law Enforcement's Warrantless Phone Searches

from the we-did-it-because-no-one-said-not-to dept

Privacy International, which has successfully challenged UK surveillance programs, is bringing its heat to the local level. In a report PI released towards the end of March, the group noted several law enforcement agencies were seizing and searching phones -- often deploying forensic software -- without warrants. This went further than devices owned by criminal suspects. Searches were also performed on phones of crime victims and witnesses.

At no point does it appear warrants were sought. Documents obtained by PI showed UK police forces are operating under a melange of self-written policies or citing random portions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) to support their warrantless searches. It also appears there is no national oversight of this process, which has allowed this current policy patchwork to develop.

This is working out badly for UK citizens, as Privacy International points out.

Data can be taken from victims, witnesses and suspects without informing them. With no clear policies or guidance on the use of this technology, individuals are unaware of their legal rights in terms of:

- Whether data is only taken when necessary and proportionate;

- Getting the police to delete this data when there is no legal reason to retain it, particularly if they are innocent of any crime;

- Ensuring data is held securely to prevent exposure of their personal data as a result of loss of records, misuse or security breach.

Since it appears leaving law enforcement agencies to their own devices (and those owned by others) is only making things worse, Privacy International is pressing the issue.

Campaigners from U.K.-based Privacy International have formally complained about British police being able to download the contents of people’s phones—phones, photos, even fragments of deleted conversations—without a warrant.

While warrants are required to do this in countries such as the U.S., in the U.K. dozens of police forces point to various pieces of legislation to support the idea that they don’t need them. Privacy International says the practice is illegal, however, and has complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the British privacy regulator.

PI points to the UK's Data Protection Act, which provides protection for citizens from government harvesting of data and communications. This is being circumvented by common law enforcement practices that neither inform device owners of the extent of the search nor seek informed consent before performing forensic searches. On top of that, data housed in devices may fall under other protections as well. Phones can contain privileged communications with legal representation or information about journalists' sources.

It also notes the updated Data Protection Act, meant to align the UK with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, will make these efforts even more illegal than they already are. PI is pretty sure law enforcement agencies won't have these policies rewritten before the new law comes into force, which means its complaint will still be on solid legal ground even after the new law is enacted.

This is what happens when law enforcement obtains powerful tech but answers to almost no one. The lack of oversight -- at local or national level -- has allowed law enforcement to perform invasive searches with a minimum of notification or paperwork. Hopefully, this will change soon.

Filed Under: phone searches, privacy, uk, warrants
Companies: privacy international

Privacy International Sues US Government Over Denied Access To Five Eyes Surveillance Agreements

from the new-communications,-new-rules dept

The last thing anyone heard about Five Eyes surveillance partnerships via official channels was more than seven years ago. In the intervening years, leaked documents have shed a little light on the information sharing Five Eyes countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) engage in. But the last Five Eyes agreement released is now more than 60 years old.

The Five Eyes group has existed since 1946 and the last document officially published about it comes from 1955. Since then, vast technological changes have altered how national security bodies collect and store information.

The modern era of Five Eyes surveillance has only been glimpsed through leaked Snowden documents. Coverage of these documents is noted in Privacy International's FOIA lawsuit [PDF] against a handful of US government agencies. PI has been asking for updated versions of the Five Eyes agreements since late last year. Unsurprisingly, the agencies queried haven't responded.

The agencies named as defendants (the NSA, ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence], State Dept., and NARA [National Archives and Records Administration]) have all had at least 100 days to respond to PI's requests. None of them have responded positively. The NSA said all records were exempt from disclosure. The ODNI and NARA haven't responded at all, other than to note the request has been received. The State Department offered to "administratively close" PI's request if it didn't respond to the agency's letter within 20 days -- despite the State Department having done nothing to advance the request during the previous 180 days.

As the lawsuit points out, the documents PI is seeking are definitely of interest to the public. The last agreement anyone has seen in full predates the internet itself, where most Five Eyes surveillance now takes place.

Many individuals today live major portions of their lives online. They use the internet to communicate with others, impart ideas, conduct research, explore their sexuality, seek medical advice and treatment, correspond with lawyers, and express their political and personal views. They also increasingly use the internet to conduct many ordinary activities, such as keeping records, arranging travel, and carrying out financial transactions. Today, much of this activity is conducted on mobile digital devices such as cellular phones, which “could just as easily be called cameras, video players, rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps, or newspapers.” Riley v. California, 134 S. Ct. 2473, 2489 (2014).

The internet has also enabled the creation of greater quantities of personal data about communications, known as “metadata.” Metadata is information about a communication, which may include the sender and recipient, the date and location from where it was sent, and the type of device used to send it. Metadata can reveal web browsing activities, which might reveal medical conditions, religious viewpoints, or political affiliations. It can also reveal items purchased, news sites visited, forums joined, books read, movies watched and games played.

Communications – emails, instant messages, calls, social media posts, web searches, requests to visit a website – that utilize the internet can take any viable route to their destination; distance is not a determinative factor. They have the potential to travel around the world before reaching their destination, even if the information is being sent between two people (or a person and an entity) within a single country, or even a single city. The dispersion of communications across the internet vastly increases the opportunities for communications and data to be intercepted by foreign governments, who may then share them with other governments.

Knowing who's allowed to do what with this firehose of information is something people would like to know. Unfortunately, a vast network of surveillance programs have been enacted with little oversight, utilizing secret directives and classified interpretations of existing laws.

The ODNI may be engaged in more proactive transparency than it ever has in its history, but it still usually takes a lawsuit to force documents out of its hands. It's the ODNI that ultimately decides whether NSA-related documents get published, so targeting both with FOIA requests is a good way to increase your chances of disclosure. But those chances are still almost nonexistent, thanks to national security-related FOIA exemptions. And, if nothing else, the NARA should have some Five Eyes agreement back issues laying around, but once again, filing a FOIA lawsuit is only one of several steps in a long, arduous, and often frustrating process.

Filed Under: five eyes, surveillance
Companies: privacy international

New Documents Show UK Intelligence Agencies Hacking Computers With Little To No Oversight

from the because-of-course-they-are dept

Privacy International, which has been engaged in legal challenges over GCHQ spying for the past few years, has obtained an oversight document as a result of its litigation. What they show is the agency's broad hacking powers and the reluctance of its oversight to condone these actions.

The Commissioner of the Intelligence Services was slow to respond to hacking. Many of the concerns the Commissioner raised in his 2014 report [published July 2015] are the subject of PI's legal complaint, including whether it is lawful to use broad "thematic warrants" to justify the hacking of people in the UK. The Commissioner questioned this practice in depth. He was concerned that current law "does not expressly allow for a class of authorisation", and therefore the warrants were too broad. As a result, the Commissioner was worried that the Secretary of State was unable to properly assess whether the warrant authorised activity was necessary and proportionate. [ibid, p18] This means that GCHQ could get a warrant in the UK to hack the computer of everyone in Birmingham with little meaningful oversight.

Broad warrants at home -- signed by someone who may not have had any idea exactly what they were authorizing. No warrants, for the most part, for extraterritorial hacking. Testimony on behalf of the GCHQ by its director of cyber-security points out that the Secretary of State (who handles surveillance warrants) is rarely consulted when the target is foreign. The only exceptions are if the GCHQ feels the target may be "sensitive" or "politically risky." Otherwise, the GCHQ grants itself permission to carry out these attacks.

Two other agencies that write their own hacking orders (MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service) also do what they can to eliminate whatever minimal paper trail these actions might generate.

The Intelligence and Security Committee Report in March 2015 called MI5's and SIS's failure to keep accurate records of their overseas hacking activities "unacceptable", [ISC report, p.66] as it makes effective oversight impossible [Witness Statement of Ciaran Martin, 71L].

Arguably, the oversight was never "effective" to begin with. Privacy International's Caroline Wilson Palow points out that Parliament was never notified in the first place by these agencies about their hacking activities. The oversight of three intelligence agencies is pretty much limited to one guy (Sir Mark Waller) who engages in spot checks of warrants periodically. With none of the agencies feeling any particular urge to seek warrants for overseas surveillance, it does cut down on Waller's workload, but it doesn't do much to ensure they aren't abusing their (often) self-awarded privileges.

Filed Under: gchq, oversight, surveillance, uk
Companies: privacy international

Privacy International Files Complaint Against GCHQ's Use Of 'Bulk Personal Datasets'

from the chipping-away dept

Last month, we noted that the UK rights group Privacy International has been at the forefront of the fight against the UK's disproportionate surveillance activities, to such an extent that the UK government has changed the law just to avoid one of its legal challenges. Those have covered many different aspects of GCHQ's activities. In July 2014, Privacy International filed a complaint with the UK's spy watchdog, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), over GCHQ's surveillance tools. In September 2014, it tackled GCHQ's involvement in the "Five Eyes" system. And now it has come at things from yet another angle:

Privacy International today filed a legal complaint demanding an end to the bulk collection of phone records and harvesting of other databases, from millions of people who have no ties to terrorism, nor are suspected of any crime.

The complaint, filed in the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, is the first UK legal challenge to attack the UK Government Communications Headquarters' (GCHQ) use of "bulk personal datasets" equivalent of the US s.215 bulk phone records metadata program. The s.215 program run by the NSA, which has dominated the US surveillance reform debate since Edward Snowden revealed it, was curtailed just days ago with the passing of the USA Freedom Act.

The latest challenge flows from the publication in March of the IPT report, "Privacy and Security: A modern and transparent legal framework." Even with its frequent redactions, the report provided important new information on which Privacy International is basing its complaint:

The ISC does not reveal which datasets have been collected by GCHQ, but they are described as being "highly intrusive", containing "millions" of records, which are then "linked together." In a startling admission, the datasets were separately described as pertaining "to a wide range of individuals, the majority of whom are unlikely to be of intelligence interest."

There is no proper legal regime in place, with no restrictions on which datasets can be collected, how long they can be stored, or accessed. The acquisition and subsequent use of datasets is not authorised by a judge, or even a Minister.

It gets even worse:

There are no legal penalties for misuse of this information, and abuse of the data has already happened with the ISC finding that agencies “had disciplined – or in some cases dismissed – staff for inappropriately accessing personal information held in these datasets.” It is not sufficient that misuse is dealt with by individual disciplinary measures. We need much stronger safeguards to prevent misuse occurring in the first place.

Bringing multiple cases before tribunals and courts is one way to achieve that. At the very least, it makes people more aware of what is going on, and increasingly it is leading to small but symbolically important victories too.

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Filed Under: bulk collection, gchq, nsa, surveillance, usa freedom act
Companies: privacy international

Tired Of Losing Legal Challenges To Its Surveillance, UK Government Secretly Changes Law So It Can Win

from the that's-cheating dept

Against all the odds, legal challenges to UK surveillance are succeeding, as Techdirt has reported. At the forefront of bringing cases against GCHQ is the rights group Privacy International. In May 2014 it asserted that GCHQ's activities were illegal under the UK's Computer Misuse Act (CMA), which criminalizes breaking into digital systems. A year later, and just hours before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal hearing of Privacy International's complaint against GCHQ, the UK government revealed the following:

only a few weeks after the claim was filed, the [UK] Government quietly introduced legislation on 6 June 2014 that would amend the CMA to provide a new exception for law enforcement and GCHQ to hack without criminal liability. The change not only affects Privacy International's claim, but also grants UK law enforcement new leeway to potentially conduct cyber attacks within the UK.

That is, the UK government was implicitly admitting that GCHQ's activities were, once again, illegal, but fixed that problem with the simple expedient of changing the law to make them legal. That on its own is questionable, although some might say that spies and the police need to have immunity when carrying out certain authorized acts. But the real issue here is another: the fact that this change was pushed through with none of the usual scrutiny or debate accorded to laws with important effects. As Privacy International explains, although the UK government published an explanatory note about the proposed amendment, it neglected to mention its true impact. Moreover:

It appears no regulators, commissioners responsible for overseeing the intelligence agencies, the Information Commissioner's Office, industry, NGOs or the public were notified or consulted about the proposed legislative changes. There was no published Privacy Impact Assessment. Only the Ministry of Justice, Crown Prosecution Service, Scotland Office, Northern Ireland Office, GCHQ, Police and National Crime Agency were consulted as stakeholders. There was no public debate.

This is essentially secret law-making, where the only people consulted are the ones who will benefit. That's troubling at the best of times, but especially so in the context of a government abusing its powers to avoid yet another embarrassing defeat in the courts.

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Filed Under: gchq, legality, nsa, privacy, secret law, spying, surveillance, uk
Companies: privacy international

Surveillance Software Company Gamma Found To Have Violated Human Rights; Receives Unprecedented Slap On The Wrist

from the critical-decisions dept

As Techdirt has reported on the increasingly active world of commercial spyware, one name in particular has cropped up several times: Gamma, with its FinFisher suite of spyware products. In October last year, we reported that Privacy International had filed a criminal complaint against the company with the National Cyber Crime Unit of the UK's National Crime Agency. There's no update on that move, but it seems that a parallel action has had more success (pdf):

British-German surveillance company Gamma has been condemned by a human rights watchdog for its failure to adhere to human rights and due diligence standards, after a two year investigation into the company's sale of surveillance technology to Bahrain.

Here's what Privacy International says was happening in Bahrain:

The complaint alleged that Gamma sold its notorious FinFisher intrusion software product to Bahrain as early as 2009, after which time it was used by the Bahraini government to violate the human rights of three Bahraini nationals and human rights activists, Ala'a Shehabi, Husain Abdulla and Shehab Hashem.

You're probably wondering what the penalty is if you are found in breach of human rights in this way -- clearly a serious matter. Well, here it is:

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s UK National Contact Point (“"CP") concluded today that Gamma International should make changes to its business practices in order to ensure that in the future it respects the human rights of those affected by the surveillance technologies it sells.

Yes, you are told to do better next time. However, looking at things more positively, Privacy International points out:

Today's decision is the first time that the OECD has found a companies selling surveillance technologies to be in violation of human rights guidelines, and one of the most critical decisions ever issued by the OECD. In it, the NCP sets out in strong terms that Gamma has no human rights policies and due diligence processes that would protect against the abusive use of its products.

In other words, just as with the recent court victories against the UK government over its surveillance activities, what's important here is not so much the punishment -- or lack of it -- as the fact that for the first time a company selling invasive surveillance tools was condemned in this way. At the very least, it puts such companies on notice that they are being watched and will be hauled up before these kind of bodies for public shaming. Well, it's a start.

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Filed Under: bahrain, companies, finfisher, human rights, privacy, surveillance
Companies: gamma, privacy international

GCHQ Will Have To Start Letting Everyone Know Whether Or Not They've Been Illegally Spied On

from the suck-it,-spooks dept

Last December, the IPT (Investigatory Powers Tribunal) ruled that GCHQ's surveillance programs didn't violate human rights, despite being broad and untargeted dragnets. This ruling -- in response to several legal challenges brought in the wake of the Snowden leaks -- was unsurprising. The IPT has overwhelmingly supported GCHQ's spying efforts in the past, having only sided against it in one-half of one percent of the challenges brought against it.

The IPT's ongoing support of the UK's intelligence community is unsurprising. To declare any of its programs as illegal or in violation of citizens' rights would be to implicate itself for its near-constant approval of surveillance programs. That makes its February decision a bit of an aberration. In response to Privacy International's legal challenge, it changed course slightly, declaring certain elements of the GCHQ's spying efforts "illegal" -- specifically, information sharing with the NSA. But this was only a partial capitulation. The IPT went on to say that this was once illegal but now was not, thanks to its December 2014 ruling. In some bizarre way, the legal complaints brought against the GCHQ managed to legalize its once-illegal partnership with the NSA.

However, its February decision makes it clear that operations prior to December 2014 were illegal, and provides an opening for UK citizens to force a bit more transparency on their intelligence community.

Because the IPT found the intelligence sharing to be illegal, anyone, inside or outside the UK, can file a complaint to the IPT and ask if their communications were part of that illegal sharing, and be legally entitled to an answer. [Privacy International's Eric] King explained, “If they don’t find anything, it’s likely they respond ‘no determination’. If they do find something, the IPT is obliged to give a declaration to the individual that their communications were illegally interfered with.”

This is far more transparency than has been granted by the NSA, which still responds to similar inquiries about files on citizens (from those citizens themselves) with its omnipresent Glomar declaration, neither confirming nor denying the collected results of its domestic surveillance programs.

So, anyone in the world will be allowed to ask -- and receive an answer -- about being swept up in shared GCHQ-NSA dragnets, provided the query only involves shared data and occurred before the IPT's legalization of this partnership in December of last year. And there are even more restrictions. The data has to be something collected by the NSA and shared with the GCHQ, not vice versa, and must still be retained and accessible at the point the GCHQ receives the inquiry.

While there are many specifics limiting the public's involvement, there will be no specifics forthcoming from the UK's spy agencies.

Despite this apparent narrowness, the number of people that could get a yes could be in the hundreds of millions. However, The IPT will not reveal the granularity of information GCHQ kept on you. “People will never find out if it was their phone records that GCHQ had, or just a specific email,” said King, “They only answer they’ll get is a broad one of yes, GCHQ had data about you illegally from NSA.”

Privacy International will be funneling these requests in to the IPT via a submission form at its site. The selectors (email address, name, telephone number) will be handed over to the GCHQ to be used to search for matching, NSA-originated shared data. If found, requestors will be given their detail-free "yes" answer and the illegally-obtained data will be destroyed. It's not a huge step forward but it's a start.

What this will do, however, is open up the GCHQ to many more legal challenges -- something that may result in even further accountability and curtailing of its powers. Privacy International is basically creating a class action suit against the UK spy agency. It's not money the group is after, but more transparency. It hopes to force the GCHQ into revealing more details about its domestic surveillance and its partnership with the NSA.

Privacy International's Eric King admits this won't be an easy -- or short -- process. It's very likely the GCHQ will mount its own challenge against the IPT's decision, and will resort to its usual opacity and obfuscation to avoid giving members of the public the yes/no answer the tribunal has declared they're entitled to. (And losing the illegally-obtained data in the process...) But in terms of reactions to the Snowden leaks, this decision (potentially) demands more accountability from the UK's spy agency than all of the administration's weak NSA reforms combined.

Filed Under: gchq, ipt, nsa, surveillance, uk
Companies: privacy international

UK's Secretive Court Says Intelligence Sharing Between NSA And GCHQ Was Unlawful In The Past -- But Now It Isn't

from the power-of-transparency dept

Techdirt has written about the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), which reviews complaints about surveillance in the UK, a number of times, noting that in addition to being secretive, it is pretty toothless, and generally approves of everything that the UK's secret services get up to. Against that background, a ruling released today by the IPT is pretty surprising:

British intelligence services acted unlawfully in accessing millions of people's personal communications collected by the NSA, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled today. The decision marks the first time that the Tribunal, the only UK court empowered to oversee GHCQ, MI5 and MI6, has ever ruled against the intelligence and security services in its 15 year history.

The Tribunal declared that intelligence sharing between the United States and the United Kingdom was unlawful prior to December 2014, because the rules governing the UK’s access to the NSA’s PRISM and UPSTREAM programmes were secret. It was only due to revelations made during the course of this case, which relied almost entirely on documents disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the intelligence sharing relationship became subject to public scrutiny.

As that explanation by Privacy International -- one of four claimants in this case -- mentions, the IPT found that sharing intelligence between the NSA and GCHQ was illegal, but now isn't. Here's why:

In a previous December 2014 ruling, the IPT held that GCHQ's access to NSA data was lawful from that time onward because certain of the secret policies governing the US-UK intelligence relationship were made public during Privacy International's case against the security services. Yet that belated disclosure could not remedy the lack of transparency regarding the UK-US sharing prior to December 2014, meaning that all UK access to NSA intelligence material was unlawful before the Court’s judgement.

Rather bizarrely, the complaint about GCHQ's illegal actions in the past has made subsequent actions legal, at least according to the IPT. Two of the claimants in the case now hope to build on this judgment by asking the IPT to confirm that communications were collected unlawfully before December 2014, and to demand their deletion. Parallel to that, they also intend to appeal against the ruling that since then, intelligence sharing between the NSA and GCHQ has been legal:

While we welcome today's decision, Privacy International and Bytes for All disagree with the tribunal's earlier conclusion that the forced disclosure of a limited subset of rules governing intelligence-sharing and mass surveillance is sufficient to make GCHQ's activities lawful as of December 2014. Both organisations will shortly lodge an application with the European Court of Human Rights challenging the tribunal's December 2014 decision.

So the battle to bring GCHQ's massive surveillance program under control, with proper safeguards for the public and meaningful oversight, continues. But at least a first victory has been gained from an unexpectedly helpful IPT.

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Filed Under: data sharing, gchq, investigatory powers tribunal, ipt, nsa, privacy, surveillance, uk
Companies: privacy international

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.

Filed Under: gchq, human rights, investigatory powers tribunal, ipt, surveillance, uk
Companies: amnesty international, privacy international