Long Reads

We hate to say we told you so. Privacy International has for years warned that powerful surveillance technologies are used to facilitate serious human rights abuses with insufficient technological and legal safeguards against abuse. We now have the most solid evidence to date that we were right. Our

Few revelations have been been as troubling for the right to privacy as uncovering the scope of the Five Eyes alliance. The intelligence club made up of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States has integrated its collection efforts, staff, bases, and analysis programs

As Privacy International celebrates Friday's victory against Britain’s security services - the first such victory this century - we cannot help but feel the success is bittersweet. After all, we may have convinced the Investigatory Powers Tribunal that GCHQ was acting unlawfully in accessing NSA

Modern day government surveillance is based on the simple concept of “more is more” and “bigger is better”. More emails, more text messages, more phone calls, more screenshots from Skype calls. The bigger the haystack, the more needles we can find. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that this

Many people imagine intelligence sharing to be a practice whereby men in trench coats silently slide manilla envelopes containing anonymous tip-offs or intelligence reports marked TOP SECRET across tables in smoke-filled rooms. While such practices certainly exist, they represent only a tiny slice

Privacy International in October 2014 made a criminal complaint to the National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency, urging the immediate investigation of the unlawful surveillance of three Bahraini activists living in the UK by Bahraini authorities using the intrusive malware FinFisher

Bad analogies about surveillance technology pervade newspaper reports, politicians’ speeches, and legal arguments. While it’s natural to want simple explanations to understand complex technology, it does us a disservice when governments, the media, or the courts mislead us through analogies that are

Today, Privacy International lodged a legal challenge to GCHQ's extensive and intrusive hacking of personal computers and devices. Below, we answer a few questions about the law underlying our complaint, and why it matters. Is hacking legal? As a result of the Snowden revelations, we have learned

The recent revelations, made possible by NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden, of the reach and scope of global surveillance practices have prompted a fundamental re- examination of the role of intelligence services in conducting coordinated cross-border surveillance. The Five Eyes alliance of States –

Privacy International filed formal complaints with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in the UK against some of the world’s leading telecommunication companies, for providing assistance to British spy agency GCHQ in the mass interception of internet and telephone