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Content type: Long Read
The fourth edition of PI’s Guide to International Law and Surveillance provides the most hard-hitting past and recent results on international human rights law that reinforce the core human rights principles and standards on surveillance. We hope that it will continue helping researchers, activists, journalists, policymakers, and anyone else working on these issues.The new edition includes, among others, entries on (extra)territorial jurisdiction in surveillance, surveillance of public…
Content type: Advocacy
BackgroundThe Snowden revelations and subsequent litigation have repeatedly identified unlawful state surveillance by UK agencies. In response, the UK Parliament passed the highly controversial Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA), which authorised massive, suspicionless surveillance on a scale never seen before, with insufficient safeguards or independent oversight.Privacy International led legal challenges to this mass surveillance regime both before and after the Act became law. The Act…
Content type: Report
This policy paper seeks to determine the potential for the existing international private military and security companies (PMSC) regulatory framework to support more effective regulation of surveillance services provided by the private sector.In order to achieve this, and given that this paper addresses an issue that is at the intersection of two domains, it seeks to establish a common language and terminology between security sector governance and surveillance practitioners.In…
Content type: News & Analysis
As Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories continue to publish crucial information about the potential targets of NSO Group’s spyware, we know this much already: something needs to be done.
But what exactly needs to be done is less obvious. Even though this is not the first time that the world has learned about major abuses by the surveillance industry (indeed, it’s not even the first time this month), it’s difficult to know what needs to change.
So how can the proliferation and use of…
Content type: Press release
Today, the ICO has issued a long-awaited and critical report on Police practices regarding extraction of data from people's phones, including phones belonging to the victims of crime.
The report highlights numerous risks and failures by the police in terms of data protection and privacy rights. The report comes as a result of PI’s complaint, dating back to 2018, where we outlined our concerns about this intrusive practice, which involves extraction of data from devices of victims, witnesses…
Content type: News & Analysis
In mid-2019, MI5 admitted, during a case brought by Liberty, that personal data was being held in “ungoverned spaces”. Much about these ‘ungoverned spaces’, and how they would effectively be “governed” in the future, remained unclear. At the moment, they are understood to be a ‘technical environment’ where personal data of unknown numbers of individuals was being ‘handled’. The use of ‘technical environment’ suggests something more than simply a compilation of a few datasets or databases.
The…
Content type: News & Analysis
Today Advocate General (AG) Campos Sánchez-Bordona of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), issued his opinions (C-623/17, C-511/18 and C-512/18 and C-520/18) on how he believes the Court should rule on vital questions relating to the conditions under which security and intelligence agencies in the UK, France and Belgium could have access to communications data retained by telecommunications providers.
The AG addressed two major questions:
(1) When states seek to impose…
Content type: Case Study
On 3 December 2015, four masked men in plainclothes arrested Isnina Musa Sheikh in broad daylight (at around 1 p.m.) as she served customers at her food kiosk in Mandera town, in the North East of Kenya, Human Rights Watch reported. The men didn’t identify themselves but they were carrying pistols and M16 assault rifles, commonly used by Kenyan defence forces and the cars that took her away had their insignia on the doors. Isnina’s body was discovered three days later in a shallow grave about…
Content type: Case Study
The prohibition against torture is absolute. There are no exceptional circumstances whatsoever which can be used to justify torture.
And yet, torture is still being carried out by state officials around the world, driven by states’ ability to surveil dissidents, and intercept their communications.
In 2007, French technology firm Amesys (a subsidiary of Bull) supplied sophisticated communications surveillance systems to the Libyan intelligence services. The systems allegedly permitted the…
Content type: Long Read
Six years after NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents providing details about how states' mass surveillance programmes function, two states – the UK and South Africa – publicly admit using bulk interception capabilities.
Both governments have been conducting bulk interception of internet traffic by tapping undersea fibre optic cables landing in the UK and South Africa respectively in secret for years.
Both admissions came during and as a result of legal proceedings brought by…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International has joined a global coalition of privacy campaigners, tech companies, and technology experts to respond to proposals by British intelligence chiefs aimed at allowing them access to encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp or Signal.
If implemented, the proposals would allow government authorities to force messaging platforms to silently add a law enforcement participant to a group chat or call.
Such a capability poses serious threats to…
Content type: Long Read
Imagine that every time you want to attend a march, religious event, political meeting, protest, or public rally, you must share deeply personal information with police and intelligence agencies, even when they have no reason to suspect you of wrongdoing.
First, you need to go to the police to register; have your photo taken for a biometric database; share the contacts of your family, friends, and colleagues; disclose your finances, health records, lifestyle choices, relationship status, and…
Content type: Long Read
The Privacy International Network is celebrating Data Privacy Week, where we’ll be talking about how trends in surveillance and data exploitation are increasingly affecting our right to privacy. Join the conversation on Twitter using #dataprivacyweek.
Innovations in surveillance and data exploitation present challenges in the fight to protect personal data across the world. Since 1990 we have been working to build a global movement through working with others - from leading civil society…
Content type: News & Analysis
European leaders met last week in Brussels to discuss what is supposed to be two separate issues, the next trillion euro-plus budget and migration. In truth, no such separation exists: driven by nationalists and a political mainstream unable to offer any alternative but to implement their ideas, the next budget is in fact all about migration.
This strategy contained within the budget will get the approval of Hilary Clinton, who recently told the Guardian that ‘Europe needs to get a handle on…
Content type: Long Read
Creative Commons Photo Credit: Source
UPDATE: 30 July 2019
Privacy International has identified the following:
Two RAB officers received approval to travel to the USA in April 2019 for training on “Location Based Social Network Monitoring System Software for RAB Intelligence Wing”
Three RAB officers received approval to travel to Russia in August 2017 to participate in user training of “Backpack IMSI Catcher (2G, 3G, 4G)” paid for by Annex SW Engineering, a…
Content type: Explainer
Phone networks are divided between two networks: the physical and the mobile. The physical runs on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) that serves your home phone. Mobile networks are dominant in the age of communication and are used to relay mobile communications to the PSTN. The most prominent mobile networks are GSM networks (Global System for Mobile communications) and are what we use everyday to communicate with one another. Another system is known as CDMA (Code Division Multiple…
Content type: Explainer
Video surveillance technologies are deployed in public and private areas for monitoring purposes. Closed-circuit television (CCTV)– a connected network of stationary and mobile video cameras– is increasingly used in public areas, private businesses and public institutions such as schools and hospitals. Systems incorporating video surveillance technologies have far greater powers than simply what the camera sees. Biometric technologies use the transmitted video to profile, sort and identify…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International welcomes reports that the French Government has come out against the export of surveillance technology to oppressive regimes. According to the French website reflets.info, the State Secretary for the Digital Economy Fleur Pellerin announced her opposition to such exports last Friday, during a radio show hosted by Le Monde and public broadcaster FranceCulture. The statement may indicate a sea change in the government's policies regarding surveillance technology, which have…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International today received an email from Saul Olivares, Sales and Marketing Director of Creativity Software, in response to the letter we sent to Creativity CEO Richard Lee yesterday.
Mr Olivares directed PI to an attached statement, in which Creativity stated that it was:
…proud to be a supplier of world class technology to MTN, in Iran and other countries. MTN is a company with the vision of being the leading telecommunications provider in emerging markets, with an avowed mission…
Content type: Long Read
Privacy International is celebrating Data Privacy Week, where we’ll be talking about privacy and issues related to control, data protection, surveillance and identity. Join the conversation on Twitter using #dataprivacyweek.
Exercising the right to privacy extends to the ability of accessing and controlling our data and information, the way it is being handled, by whom, and for what purpose. This right is particularly important when it comes to control of how States perform these activities.…
Content type: News & Analysis
17 June 2013
Below is an excerpt of an article that recently appeared in Melbourne, Australia's The Age, written by Carly Nyst, Head of International Advocacy at Privacy International:
"Mass surveillance of a country's citizens by its government can no longer be said to be the preserve of authoritarian and dictatorial states.
The publication last week by The Guardian of classified National Security Agency documents has exposed the extent of surveillance by the US government, throwing…
Content type: News & Analysis
The following op-ed appeared in openDemocracy, written by Edin Omanovic, Research Officer at Privacy International:
It's not surprising that some of the states in Central Asia spy on people. Authoritarianism across the world relies on the intrusion into, and lack thereof, of a private sphere. From the KGB to their modern incarnations, the autocracies in the region continue to rely on state surveillance and other entrenched means of political control to stay in power.
New technologies and…
Content type: News & Analysis
The following appeared in the Daily Telegraph, and was written by Carly Nyst, Legal Director of Privacy International:
"Robert Hannigan, the new head of GCHQ, announced his arrival this week with a call for “greater co-operation” with security forces by tech companies. Hannigan’s article in the Financial Times illustrated vividly the destructive ideology that has driven the infiltration by the British and American intelligence agencies into every aspects of the digital realm – an…
Content type: Press release
The release of a new report by Privacy International exposes Colombia's intelligence agencies' previously unknown history of developing communications surveillance capabilities outside of lawful authority.
The report “Shadow State: Surveillance law and order in Colombia” reveals, via previously unreleased documents, the Colombian police agencies' and intelligence services' long history developing surveillance systems. Rather than building a well-regulated system of surveillance after Colombia…
Content type: Advocacy
Privacy International's submission on the right to privacy in Thailand, Human Rights Committee, 119th Session.
In our assessment to the Committee, national legislation governing surveillance is inadequate, unclear as to the powers, scope and capacity of state surveillance activities and thus it falls short of the required human rights standards to safeguard individuals from unlawful interference to the right to privacy.
Content type: Press release
PI Research Officer Edin Omanovic said:
“The European Commission has proposed sweeping updates [PDF] to trade regulations in an effort to modernise the EU’s export control system and to ensure that the trade in surveillance technology does not facilitate human rights abuses or internal repression.
Privacy International welcomes the intentions of the proposed changes in terms of protecting human rights as it does all such moves. More than half of the world’s surveillance…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International is today proud to release the Surveillance Industry Index (SII), the world's largest publicly available educational resource of data and documents of its kind on the surveillance industry, and an accompanying report charting the growth of the industry and its current reach.
The SII, which is based on data collected by journalists, activists, and researchers across the world is the product of months of collaboration between Transparency Toolkit and Privacy…
Content type: Long Read
“This is my personal opinion,” concedes Branko, a taxi driver in Skopje, the Republic of Macedonia's capital. “It was done by America to stop Putin building his gas pipe line through Macedonia.”
“This is just politics,” he advises, skeptically.
It's a common reaction to the wiretapping scandal in Macedonia. Beginning in February last year when opposition leader Zoran Zaev posted a series of wiretaps online that he called 'bombs' – they seemingly showed that for years the phone calls of some…
Content type: News & Analysis
Surveillance companies and government officials from across the world are gathering in the UK this week at the invitation of the Home Office for the UK’s “Premier Security and Law Enforcement Event’, one week after the controversial spying legislation, entitled the Investigatory Powers Bill, had its first reading in Parliament.
Delegates and companies will be attending the three-day long ‘Security and Policing’ trade show in Farnborough, the historical centre of the UK’s aerospace industry.…
Content type: News & Analysis
Today, Privacy International is publishing the result of a global effort to benchmark surveillance policies and practices in the countries that are part of the Privacy International Network. We're calling it the 'State of Surveillance'.
We designed a survey of questions based on some key issues: statistics about the communications infrastructure of the country; what civil society organisations and groups that analyse privacy issues; the international and domestic legal framework…