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Content type: Long Read
UPDATE 21/07/2020: On Monday July 20th, the Israeli parliament approved a new bill allowing the Ministry of Health to rely again on the Intelligence Services to track people who may have been exposed to Covid 19 when the number of new cases reaches 200 and above per day. The authorisation is then granted for three weeks and can be extended if the numbers have not decreased. The new law will be effective until January 2021. As of July 21st and for at least the next three weeks, the Intelligence…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International welcomes WhatsApp's immediate reaction after the revelation that Israeli cyber intelligence company NSO group had exploited a vulnerability in their software. We encourage all WhatsApp users to update their app as soon as possible. However, we believe WhatsApp needs to be much more transparent with their users. We haven't seen a notification on the app itself that would inform users about both, the bug, and the fix. The current version merely states that you can now see…
Content type: Press release
On the five year anniversary of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden leaking a massive trove of classified information that has since transformed our understanding of government mass surveillance, Dr Gus Hosein, Executive Director of Privacy International said:
“Is it enough for your government to tell you ‘we’re keeping you safe, but we’re not going to tell you how’? Edward Snowden asked himself this profoundly important question five years ago. We’re thankful he did.
His decision to expose the…
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: News & Analysis
Since mid-2012 the Hebrew University International Human Rights Clinic has been collaborating with Privacy International to produce research about the state of privacy laws and protections in Israel and worldwide.
Last week marked the launch of a long-anticipated pilot of a controversial Israeli biometric database, a project that has been the target of civil society protest and the subject of a challenge in the Israeli Supreme Court.
While there is no shortage of institutions maintaining…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International (PI) today filed additional complaints with authorities in Japan, Israel, Korea, Taiwan, Province of China, Thailand and Argentina. On June 27th PI filed simultaneous complaints with Data Protection and Privacy regulators in 32 countries concerning recent revelations of secret disclosures of records from SWIFT to US intelligence agencies.(1)
The disclosures involve the mass transfer of data from SWIFT in Europe to the United States, and possibly direct access by US…