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Content type: News & Analysis
With powers to snoop on our communications that are unprecedented anywhere in the world, it is essential the Investigatory Powers Bill doesn't let politicians decide who is spied on.
The bill, if it is passed, aims to give the police and intelligence agencies sweeping powers to scoop up our emails, phone calls and text messages; and access details about when, where and with whom we communicate; and even hack into our computers and smartphones. At Privacy International, we have many concerns…
Content type: News & Analysis
Despite Wednesday's publication of the Investigatory Powers Bill being trailed as world leading legislation that would balance security and privacy, what the Government is actually seeking is a mandate for mass surveillance. This is a new Snoopers' Charter and we must oppose many of its most virulent elements.
The true debate on surveillance can now begin. After years of downplaying, obscuring, and denying the Snowden revelations, the Government has finally joined the conversation about the…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International said
"The true debate on surveillance can begin today. After years of downplaying, obscuring, and denying the Snowden revelations, the Government has finally entered the conversation. For the first time Parliament and the British public will be able to debate mass surveillance powers like bulk interception, bulk hacking, and the data-mining of bulk personal datasets.
This Bill will be one of the most important pieces of legislation for a decade to get right for our civil…
Content type: News & Analysis
According to Snowden documents analysed by Privacy International, the Australian Signals Directorate had access to and used PRISM, a secret US National Security Agency program which provides access to user data held by Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
This is the third spy agency of the 'Five Eyes' alliance confirmed to have had secret access to Silicon Valley company data - an alliance whose rules and policies remain classified. Earlier this year, a British court ruled that GCHQ access to…
Content type: Press release
Human Rights Watch and three individuals have today lodged a legal challenge to establish whether their communications were part of those unlawfully shared between the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
Despite billions of records being shared every day between the NSA and GCHQ, and that historical sharing having been declared unlawful [PDF], the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has not yet confirmed to any claimant that their…
Content type: News & Analysis
While two of the Vice journalists who were recently arrested in Turkey and charged with terror offenses have now been released, this remain a deeply concerning incident.* It is the latest episode in what is a pincer movement against our right to protect our data.
Two British journalists and their Turkey-based Iraqi translator working for VICE News were arrested last Thursday and charged with "engaging in terrorist activity". According to Turkish authorities, one member of the group had an…
Content type: Press release
In yet another blow to the UK’s surveillance proponents, the UN Human Rights Committee has criticised the British legal regime governing the interception of communications, observing that it allows for mass surveillance and lacks sufficient safeguards.
The latest in a series of calls for wholesale reform of surveillance laws and practices in Britain, and following on the footsteps of reports by the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation David Anderson QC and Royal United Services…
Content type: Press release
A new report released today by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) highlights key technical blind spots in current GCHQ oversight and calls for a new, comprehensive and clear legal framework governing British intelligence agencies' surveillance capability.
The report panel, which included three former British intelligence chiefs, sets out clear deficiencies in the existing technical oversight regime, explaining current oversight "does not check the code [that underlies GCHQ’s…
Content type: Press release
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…
Content type: Press release
Governments must accept they have lost the debate over the legitimacy of mass surveillance and reform their oversight of intelligence gathering, Privacy International and Amnesty International said today in a briefing published two years after Edward Snowden blew the lid on US and UK intelligence agencies’ international spying network.
“The balance of power is beginning to shift,” said Edward Snowden in an article published today in newspapers around the world. “With each court victory,…
Content type: Long Read
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. Yet the legal rulebook governing how the agencies ensure the most comprehensive joint surveillance effort in the history of mankind remains secret.
The little that is known suggests a…
Content type: News & Analysis
The central premise of international intelligence cooperation is that states are able to both access valuable partner information to protect their national security, and focus their own resources elsewhere in a mutually beneficial way. But is it really a quid-pro-quo partnership?
As the Intercept recently revealed, German policy-makers certainly have reason to doubt that this would be the case. What Germany has learned, like many others before them, is that dependence on the…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International and several other human rights organisations are taking the UK Government to the European Court of Human Rights over its mass surveillance practices, after a judgement last year found that collecting all internet traffic flowing in and out of the UK and bulk intelligence sharing with the United States was legal.
The appeal, filed last week by Privacy International, Bytes for All, Amnesty International, Liberty, and other partners, comes in response to a…
Content type: Advocacy
On 20 March 2015, Privacy International and Open Rights Group submitted comments on the UK Government's draft Equipment Interference Code of Practice.
The UK has been hacking for over a decade, yet the release of the draft Code of Practice is the first time the UK intelligence services have sought public authorisation for their activities. Indeed, it is the first time the intelligence services have publicly acknowledged they engage in hacking.
Unfortunately, the draft Code of…
Content type: Press release
The British Government has admitted its intelligence services have the broad power to hack into personal phones, computers, and communications networks, and claims they are legally justified to hack anyone, anywhere in the world, even if the target is not a threat to national security nor suspected of any crime.
These startling admissions come from a government court document published today by Privacy International. The document was filed by the government in response to two …
Content type: Press release
The UK Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee's report provides a long-awaited official confirmation that the British government is engaging in mass surveillance of communications. Far from allaying the public's concerns, the ISC's report should trouble every single person who uses a computer or mobile phone: it describes in great detail how the security services are intercepting billions of communications each day and interrogating those communications against thousands of…
Content type: News & Analysis
This Sunday is International Women's Day. You could celebrate the considerable progress in legislating for women's equal rights. You could join a protest against political and legal inequality, discrepancies in women's access to healthcare, education and other social goods. You could thank your mom for delivering you.
Here at Privacy International, we want to commemorate the importance of this day by looking at some of the ways surveillance technologies can be used to control women and how the…
Content type: Press release
Privacy International today has launched a platform and campaign to allow anyone in the world to request whether Britain’s intelligence agency GCHQ has illegally spied on them.
The platform and campaign has been developed in response to a recent court ruling that GCHQ unlawfully obtained millions of private communications from the NSA up until December 2014. This decision allows not only British citizens, but anyone in the world, to ask GCHQ if the individual’s records…
Content type: News & Analysis
Privacy International, Bytes for All and other human rights groups are celebrating a major victory against the Five Eyes today as the UK surveillance tribunal rules that GCHQ acted unlawfully in accessing millions of private communications collected by the NSA up until December 2014.
Today’s judgement represents a monumental leap forward in efforts to make intelligence agencies such as GCHQ and NSA accountable to the millions of individuals whose privacy they have violated.
The…
Content type: Long Read
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 databases filled with billions of emails and messages, but with a few technical adjustments the intelligence services have managed to insure themselves against any further challenge, at least in…
Content type: Press release
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…
Content type: News & Analysis
A year after the Eyes Wide Open program was launched here at Privacy International, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of the processes and justifications that agencies like GCHQ use to make their spying legally compliant. Tocqueville, a great philosopher of law stated:
“If they prize freedom much, they generally value legality still more. They are less afraid of tyranny than of arbitrary power, and provided the legislature undertakes of itself to deprive men of their independence,…
Content type: Long Read
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 fundamental idea drives intelligence agencies like the NSA and GCHQ - the desire to collect it all, to generate gigantic haystacks through which to trawl. In the almost two years since the first of Snowden…
Content type: News & Analysis
The following was written by Mike Rispoli, Communications Manager at Privacy International, and appeared in the 'Journalism in Europe' discussion series, hosted by Central European University:
"The response by world leaders to the horrific terrorist attacks in France earlier this month has been all too familiar. As officials rallied for freedom of expression, they called for increased vigilance against extremists by expanding government surveillance powers.
Leading the way is UK Prime…
Content type: News & Analysis
In the wake of tragic attacks in France, politicians from across the world are calling for dramatically expanded surveillance powers, to spy on our phonecalls, ban encrypted communications such as WhatsApp and iMessage, and store details about our international travels for years on end.
If it feels like you've heard this story before, it's because you have. With each violent attempt by extremists to terrorise society, our political leaders dust off old, failed proposals such as the UK…
Content type: Long Read
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 of intelligence sharing activities, and are vastly overshadowed by the massive exchange of bulk unanlysed (raw) intelligence data that takes place between the UK and its Five Eyes allies.…
Content type: News & Analysis
In the last two days multiple security vendors, newspapers and experts have weighed in on the existence of the “Regin" malware, among the most sophisticated ever discovered, and its possible origins at GCHQ and the NSA. The Intercept has now confirmed Regin was the malware found on infected internal computer systems and email servers at Belgacom, the Belgian telecommunications company. Last year, documents leaked by Edward Snowden established that it was GCHQ that had committed the attack on…
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: News & Analysis
Thousands of innocent people in London have had their communications spied on and collected through the use of invasive mobile phone surveillance technology, called IMSI Catchers, according to a recent report by the Times.
IMSI Catchers are no longer, and have not been for a while, a law enforcement secret. They have been featured crime dramas like the Wire and in movies such as Zero Dark Thirty. For years, the German Parliament has publicly received the number of IMSI Catcher…
Content type: News & Analysis
The following piece by Privacy International Legal Officer Adriana Edmeades appeared in openDemocracy:
In 2012, Citizen Lab, a think-tank operating out of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, came across evidence suggesting that Gamma International, a multinational technology corporation with offices across the world, sold a form of malware called FinFisher to Bahrain. Bahraini activists, amongst others, were seriously concerned: FinFisher gives its operator complete…