Search
Content type: News & Analysis
5th November 2014
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 operations …
Content type: News & Analysis
4th November 2014
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…
Content type: News & Analysis
13th October 2014
Jaafar Al Hasabi, Mohammed Moosa Abd-Ali Ali, and Saeed Al-Shehabi each fled Bahrain for the United Kingdom with one goal: to be safe.
These men, activists in the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain, were variously subject to torture, arbitrary detention, harassment, and psychological trauma in their home country. They thought coming to the UK, and living in exile, would at least mean they would be outside the reach of the Bahraini government.
Despite the nearly 4,000 miles between their homes…
Content type: Long Read
27th August 2014
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 inadequate. It is even worse if these analogies are used as a basis for policy change.
Privacy International’s legal challenge against GCHQ’s mass surveillance rests on the capability of the judges…
Content type: News & Analysis
2nd July 2014
We have learnt a lot in the last year about the dirty games GCHQ and NSA are playing to infiltrate the networks, tools and technologies we all use to communicate. This includes forcing companies to handover their customers’ data under secret orders, and secretly tapping fibre optic cablesbetween the same companies’ data centers.
Not content with that, we know now GCHQ are targeting companies systems administrators, exploiting the routers and switches in their networks to spy on us all,…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th June 2014
The following is an excerpt from an Op-Ed written in the New Zealand Herald by Privacy International's Legal Officer Anna Crowe:
Since the release of documents by Edward Snowden nearly a year ago, New Zealand has often been seen as a passive participant in the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, not unlike a good kid hanging out with the wrong crowd.
However, Snowden documents released last month and the news that New Zealand appears to be sharing intelligence used in drone strikes…
Content type: News & Analysis
21st May 2014
While the initial disclosures by Edward Snowden revealed how US authorities are conducting mass surveillance on the world's communications, further reporting by the Guardian newspaper uncovered that UK intelligence services were just as involved in this global spying apparatus. Faced with the prospect of further public scrutiny and accountability, the UK Government gave the Guardian newspaper an ultimatum: hand over the classified documents or destroy them.
The Guardian decided that having the…
Content type: News & Analysis
30th April 2014
May Day serves as a timely reminder that across their history, intelligence services have targeted trade unions and other organisations working for progressive social change.
Intelligence agencies have sought to justify expanded surveillance capabilities on the basis of pressing national security threats, particularly terrorism; however, as the Snowden revelations have highlighted, intelligence agencies actually often use these capabilities to monitor organisations that promote human rights,…
Content type: News & Analysis
20th February 2014
On Monday, Privacy International submitted a dossier to the National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency on behalf of Ethiopian political refugee Tadesse Kersmo, asking them to investigate the potentially unlawful interception of Tadesse's communications, as well as the role a British company played in developing and exporting the invasive commercial surveillance software called FinSpy that was found on Tadesse's computer.
Here, we address some of the legal questions surrounding the…
Content type: Press release
19th February 2014
In response to the ruling against David Miranda over his detention at Heathrow, Privacy International Executive Director Dr. Gus Hosein said:
Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 is a law intended to fight terrorism, and was not drafted to target people like David Miranda. In this instance however the government used it to seize the devices of journalists to intimidate and obstruct the reporting of mass and unlawful surveillance practices of the British government. To equate journalism…