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Content type: News & Analysis
11th December 2015
Sometimes it takes an unexpected stranger to remind you what you have, and what you are at risk of losing. Roman Zakharov, a Russian publisher who challenged Russia’s surveillance legislation, is that stranger for many Brits and Europeans. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights judgement on Friday 4 December 2015 was remarkable, not because it tore up the rule book on the jurisprudence surrounding state surveillance in the Council of Europe, but because it followed that rule…
Content type: Long Read
9th April 2019
(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).
Content type: Long Read
27th March 2019
(In order to click the hyperlinks in the explainer below, please download the pdf version at the bottom of the page).
Content type: Examples
7th May 2019
The rise of social media has also been a game changer in the tracking of benefits claimants. In the UK in 2019, a woman was jailed after she was jailed for five months after pictures of her partying in Ibiza emerged on social media. She had previously sued the NHS for £2.5 million, after surviving a botched operation. She had argued the operation had left her disabled and the “shadow of a former self” but judges argued that the pictures suggested otherwise.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/…
Content type: News & Analysis
9th March 2016
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
10th September 2012
As part of the government’s ambitious Open Data programme, the Cabinet Office announced last year that data from the National Pupil Database (NPD) will be made freely available and accessible to all. The NPD, previously only available to researchers on an academic licence, contains a record for every single state school pupil in the country, covering educational attainment from reception to sixth form, as well as characteristics such as attendance, ethnic background and free school meal…
Content type: News & Analysis
2nd February 2018
The recent announcement by the Minister for Justice that serious and organised crime will receive legislative attention from the Government and the Oireachtas is most welcome. However, the stated means of achieving this are deeply concerning for the Irish public and larger digital economy. The statements indicate that the Government intends to follow the British model of surveillance where Irish companies can be compelled to betray their users. Why would any user engage with a service that…
Content type: Press release
30th November 2011
At 12.45pm today, Wikileaks released hundreds of brochures, presentations, marketing videos and technical specifications exposing the inner workings of the international trade in surveillance technologies. Many of these documents were gathered by PI’s Eric King while undercover at industry-only conferences and trade shows in London, Paris and Washington DC.
Mr King joined Julian Assange, security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, Stefania Maurizi of Italian news weekly L’Espresso, Jean-Marc Manach…
Content type: News & Analysis
9th January 2018
This post was written by Chair Emeritus of PI’s Board of Trustees, Anna Fielder.
The UK Data Protection Bill is currently making its way through the genteel debates of the House of Lords. We at Privacy International welcome its stated intent to provide a holistic regime for the protection of personal information and to set the “gold standard on data protection”. To make that promise a reality, one of the commitments in this government’s ‘statement of intent’ was to enhance people’s enforcement…
Content type: Long Read
31st October 2016
This piece was written by Ashley Gorski, who is an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, and PI legal officer Scarlet Kim and originally appeared in The Guardian here.
In recent weeks, the Hollywood film about Edward Snowden and the movement to pardon the NSA whistleblower have renewed worldwide attention on the scope and substance of government surveillance programs. In the United States, however, the debate has often been a narrow one, focused on the rights of Americans under…
Content type: Long Read
7th July 2016
This piece originally appeared here.
On both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing the dramatic expansion of government hacking powers. In the United States, a proposed amendment to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would permit the government to obtain a warrant, in certain circumstances, to hack unspecified numbers of electronic devices anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, across the pond, the British Parliament is currently debating the Investigatory Powers Bill, which (…
Content type: News & Analysis
21st February 2014
Political activist and university lecturer Tadesse Kersmo believed that he was free from intrusive surveillance when he was granted political asylum in the UK. Instead, he was likely subject to more surveillance than ever. His case underlines the borderless nature of advanced surveillance technologies and why it represents such a massive problem.
In the past, those fleeing conflict or persecution could reasonably expect a degree of respite if they managed to escape their circumstances. However…
Content type: News & Analysis
17th August 2012
In the PI office, we have daily debates about which platforms to use for our organizational operations. As a privacy charity, we are naturally concerned about the integrity of our own information services and resources, but we frequently receive queries about the best technologies to use from a variety of other organizations, some with very complex threat models.
The sad fact is that we are all poorly served by the range of services currently available. We worry that there is a significant…
Content type: Report
24th May 2020
It is common for families with no recourse to public funds who attempt to access support from local authorities to have their social media monitored as part of a 'Child in Need' assessment.
This practice appears to be part of a proactive strategy on the part of local authorities to discredit vulnerable families in order to refuse support. In our experience, information on social media accounts is often wildly misinterpreted by local authorities who make serious and unfounded allegations…
Content type: News & Analysis
14th May 2019
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: News & Analysis
14th July 2014
From Monday 14 to Friday 18 July, the British intelligence agencies and the Ministers responsible for them will be under the spotlight in an historic case to determine whether GCHQ's mass communications surveillance activities are a violation of Britain's human rights obligations.
Privacy International, along with Amnesty International, Liberty, the American Civil Liberties Union, Pakistani organisation Bytes for All and others, have brought the case before the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (…
Content type: News & Analysis
8th November 2018
Our team wanted to see how data companies that are not used to being in the public spotlight would respond to people exercising their data rights. You have the right under the EU General Data Protection Regulation ("GDPR") to demand that companies operating in the European Union (either because they are based here or target their products or services to individuals in the EU) delete your data within one month. We wrote to seven companies and requested that they delete our data, and we've made…
Content type: Advocacy
17th November 2017
Thornsec is a piece of software developed by Privacy International’s Tech Team which is an automated way to deploy, test, and audit internal and external services for an organisation, saving a lot of time and creating a sustainable security model. We are using this software to run all of Privacy International’s services – website, calendar, project management tools, Tor hidden services, VPNs. The whole system runs on two servers and the whole cost is around US$1000 to set up.
Thornsec is…
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: Long Read
27th September 2018
Written jointly by Privacy International and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
In a landmark decision earlier this month, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that one of the mass surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden violates the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. While the case challenges the U.K. government’s mass interception of internet traffic transiting its borders, the court’s judgment has broader implications for mass spying programs in Europe and…
Content type: Press release
12th February 2016
In response to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) ruling today that GCHQ's hacking is lawful, we have issued the following press statement:
"We are disappointed by the IPT’s judgment today, which has found Government hacking lawful based on a broad interpretation of a law dating back to 1994, when the internet and mobile phone technology were in their infancy.
Until we brought this case, GCHQ would neither confirm nor deny that it was they were engaging in mass hacking of computers,…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th July 2013
The following excerpt is from a posting in the Guardian's Comment is Free by Carly Nyst, Privacy International's Head of International Advocacy.
"In order to challenge a secret surveillance system, and to demand the government explains why it is spying on British citizens, one must apply to a secret tribunal that does not make public its proceedings or the reasons for its decision. It may seem like an Orwellian fantasy, but this is the stark reality of the British legal system.
It's called…
Content type: News & Analysis
7th August 2018
Create Commons Photo Credit: Source
Privacy International has achieved an important victory for government transparency and information access rights. This victory stems from a long-running battle with the government to obtain information about the UK police’s purchase and use of IMSI catchers. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently issued a series of decisions, which agree with Privacy International that police forces cannot rely on a position of “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND…
Content type: Long Read
25th September 2018
The UK's domestic-facing intelligence agency, MI5, today admitted that it captured and read Privacy International's private data as part of its Bulk Communications Data (BCD) and Bulk Personal Datasets (BPD) programmes, which hoover up massive amounts of the public's data. In further startling legal disclosures, all three of the UK's primary intelligence agencies - GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 - also admitted that they unlawfully gathered data about Privacy International or its staff. You can read the…
Content type: Examples
23rd September 2020
Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a secure mobile phone app into which users enter their name, address, date of birth, phone number, and doctor information, plus a scanned official identity document against which the smartphone can…
Content type: News & Analysis
15th February 2015
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 case was…
Content type: News & Analysis
24th April 2013
After a successful investigation by the US government into the illegal reselling of over a million dollars worth of surveillance equipment to the Syrian regime, Dubai distribution company Computerlinks FZCO has agreed to pay the maximum civil penalty of $2.8 million.
Computerlinks, in three separate transactions between October 2010 and May 2011, sold $1.4 million worth of devices developed by California-based Blue Coat to the state-run Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, which controls…
Content type: Examples
19th March 2020
A new surveillance system to detect cases of COVID-19 in England was established by Public Health England (PHE) and the NHS to strengthen existing systems and to prepare for and prevent wider transmission of the virus. Some NHS hospitals have been asked to take part in the plan, which involves testing samples from patients with severe respiratory infections who do not meet the current definition for COVID-19 in intensive care units (ICU) and Severe Respiratory Failure (ECMO) Centres.
Source: …
Content type: Examples
19th March 2020
The coronavirus action plan announced on March 3, alongside many measures for managing the NHS in the crisis, will also allow the Investigatory Powers Commissioner to appoint judicial commissioners (JCs) on a temporary basis in the event that there are insufficient JCs available to operate the system under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. The Home Secretary, at the request of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, will also be allowed to vary the time allowed for urgent warrants to be…
Content type: Report
5th May 2005
This report investigates the probable effect of the proposed UK national Identity Card system on people who are marginalised, who suffer social disadvantage or exclusion, and those who are disabled. The work focuses on the biometrics element of the government’s proposals (specifically facial recognition, ngerprinting and iris scanning).
The Report provides a specific assessment of the recently published biometrics trial conducted by the UK Passport Service (UKPS), and compares these findings…