{"id":5386,"date":"2015-02-07T09:53:44","date_gmt":"2015-02-07T14:53:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5386"},"modified":"2015-02-07T09:53:44","modified_gmt":"2015-02-07T14:53:44","slug":"in-historic-ruling-uk-surveillance-secrecy-declared-unlawful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5386","title":{"rendered":"IN HISTORIC RULING, UK SURVEILLANCE SECRECY DECLARED UNLAWFUL"},"content":{"rendered":"

IN HISTORIC RULING, UK SURVEILLANCE SECRECY DECLARED UNLAWFUL<\/a><\/h3>\n

The United Kingdom\u2019s top surveillance agency has acted unlawfully by keeping details about the scope of its Internet spying operations secret, a British court ruled in an unprecedented judgment issued on Friday.<\/p>\n

Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, was found to have breached human rights laws by concealing information about how it accesses surveillance data collected by its American counterpart, the National Security Agency.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0ruling<\/a>\u00a0was handed down by the\u00a0Investigatory Powers Tribunal<\/a>, a special court that handles complaints related to covert surveillance operations conducted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. In its 15-year history, the tribunal has never before upheld a complaint against any intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n

The legal challenge was brought by human rights groups, including\u00a0Privacy International<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Liberty<\/a>, following disclosures from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The groups alleged that GCHQ was unlawfully obtaining data through the NSA\u2019s\u00a0online spying program PRISM<\/a>, which collects data stored by Internet giants such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo. The groups also focused on GCHQ\u2019s role in obtaining private communications swept up by the NSA directly from internet cables, known as so-called \u201cupstream\u201d collection.<\/p>\n

The court ruling against GCHQ found that by keeping the rules underpinning the surveillance secret, the agency had \u201ccontravened<\/a>\u201d the privacy and free expression provisions of the\u00a0European Convention on Human Rights<\/a>. The secret policies were\u00a0released<\/a>\u00a0for the first time in December, meaning that until then GCHQ had been operating unlawfully, likely for several years. (GCHQ has had access to PRISM since at least 2010, according to\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0based on Snowden documents.)<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IN HISTORIC RULING, UK SURVEILLANCE SECRECY DECLARED UNLAWFUL The United Kingdom\u2019s top surveillance agency has acted unlawfully by keeping details about the scope of its Internet spying operations secret, a British court ruled in an unprecedented judgment issued on Friday. Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, was found to have breached human rights laws by concealing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1543,249,1511,3298,3297,483,1694,746,765,3296],"class_list":["post-5386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-digital-surveillance","tag-edward-snowden","tag-gchq","tag-government-communications-headquarters","tag-legality","tag-liberty-2","tag-prism","tag-spying","tag-surveillance","tag-uk-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5386"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5387,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5386\/revisions\/5387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}