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IPFS News Link • Surveillance

U.K.'s Mass Surveillance Databases Were Unlawful for 17 Years, Court Rules

• theintercept.com by Ryan Gallagher

Between 1998 and 2005, electronic surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters and domestic spy agency MI5 began secretly harvesting "bulk personal datasets" containing millions of records about people's phone calls, travel habits, internet activity, and financial transactions.

On Monday, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a special court that handles complaints related to British spy agencies, found that access to the datasets had not been subject to sufficient supervision through a 17-year period between 1998 and November 2015. The tribunal said that due to "failings in the system of oversight" the surveillance regime had violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to privacy.

The case was brought in June 2015 by the London-based human rights group Privacy International, which challenged the legality of the surveillance after the British government publicly admitted using an obscure provision of the 1984 Telecommunications Act to harvest the data.


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