UK agencies including GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 have broken privacy laws for many years with their bulk data collection programs. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has ruled against the agencies, stating that some of their key programs violated protections in the European Convention on Human Rights.
This ruling infringes upon the UK’s ability to argue that all of its controversial spying has been lawful.
Protections against unlawful spying were only added to some programs in 2015, which means over a decade of illegal spying took place. For example, oversight was added to a Bulk Communications Data collection effort and a Bulk Personal Datasets collection effort in 2015, yet those programs began in 1998 and 2006, respectively.
While this ruling is a win to some extent, it’s not what some groups were looking for. According to Privacy International, the current privacy protections are still “deeply inadequate,” yet the Tribunal ruled they are “satisfactory.”
