GCHQ spying on British citizens was unlawful

GCHQ unlawfully spied on British citizens, a secretive UK court has ruled.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), the secretive court that was created to keep Britain's intelligence agencies in check, said that GCHQ's access to information intercepted by the NSA breached human rights laws. The IPT has never ruled against any intelligence agency since it was set up in 2000. It found in December that GCHQ's access to the data was lawful from that point onward. That decision is now being appealed.

But the court said that historical collection was unlawful because the rules governing how the UK could access information received from the NSA were kept secret. It concerned practices disclosed as part of documents disclosed by Edward Snowden, and related to information found through the NSA's PRISM and UPSTREAM surveillance programmes.

PRISM allegedly allowed the NSA access to data from companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Skype. UPSTREAM allowed the NSA to intercept data through the fibre optic cables that power the Internet. The ruling comes after a legal challenge brought by civil liberties groups Privacy International, Bytes for All, Amnesty International and Liberty.

The Tribunal declared that intelligence sharing between the United States and the United Kingdom had been unlawful prior to December 2014, because the rules governing the UK's access to the NSA's PRISM and UPSTREAM programmes were kept secret.

Prior to December last year, the secret policy breached Article 8, the right to a private life, and Article 10, the right to freedom of expression without State interference, the tribunal said.
Yet it was only due to revelations contained in the documents leaked by Snowden that the intelligence sharing relationship became subject to public scrutiny.

The decision marks the first time that the Tribunal, the only UK court empowered to oversee GHCQ, MI5 and MI6, has ever ruled against the intelligence and security services in its 15 year history, said watchdog charity Privacy International.

The claimants in the case are Privacy International, Bytes for All, Liberty and Amnesty International. Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, said: "The only reason why the NSA-GCHQ sharing relationship is still legal today is because of a last-minute clean up effort by Government to release previously secret 'arrangements'. That is plainly not enough to fix what remains a massive loophole in the law, and we hope that the European Court decides to rule in favour of privacy rather than unchecked State power."

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/06/gchq_mass_surveillance_unlawful