British security agency ‘acted unlawfully’ by sharing data
Print Edition
A British tribunal yesterday ruled that some aspects of intelligence-sharing between security agencies in Britain and the United States were unlawful until December, in a ground-breaking case brought by civil liberties groups.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that Britain’s GCHQ had acted unlawfully in accessing data on millions of people in Britain that had been collected by the US National Security Agency, because the arrangements were secret.
Campaign groups Liberty, Privacy International, Amnesty International and others brought the case following revelations about mass surveillance made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
It was the first time in its 15-year history that the tribunal, which deals with legal challenges to Britain’s GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, had issued a ruling that went against one of those security agencies.
The legal challenge forced the British government to reveal some details about the previously secret rules governing how GCHQ accessed data collected as part of the NSA’s Prism and Upstream programmes, first revealed by Snowden in June 2013.
The tribunal ruled that “the regime governing the soliciting, receiving, storing and transmitting by UK authorities of private communications of individuals located in the UK, which have been obtained by US authorities pursuant to Prism and ... Upstream” contravened human rights laws until the government’s disclosures about how the arrangements worked.
A spokeswoman for Prime Minister David Cameron said the rules on intelligence-sharing were now fully lawful, adding: “The judgment will not require GCHQ to change what it does.”
Material revealed by Snowden and cited by the civil liberties groups showed Prism allows the NSA to access data handled by the world’s largest Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others.
The groups hailed the ruling as a major victory.
“We now know that, by keeping the public in the dark about their secret dealings with the National Security Agency, GCHQ acted unlawfully and violated our rights,” Liberty’s legal director James Welch said in a statement.
Yesterday’s ruling followed a judgment by the same tribunal in December that Britain’s legal regime governing mass surveillance of the Internet by intelligence agencies did not violate human rights.
The tribunal’s concern, addressed in the new ruling, was that until details of how GCHQ and the NSA shared data were made public in court, the legal safeguards provided by British law were being side-stepped.
“Today’s IPT ruling reaffirms that the processes and safeguards within the intelligence-sharing regime were fully adequate at all times,” a GCHQ spokesman said.
“It is about the amount of detail about those processes and safeguards that needed to be in the public domain.”
The civil liberties groups are preparing to challenge the December ruling in the European Court of Human Rights.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
