Toh, Edward snowden he was right. The mass surveillance he reported was illegal. This was stated by the European Court for Human Rights which, eight years after the start of the legal challenge initiated by the leaks of the American whistleblower, yesterday (Tuesday 25 May) ruled that the mass interception of data by the espionage agency British Gchq (Government Communications Headquarters) was illegal and violated the right to privacy. The judges also found that the collective wiretapping regime violated the right to freedom of expression and contained insufficient protections for journalists’ sources.
The news, released yesterday in the Guardian, was commented on as historic on both Twitter and by Snowden than from the journalist Alan Rusbridger, who has always followed the story closely and is the former director of the Guardian.
This is the culmination of a legal challenge to the mass interception of online communications by the GCHQ launched in 2013 by Big Brother Watch and others following the Snowden revelations on the interception, processing and storage of data on millions of private communications of individuals by the wiretapping agency. The Gchq was replaced in 2016 by the InvestigatoryPowers Act (Ipa). The 2013 Snowden revelations included details of a code-named operation “Tempora,” which tapped into and stored huge volumes of data drawn from fiber-optic cables.
As the Guardian explains, yesterday’s ruling confirmed elements of a lower court’s 2018 ruling that minimizing the risk of abuse of power in mass wiretapping requires “end-to-end guarantees” on the necessity and proportionality of the measures taken; the mass interception “should be subject to independent authorization at the outset when defining the subject matter and scope of the transaction; and the transaction should be subject to independent ex post facto (retrospective) supervision and review”.
“Collective surveillance powers allow the state to collect data that can reveal a huge amount of information about each of us, from our political views to our sexual orientation. These mass surveillance powers don’t make us safer,” said Megan Goulding. , a lawyer for Liberty, among the non-governmental organizations that have brought forward the human rights cause. “Our right to privacy protects all of us. Today’s decision takes us one step further towards eliminating these dangerous oppressive surveillance powers and ensuring the protection of our rights.”
For Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, “the court has established clear criteria for evaluating future mass interception regimes” so that they are not abused. Ilia Siatitsa of Privacy International commented that it was “a major victory for privacy and freedom for all in the UK and beyond”. And he added: “It doesn’t end here”. Let’s hope.
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