A British charity promoting privacy around the world, Privacy International, has filed a lawsuit against the British government over its use of mass surveillance programs.
The organization announced the filing of the lawsuit today, arguing that an “expansive surveillance regime seemingly operates outside the rule of law, lacks accountability, and is neither necessary nor appropriate.”.
Of course you understood that they are referring to the NSA affair and the cooperation of the American secret service with its British counterpart, GCHQ. It was recently revealed that the two services collaborated to monitor huge amounts of data. The data collected by GCHQ was allegedly sent to the US secret service for study by its analysts.
The lawsuit was filed with the Investigatory Powers Tribunal – an independent judicial body that is separate from the government and supposedly unaffected.
The lawsuit is based on two main points.
First, that there is no legal framework within which the contact details of UK citizens can be monitored, neither by local intelligence agencies nor by the people behind the NSA's PRISM.
Secondly, and perhaps even more tellingly, GCHQ is harnessing and storing “huge amounts of data” via undersea cables with the Tempora program.
“One of the basic principles of law in a democratic society is the accessibility and predictability of the law. If there is no way for citizens to know about the existence, interpretation or enforcement of a law, then the law is secret. And a secret law is not just. It is a fundamental breach of the social contract if the government operates in such an arbitrary manner,” said Eric King, head of research at Privacy International.
