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Content Type: Advocacy
We responded to the Home Office consultation on codes of practices under the Investigatory Powers (Amendment) Act 2024 (IPAA). Our response focused on (1) the draft codes relating to bulk personal datasets with low or no reasonable expection of privacy, (2) third-party bulk personal datasets and (3) the notices regime. You can download our full response with its 23 recommendations for reform at the bottom of this page.'Low Privacy' Bulk Personal DatasetsThe IPAA introduces a new concept of…
Content Type: Video
In January 2023, the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal handed down a landmark judgment. The Tribunal held that there were “very serious failings” at the highest levels of MI5 - the UK's domestic intelligence agency - to comply with privacy safeguards from as early as 2014, and that successive Home Secretaries did not to enquire into or resolve these long-standing rule-breaking despite obvious red flags.
In this episode, we talk to Meg Goulding, a lawyer at the UK-based campaigning…
Content Type: Long Read
We won our case against the UK’s Security Service (MI5) and the Secretary of State for the Home Department (SSHD). The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) – the judicial body responsible for monitoring UK’s intelligence and security agencies – held that MI5 acted unlawfully by knowingly holding people’s personal data in systems that were in breach of core legal requirements. MI5 unlawfully retained huge amounts of personal data between 2014 and 2019. During that period, and as a result of these…
Content Type: Press release
In a landmark judgment, handed down today (Monday 30 January 2023), the Investigatory Powers Tribunal have found that there were “very serious failings” at the highest levels of MI5 to comply with privacy safeguards from as early as 2014, and that successive Home Secretaries did not to enquire into or resolve these long-standing rule-breaking despite obvious red flags.
Human rights organisations Liberty and Privacy International, who brought this significant legal case in January 2020, have…
Content Type: Long Read
Additionally, in January 2020 Privacy International and UK-based NGO Liberty filed a new claim against MI5 and the Secretary of State for the Home Department in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (the “Ungoverned Spaces Case”, this time, the case sought to hold MI5 and the SSHD accountable for systemic, long-term failures in the way they handle and retain millions of people’s personal data. As part of this claim, PI requested that the IPT re-opens parts of the original BPD/BCD. This aspect of…
Content Type: News & Analysis
What happened
On 22 July 2021, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) issued a declaration on our challenge to the UK bulk communications regime finding that section 94 of the Telecommunications Act 1984 (since repealed by the Investigatory Powers Act 2016) was incompatible with EU law human rights standards. The result of the judgment is that a decade’s worth of secret data capture has been held to be unlawful. The unlawfulness would have remained a secret but for PI’s work.
You…
Content Type: Long Read
Privacy and security are both essential to protecting individuals, including their autonomy and dignity. Undermining privacy undermines the security of individuals, their devices and the broader infrastructure. People need privacy to freely secure themselves, their information, and fully enjoy other rights. However, a growing number of governments around the world are embracing hacking to facilitate their surveillance activities.
As a form of government surveillance, hacking presents…
Content Type: News & Analysis
In mid-2019, MI5 admitted, during a case brought by Liberty, that personal data was being held in “ungoverned spaces”. Much about these ‘ungoverned spaces’, and how they would effectively be “governed” in the future, remained unclear. At the moment, they are understood to be a ‘technical environment’ where personal data of unknown numbers of individuals was being ‘handled’. The use of ‘technical environment’ suggests something more than simply a compilation of a few datasets or databases.
The…
Content Type: News & Analysis
Federal law enforcement is deploying powerful computer hacking tools to conduct domestic criminal and immigration investigations.
By Alex Betschen, Student Attorney, Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic, University at Buffalo School of Law
Hacking by the government raises grave privacy concerns, creating surveillance possibilities that were previously the stuff of science fiction. It also poses a security risk, because hacking takes advantage of unpatched vulnerabilities in our…
Content Type: Press release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 21, 2018
CONTACTS:
Alex Betschen, Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic, [email protected], 716–531–6649
Colton Kells, Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic, [email protected], 585–766–5119
Abdullah Hasan, ACLU, [email protected], 646–905–8879
NEW YORK — Privacy International, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Civil Liberties & Transparency Clinic of the University at Buffalo School of Law filed a lawsuit today…
Content Type: Long Read
The UK's domestic-facing intelligence agency, MI5, today admitted that it captured and read Privacy International's private data as part of its Bulk Communications Data (BCD) and Bulk Personal Datasets (BPD) programmes, which hoover up massive amounts of the public's data. In further startling legal disclosures, all three of the UK's primary intelligence agencies - GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 - also admitted that they unlawfully gathered data about Privacy International or its staff. You can read the…
Content Type: News & Analysis
This piece was originally published on Just Security.
Ten years ago, an FBI official impersonated an Associated Press reporter to lure and track a teenager suspected of sending in prank bomb threats to his school. To find him, the FBI agent, posing as a reporter, sent the teenager links to a supposed story he was working on, but the links were infested with malware that once clicked on quickly exposed the teen’s location. More recently, the FBI has seized and modified websites so…
Content Type: Press release
We found this image here
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) today held that, for a sustained period, successive Foreign Secretaries wrongly gave GCHQ unfettered discretion to collect vast quantities of personal customer information from telecommunications companies.
The judgment exposes:
· the error-ridden and inconsistent evidence provided by GCHQ throughout the case;
· the willingness of telecommunications companies to secretly hand over customer data on the basis of mere verbal…