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UK spies violated privacy laws with bulk data collection
Ever since Edward Snowden's leaks came to light, UK spy agencies have responded to accusations of surveillance overreach with a common boilerplate statement: that their activities are lawful, necessary and proportionate. However, they can't always use that justification any more. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has ruled that key GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 bulk data collection programs violated privacy protections in the European Convention on Human Rights. Both a Bulk Communications Data effort (which covers data such as visited websites, email metadata and GPS locations) and a Bulk Personal Datasets initiative (covering biographical details like your communications and financial activities) didn't have proper oversight until 2015, when some safeguards came into place. That's particularly damning when BCD was had been in place since 1998, and BPD since 2006.
UK spy agency broke rules when it snooped on civil rights groups
The spies at the UK's Government Communications Headquarters may swear that they're obeying the law, but that doesn't mean that everything they're doing is completely above-board. The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has determined that GCHQ broke data retention rules when it spied on civil rights groups in Egypt and South Africa. The agency legally intercepted the communications of these two targets, according to the ruling, but it either kept that data longer than it should have (in the Egyptian circumstance) or didn't follow policies for studying that data (in South Africa).
Find out if the UK used NSA data to spy on you
While it's sadly likely that your communications have passed through an intelligence agency at some point, it's usually difficult to know just who got your data. However, you now have a rare opportunity to find out. Thanks to a ruling that the UK's GCHQ illegally spied on people using NSA databases, advocacy group Privacy International has posted a simple web form that lets you ask if you were caught in Britain's law-breaking dragnet -- and, as you might expect, petition against mass surveillance. This won't provide the most comprehensive results (you should use the official form if you're really worried), but it should still lead to GCHQ purging the relevant records if there's a match. The only big problem? The request is limited to the past data covered by the ruling, so there's no guarantee that you're truly off the radar. [Image credit: Christopher Furlong - WPA Pool/Getty Images]
Judges rule that UK spying doesn't violate human rights
British spies may be peeking into webcams and modifying internet traffic, but all that is above board -- if you ask the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, anyway. Its judges have ruled that the Government Communications Headquarters' (GCHQ) intelligence gathering practices aren't violating the European Court of Human Rights' safeguards for free speech and privacy. The Tribunal agrees that unchecked mass data collection would be illegal, but contends that the ways GCHQ selects and preserves that data are reasonable. It doesn't have "carte blanche" to do what it likes, according to the ruling.
