Supervisor: GCHQ wiretapping programs were illegal

British intelligence agency GCHQ has broken the law and violated human rights by using tapped internet data from the NSA. This has been determined by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the supervisor of the British secret services.

Civil rights groups Liberty, Bytes for All, Amnesty International and Privacy International, among others, had filed a complaint with the regulator against GCHQ after the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden. Prosecutors say British intelligence has broken British law by using Internet data collected from the US intelligence agency NSA. This concerns the close cooperation between the services in the Prism and Upstream programs in which large amounts of data were collected via the dragnet method.

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has ruled after a series of open and closed sessions that GCHQ has broken the law by using NSA data to monitor British citizens, The Independent reports. For example, the service would have violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This article guarantees the right to privacy. Article 6, which lays down the right to a fair trial, was also allegedly violated. In December, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that the British secret service did not act in violation of human rights.

According to the regulator, GCHQ made a mistake by keeping the rules for the exchange of privacy-sensitive data with the NSA strictly secret. However, the large-scale collection programs for internet data are legal, according to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The service would also fully comply with the law again, according to the regulator. GCHQ therefore speaks in a response about a ‘technical detail’ that would have prompted the regulator to judge some of its wiretapping as illegal.

The regulator’s ruling will allow UK citizens as well as organizations to request that all information GCHQ holds about them be removed. Some of them would have already started the procedures for this. In addition, civil rights organization Privacy International has indicated that it is not yet satisfied with the verdict because the oversight of the intelligence services is still insufficient. The organization therefore wants to go to the European Court of Human Rights.