Find Out Whether British Spooks Illegally Spied on You

[Anthea]

Now You Can Find Out Whether British Spooks Illegally Spied on You

Thanks to a recent court ruling in the UK, you'll soon be able to find out whether British spies illegally accessed your data through sharing programs with US intelligence agencies.

Starting today, a new​ site set up by Privacy International will begin funneling requests from anyone—not just UK citizens—to check whether the British intelligence agency GCHQ was snooping on their communications via the NSA's PRISM and UPSTREAM surveillance programs.

That was a huge concern after the Snowden revelations suggested that the "Five Eyes" spying alliance (the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have created a giant racket for second-hand surveillance.

While many of the individual countries have so-called "minimization" procedures for scrubbing "incidentally" collected data about their own citizens, there's nothing stopping them from getting that same data when it's collected and shared by an allied country.

"This will allow the public to finally know how the Snowden revelations have affected them personally and will allow people to hold intelligence agencies to account for their unlawful surveillance on the world’s communications," said Mike Rispoli, a spokesperson for Privacy International. "Even if you don’t think you were spied on (you probably were), it may be fun to know either way."

The requests will be sent to the UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which earlier this month ruled that GCHQ surveillance data obtained from the NSA programs was gathered unlawfully because the rules governing the intelligence sharing were kept secret.

That decision was built firmly on evidence from Edward Snowden's surveillance files, giving it a double-edged sword effect: It applies to data that was acquired prior to December 2014, but since the case put the program into the public record, the court ruled that any future sharing between the two spy agencies is totally kosher.

Still, it's a rare and fairly significant victory for privacy advocates. The tribunal is the only judicial body with any power over the UK's spy agencies, and this is first time it has ever ruled against them.

But while the ruling may open up UK spies to more scrutiny, things haven't been going so well on the other side of the pond.

Last week, a long-running case against the NSA's domestic surveillance programs suffered a huge setback when a court ruled against a motion for summary judgement filed by the plaintiffs, who claim that the programs had collected their private data. Even though the court established the massive, indiscriminate nature of the NSA's UPSTREAM program, which taps the internet's backbone to ingest entire streams of traffic, Judge Jeffrey White ruled that the evidence “is insufficient to establish that the Upstream collection process operates in the manner in which Plaintiffs allege it does.”

In other words, they can’t compel to court to rule on whether the surveillance is illegal because can’t prove definitively their communications were intercepted. And even if they could, the judg​e argued, the case would require the government to disclose information that might endanger national security.

That might not be a problem in the UK though, since the court has explicitly ruled the information sharing aspect of GCHQ's activities were illegal. And finding out who, exactly, was surveilled might pave the way for future legal challenges.

“We have known for some time that the NSA and GCHQ have been engaged in mass surveillance, but never before could anyone explicitly find out if their phone calls, emails, or location histories were unlawfully shared between the the US and UK," said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, in a statement sent to Motherboard.

"The public have a right to know if they were illegally spied on, and GCHQ must come clean on whose records they hold that they should never have had in the first place."

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/now-yo ... =mbtwitter