Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Well, solution is obviously to exit EU, then ECHR, then various conventions (Hague, Berne, Geneva) and UN.
A significant legal blow has been dealt to the British government over its secret mass surveillance activities. The mysterious Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which oversees Blighty's snoops, has ruled that the bulk collection of personal data — conducted by GCHQ and MI5 between 1998 and 2015 — was illegal. Responding to a …
That is expected.
End of the day, ECHR and the European council were proposed by Churchil as a "Never Again" measure so that there is never ever a repeat of what happened in the 1930-es in the _RUN_ _UP_ to WW2 so that we do not have a WW3 in the same mould.
They will be repealed and removed with extreme prejudice from the British statute book. Anyone with _DIFFERENT_ expectations should only go back to the recordings of the Tory party conference and see the roaring applause which Teresa May got by quoting the Mein Campf (later appropriated by Stalin and from his ravings by Putin). That is where the citizenship quote comes from. Just to make things sure that this is not a fluke, not a hallucination and not a figment of imagination, this was followed by the Home Secretary including exerpts from the "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" (1934, Nazi Germany) and "Amendments to the Law for the Protection of the State" (1934, Bulgaria aligning to the Nazi axis). This is where the idea to publish the numbers of J^H Europeans employed by a company comes from.
So you are spot on. Said pesky Human Rights legislation shall be repealed in the name of building the future EuropeanFrei British Reich.
Have an upvote.
Leaving the EU and reneging on the ECHR are two very distinct things.
The ECHR involves 47 countries, including Russia.
I don't think the UK will find many countries willing to even trade with it, or negociate with it on any matter of importance, should it not respect this fundamental international treaty.
"I don't think the UK will find many countries willing to even trade with it, or negociate with it on any matter of importance, should it not respect this fundamental international treaty."
Theresa May has ensured that most of Europe is a write off anyway (see Lionel Barber's piece in the FT today) with her pandering to the Tory right wing, so our trading partners are going to be Saudi, Australia and the US. None of those is a big believer in the ECHR.
TM even wants to bypass Parliament and be a proper dictator. It is scarily similar to the rise if fascism.
I know of a Data Center, where there is a Server which has a Sealed rack connected to it
In the sealed rack is Cameras, and monitoring computers checking Every connection into and out of this persons server.
The staff at the center are not allowed to discuss this machine nor are they allowed to touch it
The server owner is also not allowed access to the machine.
(Note I am nothing to do with the data center nor the servers involved. But I am reliably informed that this is not the only Server in this state.)
Sounds like reasonable security to me. We have systems for commercial customers (household names) like that.
Cameras activated when the rack is opened.
"monitoring computers checking Every connection into and out of this persons server." That'll be a firewall, then :) Yes, I am aware that more sophisticated checking is available.
Only pre-authorised support staff can physically access the systems. That excludes the data centre staff and the customer staff.
So, nothing spooky at all.
Yup, we keep our customer's servers in a data centre which is guarded by ex-equaddies and plenty of barbed wire, and to get into the rack you need to go through a whole rigmarole to get a pass, and you still need keys to get any closer than the door.
Quite the pain in the bum when all you need to do is swap a borked disk.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you. That the statutory bodies would break statutes and the executive would hide and abuse the sovereign will of parliament.
Well at least when we've got rid of all that EU nonsense we can put new laws in place to make it legal to tap anyone's communication without oversight.
"...we can put new laws in place to make it legal to tap anyone's communication without oversight."
Let's not take up MP's time with this sort of thing.
The government is quite happy to allow this sort of behaviour by their "security" apparatus without all the bother of drafting and passing laws. After all it's all a big secret and nobody knows about it.
Anyway MPs have better things to do with their time like thinking up cunning plans to pad their expenses and the paid jobs and directorships that a lot of them have. They can't manage on a basic £74,962 you know.
"The public and Parliament deserve an explanation as to why everyone’s data was collected for over a decade without oversight"
It's a good job that we change our government every 4 or 5 years then, so that nobody can be held accountable.
What about the civil service who administer all this stuff? Nah, can't see that happening either.
".....we can put new laws in place....." Already done, which is why HMG's finest are laughing up their sleeves at this "victorious" bolting of the stabledoor after the horse has not just bolted, but a backdoor has been legally added to the stable. All the data collected prior to June 2015 will have already been carefully analysed and sent to the NSA in the States for safekeeping, where it is beyond the reach of the EU. Any data collected since is covered by the Investigatory Powers Bill, and will still be shared with (and probably stored long-term) by the NSA. Gus Hosein will enjoy his pointless victory dance and the spooks will continue with business as usual.
"....but have their been convictions of other people where this data was used in the prosecution case?...." If there were, under English law the evidence would still be admissible and the conviction safe. Even if a future prosecution were to go ahead based on the data collected prior to June 2015, the evidence would still be admissible. The "fruit of a poisoned tree" argument holds in US courts and some European ones, but not in the UK, where the judge gets to decide if any evidence is "unfair", and in a case of terrorism that is very unlikely.
I don't think there is anything else that could be done. These organisations cannot be fined or put in prison. All they could do is sack someone or move them to a different job. Having any trial would be impossible for security reasons unless it is conducted in secret.
Surveillance in the UK is probably more pervasive than most countries but, speaking personally, it has not been oppressive.
The UK has been a master of the intelligence business for centuries and I don't think that anyone has come up with an alternative form of security, so I guess the spooks will be spooking for some time to come.
A comprehensive paper trail for spooking activities, including asking a 'friend' to lend a hand in the spooking, is the best we can hope for in terms of democratic control.
Unfortunately it's too late to do anything about it, no one will have their hand slapped or go to jail for it and no notice will likely be taken for future mass surveillance.
As the case showed, those with access to the database used it to look up birthdays and spy on friends and family, even though they were told in advance not to do it.
With this in mind, now we are giving however many police officers full access to our browsing history and all phone calls via ICR records and other powers, with just as little oversight from abuse. It doesn't take a genius to know what will happen.
"It doesn't take a genius to know what will happen."
Yes I think we can all see where this is going. To save mucking about and to avoid possible future unpleasantness involving cages, please can I cut straight to the chase and state unequivocally for the record:-
"Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me!"
[Edited - Supervisor 89899374C - Thoughtcrime perpetrator's collaborator redacted.]
"With this in mind, now we are giving however many police officers full access to our browsing history and all phone calls via ICR records and other powers, with just as little oversight from abuse."
It underscores that oversight is absolutely necessary - and that police shouldn't get off lightly because they're police. If you want to enforce the law and keep the peace then you have to be seen to be held to higher standards - otherwise you end up with situations like the Flying Squad being unable to secure convictions of armed robbers despite catching them redhanded (because the jury don't believe a word they say)
and therefore, the spooks and their paymasters have the following statement to make:
hahahahhahahahahahahahha
ahahhahahahahahahah
ahahahhahahaahahhhahahhahahahahhaha
carry on, citizen 564566/2, nothing new to see here!
@AC
Business as usual...
Wright recalled having fun in the 1950s: "For five years we bugged and burgled our way across London at the State's behest, while pompous bowler-hatted civil servants in Whitehall pretended to look the other way."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/7547558/Peter-Wright.html
".....Wright recalled....." Yeah, just don't forget that Wright's revelations also included the Venona Project, which showed not just the value of interception and decryption, but also the lengths to which the Soviets did infiltrate the West using "useful idiots" as well as professional spies. Pretending there is no value in monitoring communications, even without the threat of terrorism, is simply putting your head in the sandpile up your rectum.
You get round that by doing lots of Hadoop Analysis on said Data, that forms a brand new database, having 'no links' to its former data, but having all the intelligence extracted from it.
In the same way its difficult to prove copyright if someone even makes small changes to the way something was originally formatted, just look at the Samsung Galaxy X v the iPhone X.
Or you store the data outside the UK on NSA servers, or you get NSA to carry out work on your behalf (and vice versa).
I'm sure Theresa May's 'Brexit means Brexit', won't concur that 'Illegal Bulk Data Slurp means Illegal Bulk Data Slurp' gets deleted. It's not in Zero-T's nature to invoke such a ruling.
".....will the spooks be forced to wipe the data they illegally obtained from 1998-2015...." Probably locally, but it is highly likely to have been copied to the NSA" and stored in the States, where the UK's spooks can still mine it when required. It is claimed that the Five Eyes agreement allows the participants to circumvent local privacy laws by getting another member country to do the interception, storage and analysis of data, so there would be nothing stopping the NSA retaining a copy of the pre-June 2015 data after it was deleted in the UK. Sorry, you'll have to keep on buying the tinfoil for hats for a while yet.