For nearly
two decades, British spies unlawfully maintained vast troves of
people’s private data without adequate safeguards against misuse, a
tribunal of senior judges has ruled.
Between 1998
and 2005, electronic surveillance agency Government Communications
Headquarters and domestic spy agency MI5 began secretly harvesting
“bulk personal datasets” containing millions of records about
people’s phone calls, travel habits, internet activity, and
financial transactions.
On Monday,
the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a special court that handles
complaints related to British spy agencies, found that access to the
datasets had not been subject to sufficient supervision through a
17-year period between 1998 and November 2015. The tribunal said that
due to “failings in the system of oversight” the surveillance
regime had violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human
Rights, which protects the right to privacy.
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report:
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