By Steve Watson
Renewed calls for pardoning whistleblowers after GCHQ’s communications trawling officially ruled unlawful
In a landmark ruling, the European Court of Human Rights has declared that bulk communications gathering by Britain’s GCHQ spy agency was illegal, proving whistleblower Edward Snowden right, and prompting more calls for the former NSA contractor to be pardoned.
The court noted that there were “fundamental deficiencies” in the GCHQ’s interception of communications, namely that no politician or independent body had authorized the data gathering, that search terms GCHQ used to trawl through the data had not been included in a warrant application, and that individual names, email addresses, and phone numbers had not been authorized to be used by the spooks.
Snowden revealed that the GCHQ was scouring all online and telephone data in the UK via a program code named ‘Tempora’.
Former editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, who had to destroy hard drives given to him by Snowden in 2013 before the government seized them, lauded the ruling:
It’s taken a long time, but turns out @Snowden was right https://t.co/8IQeqKjVBu
— alan rusbridger (@arusbridger) May 25, 2021
Snowden responded, saying that he couldn’t have done what he did without journalists and human rights lawyers:
Without journalists to tell the story, the public would not have known about it.
Without human right lawyers defending that public, the courts would not have cared about it.
Without those courts, politicians would still be denying it.
I could not have done this alone. https://t.co/TqqLzEj3Ht
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 25, 2021
? BREAKING: UK mass surveillance found unlawful by Europe’s highest human rights court.
This confirms definitively that the UK’s bulk interception practices were unlawful for decades, a finding that vindicates @Snowden's whistleblowing
⬇️OUR RESPONSE⬇️https://t.co/FoFIh7wouC
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) May 25, 2021
The ruling led to new calls for Snowden, still hiding out in Moscow, as well as Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, languishing in prison, to be given their lives back:
The tide is turning. @POTUS should be on the right side of history: pardon Edward Snowden and Julian Assange now: https://t.co/jQQlKClCxa
— Andrew Mcguiness (@Cov3raa) May 25, 2021
(1/5) Big Brother Watch Director @silkiecarlo: “This judgment confirms that the UK’s mass spying breached citizens’ rights to privacy and free expression for decades."
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) May 25, 2021
(1/5) Big Brother Watch Director @silkiecarlo: “This judgment confirms that the UK’s mass spying breached citizens’ rights to privacy and free expression for decades."
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) May 25, 2021
(3/5) "Mass surveillance damages democracies under the cloak of defending them, and we welcome the Court’s acknowledgement of this. As one judge put it, we are at great risk of living in an electronic “Big Brother” in Europe."
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) May 25, 2021
(5/5) "We will continue our work to protect privacy, from parliament to the courts, until intrusive mass surveillance practices are ended.”
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) May 25, 2021
Pardon is way overdue for @Snowden https://t.co/HfAaDQJL9J
— Jonathan Clarke (@_JonathanClarke) May 25, 2021
Without journalists to tell the story, the public would not have known about it.
Without human right lawyers defending that public, the courts would not have cared about it.
Without those courts, politicians would still be denying it.
I could not have done this alone. https://t.co/TqqLzEj3Ht
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 25, 2021
The GCHQ continues to spy on British citizens, as we reported last November it has been monitoring the movement of British people minute by minute to check if they are complying with government restrictions.
According to reports, the spy agency embedded a ‘cell’ within Number 10 Downing Street in order to provide Prime Minister Boris Johnson with real time information pertaining to the public’s movements.
Words we didn't expect to read in 2020:
"GCHQ analysts have been given access to mobile phone data to track the public's movements during the national lockdown. The up-to-the-minute reports on compliance are passed to the Prime Minister"https://t.co/SKqk5uRw0z
— Big Brother Watch (@BigBrotherWatch) November 19, 2020
