Thousands of people are signing up to join an unprecedented legal campaign against the United Kingdom’s leading electronic surveillance agency.
On Monday, London-based human rights group Privacy International launched an initiative enabling anyone across the world to challenge covert spying operations involving Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, the National Security Agency’s British counterpart.
The campaign was made possible following a historic court ruling earlier this month that deemed intelligence sharing between GCHQ and the NSA to have been unlawful because of the extreme secrecy shrouding it.
Consequently, members of the public now have a rare opportunity to take part in a lawsuit against the spying in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, a special British court that handles complaints about surveillance operations conducted by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Privacy International is allowing anyone who wants to participate to submit their name, email address and phone number through a page on its website. The group plans to use the details to lodge a case with GCHQ and the court that will seek to discover whether each participant’s emails or phone calls have been covertly obtained by the agency in violation of the privacy and freedom of expression provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights. If it is established that any of the communications have been unlawfully collected, the court could force GCHQ to delete them from its vast repositories of intercepted data.
By Tuesday evening, more than 10,000 people had already signed up to the campaign, a spokesman for Privacy International told The Intercept.
In a statement announcing the campaign on Monday, Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, said: “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.
“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 U.S. and U.K.
“There are few chances that people have to directly challenge the seemingly unrestrained surveillance state, but individuals now have a historic opportunity finally hold GCHQ accountable for their unlawful actions.”
Details about the scope of GCHQ and NSA surveillance first emerged in June 2013 following leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which exposed a series of major secret programs used to sweep up private communications on a large scale. Last year, The Intercept revealed new details about GCHQ’s efforts to push for broader access to data swept up by the NSA.
GCHQ declined to comment about the Privacy International initiative, and referred inquiries from The Intercept to the British government’s Home Office. A Home Office spokesperson said in emailed statement:
The current regime governing both the intelligence agencies’ external interception and intelligence sharing regimes is lawful and European Court of Human Rights compliant.
This government is committed to transparency. It has made public more detail than ever before about the work of the security and intelligence agencies, including through the publication of statutory codes of practice.
We have now made public the detail of the safeguards that underpin requests to overseas governments for support on interception.
Photo: A Banksy artwork near GCHQ headquarters in Cheltenham, England: Matt Cardy/Getty Images.
These guys are working for the people who start wars and then find some way to blame the victim. If they are successful, they will make a pile of money whether you win or lose, and you will wind up stuck with the bill. They have done it to you in the past, to Germany and America. Nobody can escape their peering, all-seeing eye. They will silence their opposition and destroy all who would expose their crimes. Mark my word, your safety is the furthest thing from their narrow minds, because the more you suffer and lose, the more power their masters gain over you and your children. If you think your taxes are high now, just wait until you can no longer resist and effectively protest. Look at the mess they have made of your country. This is deliberate, for they have learned to govern by crisis management, and as Chicago’s famous dual national mayor is fond of saying: “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. Now, please apply that old Roman maxim whenever you experience any crisis: QUID PROFITEM?
I have issues with ” …requesting my records to be deleted. ”
By authorizing destruction of my records I, in essence, authorize erasure of any and all evidence of my abuse, guaranteeing that none of my abusers would ever be held responsible in a court of law.
And most importantly, guaranteeing that I would never have any legal recourse for my injuries.
Am I wrong or am I right? I am not a lawyer so pls help..
@Stan: and you did nothing wrong though?
People, stop trying to “STOP” surveillance, it will NEVER happen and it has been there long before CCTVs/Internet happened. And we even NEED it with all the psycho people out there. What needs to be done is to enact clear laws about what this surveillance programme can do. That’s why I don’t think that information should be used for anything else except stop terrorism or murders. Even if they have clear evidence of someone selling crack, they can’t do anything about it.
Whoever is AGAINST surveillance is just an idiot who thinks the world is made up of decent people.
I am an American living in East Bay San Francisco and had my e-mail read by NSA. I sent one e-mail to another American free lance documentarian about my project how I was going to “Wake up Congress about Fraud in Medicare/Medicaid due to incompetent medical doctors who cost tax payers Billions” because I am now slowly dying from an illness that these incompetent doctors should have diagnosed when my surgery went horribly wrong because surgeon operated on the WRONG BODY PART causing massive complications during and after that surgery with none of those complications written on any medical record. I stated I would take a gun to my head on the Capital steps to get the attention of Congress regarding how corrupt our Medical Industrial Complex had become which was NOT providing any medical benefit to the citizens it was suppose to protect. Instead Medicare/Medicaid is used to fund incompetent medical care for doctors and hospitals who do not want their mistakes to be discovered or for the patient to be told about those mistakes so compensation can be given to the patient that would include future payment for medical care and financial damage to the patient’s family. My surgery should have only been 4 hours but became over 8 hours. The surgeon wrote a false surgical medical record that I only just recently obtained because our government does not enforce laws that have already been passed by our government. Our government does not function because there is not enough funds to enforce laws that have already been legislated to protect the average citizen because our government spends over 50% on the Defense Department for a “War on Terror” that they created because of U.S. foreign policy since before WWI. Our country is run for the benefit of the Military and Medical Industrial Complex which is killing the citizens of the U.S and poor of this world. I was permanently disabled at 49 because of surgery mistakes that were covered up by the surgeon and the hospital. Unable to return to work my county government applied for social security disability that was granted within 4 months of application and now the tax payer thru Medicare/Medicaid and SSD pays all future bills for continued “incompetent” medical care because doctors protect each other against removal or complaints to our Medical Boards which are a JOKE! I have found that “all” my medical records that have been written are either completely false or are totally incompetent that when management discovered their doctors had made mistakes they altered my medical record and prevented me from obtaining my full medical records including violating our California “law of amend” which I have provided all doctors that wrote the false or incompetent medical records for past 13 years since I always send written confirmation letters or faxes to all my medical providers when mistakes have occurred. The reason that our disabled poor in the U.S cost our Medicare/Medicaid system so much money but obtain no medical benefit to improve their health is because American doctors and hospitals make unlimited mistakes that they do not want to be held accountable for paying. The rich get the best medical care in American and the rest of the citizens get the worst. Not one of my doctors coordinated my medical care with a PCP or specialist I was obtaining medical care. I still would not have any clue what was killing me if I had not finally “demanded testing for sleep apnea” that started immediately after the surgical mistakes which no doctor diagnosed even when I was providing them with the “classic symptoms” of that illness. After the test results returned my primary care doctor still failed to order the necessary follow up testing that would diagnose if any CPAP machine would be of any medical benefit. I finally viewed my medical record and found that test should have been ordered and performed three previous times but was not or was that testing discussed with me. Then they altered my medical records at our county medical center refusing to provide me a copy of those records until I contacted my county supervisor. The copy I received had again been altered. This was what I communicated in my e-mail that the NSA read. Within 24 hours of sending that e-mail our local police were on my doorstep demanding to know if I was a “terrorist”. Our government didn’t care that doctors had killed me with incompetent medical care they only cared if I would commit a terrorist act by reading my e-mail thru a software program that flagged my words. Before I became disabled I was a computer programmer with EDP auditing experience. Since I had long watched Democracy Now I was not surprised about the NSA reading my communications. Our government lies to our citizens and the world when they stated they are only trying to protect our citizens against terrorism. I was also a history major in college; therefore, understand why Muslim people do not like our foreign policy decisions. I do not like them either.
In reference to the Gallagher’s 2/6/2015 article also see the british MP noting that 40% of US external intelligence is directed at UK–Most likely this intelligence is just fed back to the UK government to get around those domestic privacy laws that prevent UK intelligence orgs from spying on UK citizens. The UK probably does the same for the U.S., spying on U.S. citizens and passing along stuff to the U.S. gov. See the UKUSA agreement on signals intelligence. At the NSA I worked next to a guy from GCHQ who noted this kind of thing happened. Surveillance laundering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiafQWARrwk
Thank you Erik. To appreciate another dimension of the abuses, I request that you read this account and I also request that you please refer to it as many of your colleagues, American and British alike, as you can.
The paper raises far more serious issues about where we are all likely headed…
http://freedomfchs.lefora.com/topic/7442322/nanodevices-in-sensory-overload-mind-control-torture
Thank you.
> General Hercules
18 Feb 2015 at 9:19 pm
This exercise is going to change nothing. GCHQ will get the lawmakers to just change the law, and then all their actions will remain lawful and proportionate.
The cure is having a system that will provide privacy inspite of the activities of GCHQ, and also not depending on the generosity of politicians and bankers who need GCHQ to spy for them. So the best cure is using a 2GB Chinese made flash drive with **Tails** loaded, and using encrypted emails whose servers are located outside the USA.<
So what is "Tails" ?? – clicking on that link just gives me a "Page not found" message….
Yer gotta love Snowden!
Tails is using Tor and Tor developers are financed by US government (military), among other sponsors, just developers sell story that they are independent from sponsors. Therefore admins in data centers and schools in Europe forbid tor, tor is made for communication of pro American activists in countries like Iran, etc, countries that are not under control of American business and politics. Just use Tor in Europe and you will be spied by ISP admin, network admin at university/library/data center, etc.
Tails = The amnesic incognito live system.
Tails is a live operating system, that you can start on almost any computer from a DVD, USB stick, or SD card. It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity, and helps you to:
use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship;
all connections to the Internet are forced to go through the Tor network;
leave no trace on the computer you are using unless you ask it explicitly;
use state-of-the-art cryptographic tools to encrypt your files, emails and instant messaging.
It will spoof both the MAC address off your computer as well as the IP address of your internet connection.
Try this link : https://tails.boum.org/about/index.en.html
is javascript required for posting comments??
Please delete this comment if the answer is no
Talk about communication! This is a very good and important conversation we ought to be having
both within our national “families” and among our foreign friends as well. i REALLY HAVEN’T ANYTHING TO SAY AS i HAVE NO INFORMATION ON THIS SUBJECT WHATSOEVER, — AND/BUT — EVEN IF i DID i WOULD BE TOO AFRAID TO TALK ABOUT IT. i KNOW THAT MIGHT SOUND SAD FOR SOME OF YOU, BUT FOR OTHERS, i AM SURE YOU WILL INEVITABLY UNDERSTAND. i LOVE MY COUNTRY, BUT NOT RIGHT OR WRONG. THE PROBLEM IS I CHOOSE NOT TO BE PARTY TO THE ARGUMENT BETWEEN LIBERTY AND SECURITY. THOSE TWO HAVE BEEN GOING AT IT A LONG TIME , WOULDN’T YOU SAY? WAIT. STOP. AND THINK BEFORE YOU TALK.
Adam, you forgot to take your medication again?
It’s curious that there’s not much response to this article. Could it be, as Nemo suggests, people are lacking sufficient courage to put their name out there or perhaps some don’t want to know the answer? The way I see it, we’ve all been surveilled to some extent and the possibility to know what extent that invasion of our lives has been is just too hard to resist. General Hercules’ approach is another way to go and is probably wise, but when given the opportunity to voice our disapproval of the surveillance state, why not take it? Doing both is my choice(while we still have one).
.
jgreen7801,
There could be many reasons, of course. Let’s wait and see if this article receives more comments this weekend. Many of us have complained bitterly about the spying and some of us regulars have been the most critical.
Had this been in response to the NSA in the USA, perhaps people would be rushing to submit their names. However, we know from Mr. Snowden that NSA shares data with GCHQ and the US agents may do so to get around any Bill of Rights issues. That is, NSA can violate our rights if they let GCHQ manipulate the US citizens’ data while it is in British control.
.
This exercise is going to change nothing. GCHQ will get the lawmakers to just change the law, and then all their actions will remain lawful and proportionate.
The cure is having a system that will provide privacy inspite of the activities of GCHQ, and also not depending on the generosity of politicians and bankers who need GCHQ to spy for them. So the best cure is using a 2GB Chinese made flash drive with Tails loaded, and using encrypted emails whose servers are located outside the USA.
.
Here are the details posted on the Privacy International website (link is in TI article)
___________’Did GCHQ illegally spy on you?’____________
“Have you ever made a phone call, sent an email, or, you know, used the internet? Of course you have!
Chances are, at some point over the past decade, your communications were swept up by the U.S. National Security Agency’s mass surveillance program and passed onto Britain’s intelligence agency GCHQ. A recent court ruling found that this sharing was unlawful but no one could find out if their records were collected and then illegally shared between these two agencies… until now!
Because of our recent victory against the UK intelligence agency in court, now anyone in the world — yes, ANYONE, including you — can find out if GCHQ illegally received information about you from the NSA.
Join our campaign by entering your details below to find out if GCHQ illegally spied on you, and confirm via the email we send you. We’ll then go to court demanding that they finally come clean on unlawful surveillance.
First Name *
Last Name *
Email *
Telephone
Subscribe
Privacy International Mailing List
I authorise Privacy International and their legal team to pass my information to GCHQ and the Investigatory Powers Tribunal in order to seek a declaration my rights under Article 8 and Article 10 have been violated and to request my records to be deleted.
While these few details are all we need from you now, we may need more information from you in the future. If you have questions about how this works, read our FAQ. If you are an organisation or a business entity and want to join this campaign, email us at inf[email protected]”
.
I’ve submitted my name, email and telephone number to Privacy International. It will be interesting to see if GCHQ will admit to have illegally spied on me. GCHQ are a criminal agency and are involved in a psychological harassment program called organized stalking. The FBI had a similar program in the 1960s called COINTELPRO. The fact that illegal programs like this are allowed to continue to this day shows that there are no proper checks and balances on our government.
Does the author or TI vouch for the safety and veracity of this group to which we would be giving our personal info given the inherrant security implications in such an effort? Won’t submitting our details for inquiry in fact be like raising our hands asking GCHQ to look at us? It may be circular thinking but it may apply here. That being said, anyone who posts comments here at TI should assume they are on some government list anyway. Even if that’s not the case it’s sad that it is a real possibility.
While it is prudent to ask and think about what you stated and to consider any legal implications, won’t you, others and I be displaying cowardice if we do not take even the most rudimentary steps such as this to demonstrate our solidarity against illegal government spying from NSA, GCHQ et al.?
Perhaps commenters can have a discussion here about how far (or not) we are willing to go to help stop corrupt government overreach.
As stated in my comment, anyone here should assume that their name is on a list anyway. There may be those however for whom raising their hand could prove disastrous and backfire on them. What really pisses me off though is that I felt the question even needed to be asked. That anyone should be fearful of their own government, especially one that espouses freedom such as the US or GB. How did we get here, down the rabbit hole? I will be raising my hand, with some trepidation, not because I’ve done something to be surveilled for, but because none of us can know for certain what that something might be anymore.
I just asked GCHQ if they illegally spied on me. You can find out too. Join @privacyint’s case: https://www.privacyinternational.org/illegalspying #DidGCHQSpyOnYou
This is a moot issue for torture subjects.
We all are on the list either through our own words or other people’s imaginary descriptions of who we are.
And I hate to say it, but many here may even be harvested for painful neurological weapons abuse in mind control torture programs.
GCHQ has a boilerplate it issues on request to comment along the lines of “everything we do is legal”. So either the PR department is kept in the dark about what the agency actually does, or lied, for any such statement that was issued during the time that the information sharing was deemed illegal.
I was surveilled, stalked, and even harassed by a police helicopter in London by these psychos. It happened about 10 years ago.
This is the first time I have heard of any organization willing to look into this matter, for the benefit of non-celebrities. (Maybe I am naive about that.)
I”ll sign the petition after work, after finding my old London telephone number — the one I was using when I received one of several death threats from those jesus smokin’ nazis in texas (family).