UK Tribunal Says Intelligence-Sharing With U.S. Was Unlawful

Date: 06 February 2015 - 21:18

News ID: ۱۰۶۴۵

LONDON (Reuters) - A British tribunal ruled on Friday that some aspects of intelligence-sharing between security agencies in Britain and the United States were unlawful until December 2014, in a ground-breaking case brought by civil liberties groups.
The Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled that Britain's GCHQ had acted unlawfully in accessing data on millions of people in Britain that had been collected by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), because the arrangements were secret.
Campaign groups Liberty, Privacy International, Amnesty International and others brought the case following revelations about mass surveillance made by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
It was the first time in its 15-year history that the tribunal, which deals with legal challenges to Britain's GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, had issued a ruling that went against one of those security agencies.
The legal challenge forced the British government to reveal some details about the previously secret rules governing how GCHQ accessed data collected as part of the NSA's Prism and Upstream programs, first revealed by Snowden in June 2013.
The tribunal ruled that "the regime governing the soliciting, receiving, storing and transmitting by UK authorities of private communications of individuals located in the UK, which have been obtained by U.S. authorities pursuant to Prism and ... Upstream" contravened human rights laws until the government's disclosures about how the arrangements worked.
A spokeswoman for Prime Minister David Cameron said the rules on intelligence-sharing were now fully lawful, adding: "The judgment will not require GCHQ to change what it does."
"VIOLATED OUR RIGHTS"
Material revealed by Snowden and cited by the civil liberties groups showed Prism allows the NSA to access data handled by the world's largest Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others.
The groups hailed Friday's ruling as a major victory.
"We now know that, by keeping the public in the dark about their secret dealings with the National Security Agency, GCHQ acted unlawfully and violated our rights," Liberty's legal director James Welch said in a statement.